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Yes, evil bastard cops and good noble cops are very different. The bastard cops are doing their bastardly deeds, and the good cops look the other way and close ranks to defend their brothers at any cost. Such great difference.
Why do you assume that the good cops are even aware of the corruption? It's not like the corrupt cops are telling the other cops about their misdeeds. And if an accusation of corruption appears, it's appropriate to give the accused the benefit of the doubt. If an accusation of inappropriate force comes to light, the appropriate response is usually "Look, I wasn't there. I'm not gonna Monday morning quarterback what he did based on hearsay. If the investigation reveals misconduct, then by all means he should be held accountable."
People seem to think corrupt cops are telling all their cop bros about the shit they're getting away with and they all snicker together about it or something. And they think that the non-abusive cops hide and protect the power-trippers (for reasons that are seemingly never specified by ACABers - somethingsomething brotherly solidarity?) Do they not realize how much harder it is for cops to do their job when a power-tripping asshole shows up at the scene? Cops hate those sorts of cops!
I could see isolated incidents in very small departments (e.g., tiny towns and counties) of things like this happening, but mostly because of the tight social and kin networks in places like that and the far more limited resources and oversight. But it's rarely those departments that ACABers express issue with; it's almost always the big city departments.
If the good cops aren't aware of the naked criminality that is so publicly well-known that it is a major news story and there are entire netflix tv shows being made about it, they're bastards anyway because they are so manifestly incompetent and unfit for the duty they've taken on that they're effectively defrauding the government. A lot of this stuff is front-page news and despite the ugly conclusions this leads to about police bastardry, it is actually more insulting to assume that they're blind idiots who are unable to read newspapers or even listen to public news broadcasts. This stuff doesn't even have a figleaf to protect it - the head of a heavily politicised police department can just have footage of undeniable witness tampering posted to youtube and nothing happens. Sitting senators on government commissions into police misconduct can bring it up and nothing happens!
No, the reasons that get brought up are simple - professional retribution(how eager are you to report the person who decides whether or not you get promoted for being corrupt when there's a decent chance his boss is also on the take), the culture of policing(thin blue line, brotherly solidarity as you mentioned, etc) and mutual blackmail (you aren't going to report me for being on the take because I will then report you for being on the take).
Actually this happens in the larger state and federal departments here and that's where all of the stories I've been talking about have come from. Very small departments have, in my experience, been slightly better (my intuited explanation for this is that those ones tend to be more strongly tied to their local community).
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Because it's ubiquitous. In many cases they've literally seen it, because it was done in their presence. And yes, cops talk -- look at the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, every cop in the department knew what a "rough ride" was and that it happened.
There might be isolated instances of small departments which don't have brutal cops, or only have one who keeps his mouth shut about it. But any sizable department has significant brutality and essentially all the cops know about it.
I strongly dispute that. I don't know a ton about the Freddie Gray incident or the Baltimore department, but my understanding is that neither state nor federal prosecutors allege what you have about Freddie Gray.
More importantly, while I think isolated examples of brutality like you're alleging do occur, given the tens of millions of annual police encounters, I would fully expect that even an America full of the most perfect police forces our fallible world could ever muster would nonetheless still present an endless number of examples of egregious misdeeds across the country.
The point is that it's not a systemic problem (I argue). The conduct of these abusive officers is not tolerated by their fellow officers and superiors (why would it be? It makes their job that much harder and opens them up to criminal/civil liability). Further, these abusive officers are are regularly fired, as well charged and convicted, with the obvious caveat that it's not always easy to pass the bar of guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt (just look at non-cop criminals!)
However, I don't expect the vast gulf between our intuitions and experiences about this problem/nonproblem is going to be bridged within the limits of the intersection of our patience and free time in this already waning comment thread, I think you'll agree.
It's not so much a systemic problem as it is an intrinsic problem. Any group of enforcers will develop an us against them mentality. They have to, enforcement isn't possible if the enforcers give their opponent's arguments the same weight as their allies. The corrupt ones don't have to brag about their excesses, they just have to deny them and ask the clean ones if they are really going to believe this meth-head/loser/nazi over them.
And even if the loser convinces one clean cop of his innocence it doesn't matter, because the whole department needs to be convinced. A department which is a mix of corrupt and clean no less - the corrupt will never believe him, so the department will always be weighted heavily against him. A clean cop who took a stand would just get fired, so they reason they should tolerate a small amount of corruption so they can help the greatest number of people.
This happens at every level of society, at every level of enforcement.
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The point is exactly the opposite of this. Abusive officers do whatever they like. Everyone knows about it -- other cops who may not be so abusive themselves, defendants, defense lawyers, supervisors, prosecutors, even judges. But defendants aren't considered credible, and cops support each other unconditionally in the "blue wall of silence". Occasionally there's physical evidence and maybe a cop gets fired (and then later quietly re-instated with back pay when the union sues), but they nearly always get away with it.
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Obviously you believe that All Cops are Bastards. I'm not even arguing that that's not the case. I'm arguing that what /u/FirmWeird is describing explicitly contradicts the assertion that All Cops are Bastards. If the assertion "all cops are bastards" is only true in parts of the US (as they said), that logically implies that there are parts of the US in which that assertion isn't true i.e. NACAB.
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