[Finbarr]

County was not a typo. It's awful whenever there's an overuse of force in the USA. I'd recommend watching a few police bodycam videos on youtube before judging them wholesale though. The experience of a police officer in the United States seems to be long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror and adrenaline. Anyone out there can have a gun and encounters can unexpectedly escalate to deadly violence in seconds. Some of them should not be police officers. There are many great officers out there just trying to protect their communities.

[saghm]

All it takes is one cop acting badly to ruin things for quite a lot of people though, and the fact that police uniformly circle ranks around any of their members who is accused of something regardless of the validity makes "well, not all of them are bad!" a pretty useless sentiment. I'll consider them individually when they start holding individuals accountable, but not before then.

[Finbarr]

I think you're making some hasty generalizations here. They don't "uniformly" cover for their colleagues. Do you expect the police service to be perfect and never make mistakes? Can you point me towards a single human-run service where that's the case?

[saghm]

Having a monopoly on violence means the bar should be higher for them than for other "human-run services".