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In reply to the discussion: There are roughly 800,000 cops in the United States... [View all]Silent3
(15,212 posts)I'm not so optimistic, either, about our ability to get over our "America is number ONE!" mentality that prevents too many of our citizens and policy makers from looking at other countries for better examples of how to do things.
The main purpose of my OP is to merely suggest that, as bad as things are, I don't think it's so terrible that we're "living in a police state" (as if that's a binary, either/or proposition, and not a matter of degree), or to justify a broadly generalized hatred and/or distrust of all police that seems to emanate from DU much of the time.
The worst thing about our penal system is the unreasonable laws (mostly drug laws) the police are tasked with enforcing, and a public that, sadly, still either isn't aware, or much bothered by, the huge proportion of our population which is incarcerated. The blame for that doesn't lie largely with the police themselves, however.