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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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I don't think it is reasonable to expect cops to put their lives on the line in a society that affords them no additional respect.

My former boss was a part-time police officer for the town where he lived.

The amount of stuff people would do for him completely out of the blue when he had to drive the police cruiser was surprising. We're talking 'people paying for his meal in the drive through' level of surprising.

Nevermind the attention from women he'd get when out in uniform.

I've seen a little how the sausage is made, so to speak, so I'm not going to pretend that law enforcement has an easy job, but to say that society affords them no additional respect doesn't line up much with my experience.

Nevermind the attention from women he'd get when out in uniform.

Gotta double-check on that one. Their Hinge profiles are full of ACAB and I personally heard some woman I know talking about finding out her date was a cop and getting the ick.

It's about hit rate, not miss rate. If 90% of women are ACABers and 2.42% are badge bunnies, then their dating pool has ten five women per man (better than college, which is around 1.5). As long as the selection effects aren't too severe (and the numbers are anywhere close to my wild-ass guess), that sounds pretty good.

See also serial killers. They are unattractive to the vast majority of women, but still massively outnumbered by female fans.

He'd work alot of local festivals/events(cause, y'know, part-time Police Officer) and he'd get alot of women coming up out of the blue to flirt with him. (He already had/has a girlfriend/partner, so it wasn't as if he was actively looking.)

It was just one of the more amusing things I noted.

'Badge Bunny' is the search term you're looking for.

Like most things, it will depend on location. In my flyover Red area, a cop is going to do way better on the dating market than I would as a defense attorney (if I were still single).

"Part Time" and "Town" are giveaways. The kind of town with part time officers will almost always be low crime, and cops will be respected culturally. His main job would be writing speeding tickets to out of towners, writing DUIs (but only to the REALLY DRUNK drivers), amd responding to domestic incidents. In the latter two his judgement is respected by the community and if he deems the person arrestable, they lose an immense amount of social status, regardless of conviction (which is basically guaranteed).

That has almost nothing in common with the experience of a police officer in Chicago or Memphis.