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this video sure hits it home what happens with the police.
Where are all of the good apples?
- Thread starter fooferdoggie
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And what’s with this “bad apple” thing anyway? Isn’t the point of that proverb that the whole bunch gets spoiled if you don’t remove the bad apple ASAP?
In a way, by using ”just a few bad apples” wrong, they actually are telling the truth — The whole bunch is rotten. No point in looking for good apples because even if there still are some it won’t make a difference unless all the bad apples are removed pronto. Another interesting thing about that analogy is that real apples won‘t remove themselves. The apples, no matter if they are good or bad, simply can’t be responsible for removing bad apples. There is a higher authority that removes bad apples.
Does that mean that the “just a few bad apples“ apologists actually are asking for oversight?
In a way, by using ”just a few bad apples” wrong, they actually are telling the truth — The whole bunch is rotten. No point in looking for good apples because even if there still are some it won’t make a difference unless all the bad apples are removed pronto. Another interesting thing about that analogy is that real apples won‘t remove themselves. The apples, no matter if they are good or bad, simply can’t be responsible for removing bad apples. There is a higher authority that removes bad apples.
Does that mean that the “just a few bad apples“ apologists actually are asking for oversight?
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I think the problem is the protection of the “bad apples” in the force. I thought it was important to see police officers testifying against Chauvin in his trial. So often, the cops protect “their own” no matter what. Most cops are good people who want to protect their community.
OP
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thats what he said the system is the problem it prevents cops from stopping or talking about other cops.
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Woke up this morning to yet another story of a cop shooting and killing a black teenager who was in no way a threat to their life at the time of the shooting. It's completely baffling that this is still happening and actually seems to be ratcheting up. It's as if the cops got a "get it out of your system while you still can" memo.
I do not even believe that "good apples" makes any sense. Let me tell you an old story from a few decades ago.
The county-mounties tripped over us. Which is to say, they just happened to notice that we had something odd, and one of us told them it was cannabis (or some slang term for it). So there was a bit of a to-do over that, and once things had settled a bit, one of them walked up to me and stuck his hand in my trouser pocket. I said, “Hey, you can't do that,” and next thing I am up against the wall as a hostile person.
Now, I believe that his only goal in sticking his hand in my pocket was escalation. We were not out in the middle of nowhere, nor were we down in the heart of town. It was kind of out of the way but not remote. When you are faced by two or three officers, you have absolutely no power of your own and they hold all the cards. All they have to do is blow a situation up a little and you are toast.
In the end, they confiscated our cannabis, told us they would be reviewing the situation and let us go. Never heard another word about it. My understanding is that in that part of the country (a county in Alabama that is many hundreds of miles from where the state of Alabama is) the LEOs would bust people for cannabis, confiscate it, give them a warning and those people would be buying the same stuff back from a dealer who got his stock from the local LEA. I firmly believe that that was what was going down there.
My point, to reiterate, is that LEOs have total authority in encounters with citizens and the training needed to blow a situation up if that is what they feel like doing. You are expected to answer their questions and follow their instructions, and they get to decide when the encounter has become problematic. Not to mention that police reports and testimony are treated as more accurate than that of citizens. If you claim they lied, you better have solid proof (and hope they have not deleted it from your phone or "accidentally" bricked it).
Philosophically, I do not believe in objective "evil", because almost everything can be viewed from multiple perspectives. If you were a German living in the Third Reich, you might well have seen the cause as noble. The deciding factor, though, is power over others. You just cannot have anything that could be called "evil" in absence of power, and power is nearly impossible to control. As I see it, the police are granted too much power, and the evidence strongly suggests that they never, ever, learned to got it under control.
The county-mounties tripped over us. Which is to say, they just happened to notice that we had something odd, and one of us told them it was cannabis (or some slang term for it). So there was a bit of a to-do over that, and once things had settled a bit, one of them walked up to me and stuck his hand in my trouser pocket. I said, “Hey, you can't do that,” and next thing I am up against the wall as a hostile person.
Now, I believe that his only goal in sticking his hand in my pocket was escalation. We were not out in the middle of nowhere, nor were we down in the heart of town. It was kind of out of the way but not remote. When you are faced by two or three officers, you have absolutely no power of your own and they hold all the cards. All they have to do is blow a situation up a little and you are toast.
In the end, they confiscated our cannabis, told us they would be reviewing the situation and let us go. Never heard another word about it. My understanding is that in that part of the country (a county in Alabama that is many hundreds of miles from where the state of Alabama is) the LEOs would bust people for cannabis, confiscate it, give them a warning and those people would be buying the same stuff back from a dealer who got his stock from the local LEA. I firmly believe that that was what was going down there.
My point, to reiterate, is that LEOs have total authority in encounters with citizens and the training needed to blow a situation up if that is what they feel like doing. You are expected to answer their questions and follow their instructions, and they get to decide when the encounter has become problematic. Not to mention that police reports and testimony are treated as more accurate than that of citizens. If you claim they lied, you better have solid proof (and hope they have not deleted it from your phone or "accidentally" bricked it).
Philosophically, I do not believe in objective "evil", because almost everything can be viewed from multiple perspectives. If you were a German living in the Third Reich, you might well have seen the cause as noble. The deciding factor, though, is power over others. You just cannot have anything that could be called "evil" in absence of power, and power is nearly impossible to control. As I see it, the police are granted too much power, and the evidence strongly suggests that they never, ever, learned to got it under control.
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In this context, using a gardening metaphor, I think that we need to draw a distinction between (proverbial) "good apples" and - er - what we might describe as well tended, or - quite simply as - something we consider to be "good orchards".
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