The "law" wins

At what point do we decide that an institution is too corrupt to exist? Today I am talking about the police, really the whole system of law enforcement and prisons, the courtrooms are generally okay I guess, aside from their incredible bias towards the above things.

It's not just the police' tendency to literally get away with murder, obviously that is a problem, but the whole corruption thing is more philosophical I think. In a lot of ways it comes from our idealized version of the Old West, where all it takes to stop crime or get justice is a man with a gun, and if some dude tried to steal your horse it was considered both right and just to shoot him dead. The problem being of course that we don't live in the Old West anymore, and getting something stolen isn't precisely a death sentence these days.

But it's not entirely that though either, just as the western serials which infused this attitude into our cultural mindset where influenced by, and an influence on, Japanese Samurai movies, so to do the stereotypical attitudes from those films influence our culture today. Of particular note to me is the Samurai as nobility, they had a privileged position and in many periods where a law unto themselves, answering only to whatever lord they swore loyalty to, this allowed them to do things like murder people based on incredibly minor sleights, and be protected from retribution based on their position.

I trust you see the parallels?

Our police force sees itself as perhaps the only true citizens, with the rest of us being relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, except insofar as we pay their wages, via tax and tickets. But what they don't see us as is something to be protected. They owe fealty, and protection, to their masters, which means those who run the system. More and more that means they owe protection to the corporations who increasingly fund their departments and perhaps more importantly fund their political superiors.

They view the public as nothing more than potential threats to themselves and their livelihood. When they kill someone in the process of apprehending them, they don't look at it as the failure it is, they look at it as the removal of a threat.

And it is a failure, anytime a policeman draws his gun, anytime he beats someone, anytime a confrontation with a suspect ends anything but peacefully, they have failed in their duty. Remember, criminals are citizens too, and have rights just like the rest of us. It isn't their job to judge that.

In absolute terms, if a confrontation with a suspect ends with the suspect and other civilians alive and unhurt, and the officer involved dead, then they have done their job successfully.

Am I saying that I want them to be dead? Of course not, but the job isn't to protect yourself at the cost of the citizens, it is exactly the opposite. Obviously there will be times when a suspect will die, or be injured, and there will be times when that was the only option, however that doesn't mean we should look at those times as anything other than a failure in the system, something to be abhorred and prevented if possible. A cop who kills someone in the line of duty, no matter how justified, should only be thinking of how to prevent that from happening again, they should be counseled by their support network with just such a goal in mind as well, and should take responsibility for their actions, regardless of what the victim did, a cop pulled the trigger and now a human is dead, a human that is technically someone they should have protected.

But as an institution they don't think that way, everyone is a potential criminal, criminals are enemies, and enemies should be destroyed, that is the logic chain of modern law enforcement, and the definition of criminal is increasingly whoever they are told is a criminal.

So we have these people, the modern samurai, the gunslingers with badges, raised in a culture that puts an absolutist moral code on a pedestal, and then told to go fight the Indians, in the case of events like Standing Rock, almost literally. The only surprise should be how few people they actually kill, not how many. That can probably be attributed to the fact that while the institution is horrible, most cops aren't actually sociopathic murderers(there is your Not All Cops argument, so you can shut up now if you had one) and don't really want to kill civilians.

But just because many, maybe even most, people in the institution don't want to kill indiscriminately doesn't mean the institution doesn't encourage it, or that there aren't enough people who do to make it a herculean task to change. My personal view is that since we have no demigods, that change is now functionally impossible as it stands. And the only path forward is to tear it all down at this point. Disband every police department and union, reform them with a brand new staff, oversight, and administration, take away the guns, emphasize community involvement, make sure the force represents the racial and gender makeup of the population at all levels, and enforce the idea that they are there to protect everyone, and to kill no one.

As with all my big ideas for changing things, it is of course a pipe dream and will never happen while our government exists in the form it does, but it is nice to dream I guess.