It seems every day we hear about things in the US getting worse for the average citizen. Is it a case that it was always like this and we're only just finding out or are these more recent happenings ?
The difference now is:
1) Stories about this sort of thing are becoming well-known thanks to the internet;
2) Police are starting to mess with white people.
As I related a few days ago, it has always been this way for some of us [0].
Well educated people with money tend not to have to deal with most of it. And can usually afford to make it go away when they do. Cops also tend not to bother them as much.
I have a personal interest in "poor people's" issues, my wife works with a poor "population" and I live in an area with concerns about social justice so I'm a little more aware of it.
The poor are different from you and me and it's not just because they have less money.
But you can certainly be screwed over by corrupt or, worse, power-hungry police even when you're a well-to-do straight white male.
I can see why you might feel that way but, in the long-term big picture, no, they're really not. There was a time when law enforcement wasn't required to recognize your right to be silent, for example, and most of the civil rights advances of the sixties still hold. Civil forfeiture is dangerous and relatively new, but there was plenty of dangerous stuff back in the day.
Now, the fact that things could be a lot worse is depressing in a whole different way...
If there was a decade long shortage of clean water, if unemployment was > 30%, or if the FCC outlawed reality television [1], then people might lose it and demand change. But the intangible theft of one's rights in a (presently) nonviolent way just doesn't register on the radar for most people.
[1] Unless it was "to protect the children" of course.
1. Internet makes small town news national news in a heartbeat if outrageous enough.
2. Currently it is a perfect storm for law enforcement - there is a decade of visible overreach, NSA, TSA, general tiredness of war on drugs and the lost wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on "using war for almost any government effort, republicans hate everything government related because Obama is in office, democrats are disillusioned with him on civil rights and there is global demand for that kind of stories and the journalists supply.
So maybe the first.