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by golem14 139 days ago
For instance, the local cops checking in on grandma, or those checking in on a troubled child are really not the bad guys. You WANT them when you need them.

Not all LEOs are brown shirts, In my experience, few are, but they give the lot a bad rap.

Treating LEOs uniformly as evil is just counterproductive
2 comments
donkeybeer 139 days ago
Yes but I don't have a definitive map of who are the good ones, so we must treat it as a life or death situation and suitably defend ourselves in an interaction with any of them.
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cess11 139 days ago
Why would I want cops doing that instead of social workers or teachers doing it?

No one becomes a cop because they want to be nice and help vulnerable people. Some might say they did but that is some coping technique. Being a cop involves exerting violence towards people who are vulnerable and desperate, and to become one you have to be fine with this. Some would say that this alone is enough to deem a person ethically dubious.

Even if one would accept the premise that society requires some degree of organised violence towards its members, one would also have to handle the question of accountability. Reasonably this violence should be accountable in relation to the victims of it, and police institutions inherently are not.

I think that we should also note that the other person above used "childishly" to denote something negative, apparently they don't think of kids as the light of the world and childish as something fun and inspiring. This is something that makes me quite suspicious of their morals.

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golem14 139 days ago
Maybe you and I have vastly different experience with police. Disclaimer: From a rather small US state.

Your other note is also well taken, it does however not imply that anything a kid or teen does is OK or automatically positive.

Finally, it's OK to be suspicious. I am too. What I am saying is that one cannot just make the decision "all cops are evil or must be treated as such" and then hope for a good outcome in all cases. I argue it's a better policy to keep an open mind and decide on a case by case basis.

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cess11 138 days ago
Fine, to you it is unthinkable that the institution as such might be immoral and would need to be abolished to achieve a semblance of a just society.

However, many others have come to this conclusion and made a rather long tradition out of their arguments.

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