Civil Rights in Rochester, NY: "Blow me, you little whore"

[Bucky]

22. It's not that "most cops" are good or are bad. Most are people with power & need checks.

It's a dangerous job. It's not just the shooting; as many police are hurt or killed in traffic accidents as are shot at. It's a stressful job where you often see the worst in people. One of the hazards of the job is that it can pressure you to only see the bad; it can push you do bad things, take short cuts, start to look at every citizen as a potential trouble maker or a con artist who needs to be controlled. And then there are the crazies out there. Every couple of years you hear of another nutcase who ambushes cops for no reason.

Given those hazards, police need controls. These were two bad cops who saw a black man with money and assumed he was a trouble maker. Then there were two more officers who showed up and covered up for their colleagues--coworkers who they may need to rely upon in order to save a life one day. That pressure can create bonds of steel. That means there needs to be strong controls, strong regulations on people with that kind of power and every motive in the world to cover it up when a colleague crosses the line.

Yes, those rogue cops need to be punished, and probably fired. But there also needs to be a system in place to help weed out the troublemakers in the first place and to reduce the job stressors that allow once-vigilant officers to drift into corruption. When you have this bad a treatment of two innocent young adults at the hands of the town's police, there's probably more than just a few petty-tyrant cops on the force. The way the coverup happened, it seems like there's probably a culture of gradual corruption in Rochester's PD that's allowing the good ones to go bad.