I think good cops need help getting rid of bad ones.

[sibelian]

Workplaces can be very isolating.

Cultures develop around the loudest people, not the best or the most useful or the nicest. The person generating the most output gets all the attention and steers the story towards themselves.

We'll all worked, some of us will have worked in environments with large numbers of employees and I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of us have worked in environments where one loud, idiotic asshole constantly fucked everything up and ruined everything for everyone else. I've had numerous experiences in workplaces where there's a bully at the top stuffing the air with offensive crap, ruining the culture of the entitre place with obnoxious, egotistical garbage. I wouldn't be at all surprised if most police officers were just *itching* to get rid of the jerks in their ranks.

There is a way to get rid of such people, but it's counterintuitive. The emotional response of someone who wants things to be fair and otherwise minds their own business is to localise, the offending behaviour clams them up and the story in their head becomes a confrontational one between them personally and the offender, and THAT's what prevents the offender being ousted.

Actually what needs to happen is the good guys need to recognise the problem, talk about it openly, band together and face it collectively. It can be really hard to do, particularly if you're not from a background that would make you familiar with such processes. It can be seen as a "witchhunt" or "scapegoating".

The most difficult thing is, in order to get it to work, you have to actually play fair with the bully, otherwise you leave them with "ammunition" against you.

All of the difficulties in taking on something like what I've described above are going to be very powerfully compounded by the other eccentricities surrounding pollice work...

[sibelian]

1. Wow.

Nothing.

I guess policemen are just mindless automatons that are supposed to obey whatever instructions they're given, then...

:/

[TheKentuckian]

2. The "good ones" and the workaday ones have little to no interest in getting rid of the "bad ones"

Which kind of makes all of them "bad ones" and I think the number of "good ones" is greatly overstated and generally folds in the workaday majority as noble.

The police culture is corrupt from acorn to root to branch to leaf and the "few bad apples" argument is blind refusal to accept systemic problems.

[sibelian]

3. That's a very interesting point.

Is any of it true?