I'm heavily critical of the police, and they deserve a lot of criticism. But there are lot's of people (half my family) that are just scum. Algorithmically it may be hard to fairly weight, but on a personal level it's not hard to put people on a pretty consistent scum spectrum. If the people lower on the spectrum are critical of a certain cop, I can't weight it highly for reputation evaluation of that cop. The same for any information said scumbag provides about others.
I agree that most people are inherently good. But I add a few points of skepticism toward anybody who chooses a role that comes with inherent authority by default: clergy, legislature, law, etc.
Not saying they're bad, most aren't, however, you wanted to be the guy with the power- There is possibly a reason for that.
> you wanted to be the guy with the power- There is possibly a reason for that.
Sure, but there's nothing that suggests the underlying motivation would be negative. For example, a lot of people cite a desire to protect and serve their communities. Just because there is a motive for something doesn't imply that it's ulterior or nefarious.
I didnt say it was nefarious, but hear me out. When you open new lines of credit, or make an inquiry, your credit score drops. Atomically these aren't bad things, in a vacuum, yet when you step back and look at things holistically they can be part of a pattern. Feel me?
That doesn't contradict the parent's claim. Moreover, they're not drawn from the same population, there is a filtering mechanism that reasonably skews for police to be above-average even if we might want it to be better.
Moreover, I'm also skeptical of the simplistic idea that our policing problem derives from "too many immoral officers". It seems more likely that it's an emergent property of the incentives and constraints we put on police brass (including the police union system).
Further, if we're going to reform police, it would be nice if we focused on policies which weren't predictably counter-effective. Rather than the de-policing policies which have increased homicides by 9k/year (relative to the time period before the de-policing movement kicked off in earnest with the largest increases in the "communities of color" in whose name the de-policing initiative campaigned) for no appreciable difference in unjustified police killings, it would be nice if we instead pursued one or more of: more police training, weakened/abolished police unions, restructured internal-affairs departments, tightened background checks, mandated periodic psyche evals, etc.
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