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by _heimdall
905 days ago
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> Past that, I believe that the widespread bad behavior of other agencies is insufficient reason for mistrust here. And casually using others' bad behavior to justify mistrust - this is something we reasonably criticize police for. The government, and any authority, should be mistrusted. Period. That doesn't mean they aren't sometimes necessary, or that the lack of trust should turn into fear, but any person or organization on the winning end of a power imbalance should not be trusted. The lack of trust there is what leads to checks and balances, we need systems in place to make sure those with the power can't abuse it even if they wanted to. The best scenario is that (a) the powerful aren't trusted (2) proper guardrails are in place and (d) the powerful actually do act honestly and the guardrails may slow them down a bit but don't prevent them from doing the job they were given power to do. |
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I mostly agree with that but we're talking about a response (mine) to a post, by someone who's communicating from the interior of an LEA.
His narrative could be propaganda or false or curated by agenda or unhelpfully incomplete or meaningfully representative. We don't know which of those it is. We do know that communication outside of PR channels is useful, even if we have to heavily qualify it.
And valuable info sometimes comes out of informal channels. We're not gaining anything by crapping on it here.
Past that, we risk nothing by assuming good faith of the OP's post - even if our good faith turns out to be misapplied. No judicial precedence is in play. No hearts are swayed to dark sides. No mass readership is being fed a pregurgitated conclusion. No agenda needles get budged.
In this place and at this time: We are safe letting one LEO-adjacent individual feel - well maybe not welcome but at least a lower level of mob noise. We don't have to put their haunches up by pushing back with everything we have.