>If cops wanted to win the trust of the public and work alongside their fellow citizens to keep their communities safe
There's no reason to think this is what they want.
There's no reason to think this is what they want.
The internet is fond of talking about police as though they're a uniform entity that exists in more or less the same shape across the country (or the world).
They're not. The US alone has about 18000 law enforcement agencies spread across 3.7 million square miles and at least 10 distinctive regions and 50 states. Each reports to a different government body with different rules and different amounts of public participation, each has a unique culture. Plenty of our police departments are staffed by bullies, but plenty aren't. Many are staffed by people who actually believe that their role is to protect and serve, and those of us who live in communities like that are genuinely baffled by these conversations.
As for producing evidence: of course I can't, because "police officer reports misbehavior through appropriate channels and the infringing officer is disciplined early in their career before they caused a major scandal" never becomes a headline for obvious reasons.
My personal interactions with police officers who truly believed in their mission to protect and serve and believed that the majority of their colleagues felt the same way are all I have, but I imagine that that's inadmissible.
Given it's statistically impossible that any individual has ever been able to follow every law in effect, at any given time (or place) in their life, the simple assertion that every cop has broken a law or witnessed another do so, is more likely than not.
> except insofar as no one on the planet has never done something unethical
It's accurate to say that if that's what OP meant, but it's also entirely uninteresting, so I'm kind of operating on the assumption that they didn't mean it that way.
All that other nonsense about protecting people, laws, safety... it's in pursuit of more power and more money.