[jlgreco]

The idiom "A few bad apples..." is commonly brought up in discussions such as theses.

There is something funny about that phrase though... it is not complete. The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel". This is to say that if you do not take an aggressive stance towards weeding out all of the bad apples, the rot will spread like an infection (rotting apples will release ethylene gas which acts as a ripening agent, accelerating the rot of nearby apples) and corrupt all of the apples.

So if we trust our apples:cops metaphor then what we are really saying is that if we overlook the a few bad cops for any significant amount of time, before we know it, all cops will be bad. Obviously crooked cops don't release ethylene gas in significant quantities... instead the Blue Wall is the most commonly cited mechanism of transmission.

I like this idiom.

[hfsktr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Code_of_Silence

For anyone else who might not have heard of it (by name).

[stcredzero]

> The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel".

They don't even have to actually spoil the barrel. Since dramatic events stand out in the human mind, it's possible for a few bad actors to completely change people's perception of groups or their place in society.

This is part of the reason why it's so hard for privileged groups to understand how minorities see things and vice-versa. What's a dramatic, salient event for one group is not so much for the other.