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Rotten apples or rotten barrel? - Why police forces are magnets for the wrong kind of men
(naomimurphy.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Men's Liberation
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I appreciate the perspective, but they way I see it, we must as a society balance special privilege with special accountability. Else we bake into the structure of society itself, a severe imbalance of power.
Police as they operate now, are people given extra power to any ordinary citizen. They are allowed and expected actually to do things that nobody else is allowed/expected to do. For instance, forcefully detain and arrest people, carry loaded firearms on their person to initiate lethal force if they deem it necessary.
We already do similar with the Military, at least in the USA. Military personnel are held to higher standards of conduct and operational integrity than ordinary citizens. They have their own courts, their own extra laws and statutes, international conventions and laws they must adhere to, codes of conduct in and out of uniform, etc.
We expect our soldiers to act with even more dignity, more decorum, more restraint, and more honor than the average person, because we are placing more responsibility and power in their hands. They are the ones who fight for us, they are given weapons to kill with.
Now you may argue that we shouldn't have soldiers, or we shouldn't have cops, etc. That's fine, but if we are to have positions in our society that carry with it additional power over others that no ordinary citizen posesses, then I think we must also hold those people to higher standards than ordinary citizens. They must be the absolute best of us.
I will say this also, I am an anarchist, so I don't support the state directly anyways, but growing up in a house and community with lots of both soldiers and police, I have had far more positive encounters with military personnel than with police officers. Military personel in my experience have so much more decorum, they are incredibly respectful, reserved, well spoken, orderly. I've encountered military police and can say the same of them also. I can't think of a time where I ever felt talked down to or intimidated by a solider, and I grew up going on base many times, so it wasn't just because they were not operating in a military capacity.
It gives me hope that there is a cultural and regulatory change that can be made long term to change how police operate and are perceived by the public.