| This is a really distressing trend, right? The growing size of cities and the creation of suburbs (especially those which do not support walking) have caused the beat-cop to become somewhat deprecated--in my home city right now there is a shortage of officers and dwindling pensions for the ones that are still on board. So, instead of having Officer Bob the friendly cop who patrols your street, you have nameless squadcars driving seemingly at random--much like the beetles of Bradbury's literature. You have cops that are never seen, and when they are seen they typically are bad news. This, taken in combination with the horrific perversion of justice that can occur in our adversarial system, causes a very definite sense of the "other". We have trouble feeling bad for these cops, because in a way they do not blend in with their community in a meaningful fashion. We do not help them, we do not like them, and they generally seem to return the favor. Worse, we see an increasing attempt to bolster the average power of the cop with tools grossly out of proportion to their intended function in society: note that the two officers in this video appeared to be carrying submachineguns. What. The. Fuck. With police seen as distinct from our communities and friends and families, and with government increasingly aloof in regulations and faceless bureaucracy, I very much fear for the next decade of the American experiment. |