Enough already about "the cops are bad"

For the people whinging about the 'culture of corruption' and brutality of the police, I have a couple of points:

1) so far I have only seen utterly unsupported assertions - anecdotal evidence quoted as "a trend" or some stoner complaining that "all the cops are" (whatever). Further, any statistics that are shown tend to prove the opposite, that increasing allegations against police are NOT leading to more substantiated cases, are claimed to be "proof" that the cops "control" the system and protect their own from prosecution. Kind of like Global Warming, it's convenient when you posit something that all evidence can be twisted to support.

2) *nobody* making these claims can possibly know anything about the history of police departments and police work, particularly in urban areas. Compare 

a) police departments and systems of ombudsmen and recourse for - not to mention media and public sympathy for - people (particularly minorities, immigrants, etc.) who believe they've been mistreated today to say, the 1970s? The 1950s? The 1920s? The 1890s? Read about the police system in New York 1895-1897 when Teddy Roosevelt was NYC Police Commissioner. 

b) levels of procedure, both in terms of breadth and depth, applicable to police actions in dealing with the public today vs. the same dates. These procedures are almost universally meant to protect officers AND THE PUBLIC.

c) oversight and supervision of the 'beat cop' (or 'patrol officer' today) vs. the same dates.

d) the general level of violence used against suspects vs. the same dates. PARTICULARLY in terms of (admittedly subjective) the likelihood of lethal force being used against cops vs. the use of lethal force BY police, same timeframes.

e) corruption in law enforcement, same timeframes.


You might assert that today's police have attitude issues, are domineering, brutal, resort too quickly to brutal force and are just generally a-holes. I'd assert that a certain personality type has ALWAYS been drawn to police work, and that while police officers exhibit generally the SAME bell-curve of saints/sinners as any general population I'd concede that there probably is a little 'bubble' of personalities in the domineering/controlling area. HOWEVER, I'd simultaneously assert that this has absolutely not changed over time, while the systems emplaced over the last hundred years (and particularly in the last 20-30 years) *greatly* increase the ability of police departments to 'weed out' the outliers, psychotics, and general bad apples far better than they used to. (In fact, one could argue that for a long time, early police departments didn't really want to weed these guys out, except for the real crazies.)

In short, I think anyone who believes that police officers/departments are worse than before is either arguing from a position of complete ignorance of what "before" was like, and/or simply someone bearing a grudge against police for some slight or injustice (perceived or real, cops are of course not perfect) done to them.

This entirely disregards that I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that police officers jobs have gotten less stressful and less dangerous over time. This is a whole other issue that would sound too much like a defensive justification, so I haven't even gone into it here.