Is Police Corruption A Significant Social Issue?

Step one in protecting yourself is recognizing all of the significant threats to your well-being, freedom, and peace. Recognizing threats, of course, generally means coming to terms with some uncomfortable truths. And one of the most uncomfortable truths that most people in America need to come to terms with is that the average American, today, has far more to fear from the police than he does from criminals.

In spite of the kneejerk and undeserved respect given to the police in our society, police corruption is extremely significant - this past year, more than 1% of the total population of the United States were imprisoned. Many of these people were completely innocent.

Cops are given kneejerk respect in our society for several reasons. First, many people remember what cops once were before they became paramilitary organizations (pre-SWAT) dedicated to enforcing a fascist regime of regulatory obligations. Think, if you will, of the difference between the law enforcement philosophy contained in the old "Andy Griffith Show" or "Adam 12" and the more modern "The Shield." There was a day when cops viewed themselves - and were taught in police academies - that they were servants of the common man. Today, they are merely arms of the government enforcing the government's interests AGAINST the public. And the government wants the public kept docile, quiet, and working in meaningless slave labor so that there are tax monies to confiscate and a willing (or too tired to grumble) populace from which to steal it.

Another reason for the kneejerk respect cops are given is that TV is full of cop shows - and let's face it, most Americans gave up thinking in the 1990s. Today, everybody knows whatever three facts they actually know only because they saw it on TV. People accept a sharp dichotomy between cops and criminals (all cops are good, therefore everyone who is arrested is guilty) because they do not possess the intellectual or spiritual ability to make fine moral distinctions anymore.

Finally, I think some people continue to ignore the utter corruption of the police forces of America because it is simply too horrible to fathom - if cops are as bad as we all know that they are, then there are literally multiplied thousands of innocents in jail. Few people could sleep at night if they believed this - and even fewer if they actually thought that they might be the next innocent person serving hard time on a trumped-up charge.

So why is it that cops are so corrupt today? One reason is that there are too many cops today. Politicians on both the left and right have convinced the unthinking American populace that having more police on the street is a good thing. However,there is not enough legitimate crime occuring to keep them all busy, so cops have become adept at justifiying their existence by arresting people consequent to pseudo-crimes. If a man argues with his wife, it is "domestic violence." If a man smokes dope, it is a breach of the "war on drugs" (in spite of the fact that you can walk 30 yards from where pot is sold and buy much more expensive whiskey - from who? the government....). If a company goes bankrupt - arrest the CEO. If enough bedwetting liberals complain, arrest the local small businessman for some made-up environmental breach (and there are actually men serving hard time for breaches of federal environmental law that they had NO idea they were breaking). And, an oldie but a goodie, just about any really boring day when the "HOT NOW" sign is not on at the local Krispy Kreme can be made a bit more exciting by handing out a few traffic tickets to unsuspecting motorists whose cruise control is actually set on 55....

Also, there are perverse incentives built into the law. If you can make arrests for mythical instances of "domestic violence" or if you can prove that drug activity is up in your region (and one way of proving that is certainly by arresting more people - even if you have to plant the evidence), then local police departments can get block grants from the federal government for fighting certain politically-privileged types of crime. So the more arrests that occur, whether or not the person is actually guilty, the more "free" money floods local police departments.

Also, police, judges, and attorneys have become infected by an immoral careerism that focuses NOT on justice, but on putting people into jail. Judges sentence people not on the severity of their crimes, but on their subjective fear of what might happen if they let someone go and some special interest complains around election time. Police seek promotions based on the number of arrests they are able to string together, whether or not the arrests are legitimate.

And finally, do you know that there is only one job in the world in which every person who enters it is both trained to lie and encouraged to lie? Nooooo - that would NOT be lawyers! State ethics boards in EVERY state of the union forbid lawyers from lying as a part of their job. The only job in the world in which every single person is a trained liar is with the police forces of the world.

In all honesty, all this is not solely the fault of the police, and there are certainly a few honest cops out there (it is a very small number, however). Much of the fault lies with political liberals who have been politicizing criminal law for a generation. Much of the fault lies with conservative voters who, during the 1980s, took the position that cops needed to be given extraordinary powers to lock up criminals in an attempt to keep the Warren Supreme Court from letting them go - never foreseeing that cops would use those same extraordinary powers to lock up the innocent. And much of the fault lies with attorneys and judges, who all know that the game is crooked but continue to play it because it benefits them financially to do so.

So yes, police corruption is very significant. Innocent people are having their families broken up, their assets confiscated, and their freedom compromised. Police in America are no longer worthy of respect. We should stop treating them as if they are.