I’ve gone on at length about the problems with the cops in the country. Suburban white people tend to think these arguments are either suicidal liberalism or libertarian idealism. The reason is suburban white people tend to have a vastly different experience with the cops than downscale whites and minorities. That’s a changing reality as more and more suburbanites have their dogs shot by storm troopers raiding the wrong house, but there’s always a lag in these things.

This video is a good example of how the lower classes experience the cops.

http://youtu.be/CZh9xumD1cQ

I’ve run into some version of that fat cop a million times. In bad neighborhoods they pair cops together and that usually means a hot head partnered with a more sober minded officer. The fat one should be fired for being a fat slob, but the dirty little secret is there’s not an excess of cops willing to work tough areas. The degenerates and sociopaths are willing to work the ghetto and that let’s a slob like the fat cop keep his job. It also destroys the relationship between the citizens and the police in these neighborhoods.

The Conventional Right tends to side with the cops, but the libertarian insurgency may be changing that a little. The Ferguson shooting was remarkable not in how the Left cynically tried to exploit it, but in how many on the Right jumped on the warrior cop angle. The thing is, the Right really should not be so quick to side with the cops. They are, after all, just another bit of the growing custodial state. Cops and their unions are constantly agitating for more money, less work, more benefits, more protections, etc.

The worst aspect of it is the cops work hard to avoid accountability. People like me, who cherish law and order, but have a distrust of the police would have a different view if we actually held the cops to the same standards as private security guards. This story in 538 is a good example of how the cops undermine their credibility.

Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.

In a data driven society like our, no counting how often cops shoot people is inexcusable. Forty years ago every round fired from a state issued firearm was logged. It was standard operating procedure for police departments to have cops check their firearms in at the station when their shift was over each day. A cop discharging his firearm could expect to fill out a lot of reports and answer a lot of questions. Today, when we have much better tools for documenting this stuff, we do less of it. The ATF, of all people, routinely lose their own service weapons.

Like so much of what haunts our age, the cop problem is not staying in the ghetto. The news has a stories every day about cops doing something nuts in the suburbs. Whether or not that will change the politics of the issue is a mystery to me. My sense is it will not as the suburbs are now littered with traffic cameras and soon will have drones buzzing around. Having a fat mental defect pushing around soccer moms in the burbs is probably going to face little resistance.