That is the contention of this article and I think there is probably a valid point here. Basically the premise is that when laws are primarily involved with maintaining the public good and individual rights then honourable people want to work to enforce those laws. When the laws are repressive and arbitrary than those honourable people don't wish to be involved but thugs who like repressing people and using their power are more attracted to the police.
After a quick scan of the post, the author doesn't have a clue. Worse yet, the entire law enforcement environment is going to hell on a bullet train. Not only out on the streets, but in their offices as well. Times are changing, and not for the better.
actually where LEO is concerned the policy that is of the greatest detriment to itself and societyat large; is the intellectual cutoff point. you can, at least in the USA, be too smart to be a cop.
i could help him here... i live in a little town... but next to a larger one... the only difference in the corruption as i can see is the last names of the perpetrators ...cancer eats from the inside out.. its little wonder corruption has spread to our capitol, we cant even keep them f' ers out of our city halls...
Even in a very small organisation I see that a bare majority of people are easily swayed and/or bought and a bare majority is all it takes to get a lock on power - and once you have power you can buy the 51% by giving them the taxes of the 49% who vote against you anyway.
You go into a district or squad meeting, new laws or regulations or policies are announced and the command staff expect you to follow it and enforce it regardless on what you think of it and it's meaning. Mind you it's been ten, almost eleven years for me, but the days of officer discretion is quickly coming to an end. Command staff wants you do exactly what they tell you to do, typically without exceptions. Guess what, the field officers/deputies/troopers are seeing this as walls closing in on them. If this was the military, that's fine, but that is a different job role then law enforcement. Prime example in FL during my time was domestic violence. Beaters should go to jail, it's a good thing. Then the new laws came into play, spouse no longer had the option of filing charges or not, state will do that. What is domestic violence? I think we all agree beating on someone would fit, but the new law says differently and goes to a really warped levels. Example, boy and girl (who are who have slept together and or are living together) have a fight which girlfriend shoves boyfriend out of the way as she storms out. She is guilty of domestic abuse which means going to jail and never be able to own a firearm ever again. Or if she storms out and the boyfriend grabs her purse strap and they have a tug of war. Guess who is going to jail under domestic violence? Not talking a slap across the face or a punch, just a tug of war over a purse. Does that seem silly? Gets even better when law enforcement is called in a DV call since the state says it will prosecute without the victim's consent. As per FL state statutes, when it's a DV call the LEO is responding to and if there is NO ARREST made under DV, the LEO MUST file a report to FL Dept of Law Enforcement on why no one was arrested. I won't even get into the verbal abuse that qualifies as DV. I don't know how things are up in Canada, but the move towards police state have gotten the attention of those field law enforcement who have to enforce it. This is swiftly becoming a country I no longer can say that I recognize from my youth as soft tyranny has arrived. Even tiny towns now have at least one camera car for each police shift. Those cameras are day/night scanning every single license plate going by in either direction and automatically being run through a db. If there is a hit, it tells the LEO on what's going on. Do they do facial recognition yet? I don't know, but it's coming if it's not already out there.
I think that was the author's point. If you have good clear laws against things that are obviously bad, or you have discretion to make the determination whether a moral line has been crossed, than as an officer you can feel good about your job. It gets rough sometimes and it can be dangerous but you are working to make society a better place. Once you are told to enforce all sorts of things that just make normal people into criminals for stupid things or stupid laws that turn virtually anyone into a criminal for trying to stick up for their constitutional rights then you will get a lot of guys who don't feel good about what they are doing and the bull they have to put up with and those kind of people will start thinking about early retirement - and they won't be replaced by the right kinds of people because who in their right mind wants to be a part of that. What you end up with is a bunch of meat heads that will follow any order and a bunch of guys that just like to lay a beating on someone and like having a list of stupid excuses to do it. If the government turns a police force into a repressive, mindless instrument of petty state thuggery then only petty, mindless thugs will want to be police.
welcome to the present... the goons already outnumber the good ones... and the goons usually have the power
