Police Brutality
This is what happens when policemen get bored. The job itself tends to attract people who, more than anything, want respect. As this video shows, it doesn’t take much to put a dent in this fragile sense of authority. Americans respect their local officials too much. According to national folklore, criminals are innately dangerous and aimlessly destructive, and policemen are all that stops them imposing their evil upon us. Hence, we should be as patient and forgiving with our police, as we are unforgiving with the men they protect us from. After all the moral grey area they inhabit, serves as a buffer zone between criminal chaos and righteous serenity.
I think that a healthy society should be more weary of abuses of official power, than petty criminal infractions. After all, if our society is built on the assumption that certain people assume the moral highground of official power, our society’s credibility suffers more when these officials infringe on their power, than when powerless individuals break the laws these officials uphold. The few common values we share as a society become increasingly hypocritical to citizens constantly confronted with corrupt politicians, and violent policemen who seem immune to serious prosecution, while drugdealers are demonized and waste away in state dungeons.
An economic depression occurs when people lose their belief in the worth of money. A state’s monopoly on violence suffers similarly when people become disillusioned with the fairness of law. Our uncritical worship of our police forces, paired with our unforgiving stance on criminality, further bolsters the fringes and margins of society.
