If you didn’t know before we had countless videos of cops beating up white people, you should now be able to come to the same conclusion as the rest of us who have followed or been the victim of police violence: cops are bad.
“But my uncle brother father cousin is a pol–“
He’s bad.
“But I’m a cop and I–“
You’re bad.
Let me explain using Republicans.
When I was growing up in the rural Deep South, I had friends who were from Republican families. I went to their house after school, went to their birthday parties, and had dinner with their families. When I got old enough to understand politics, my friends were old enough to understand politics, and some of them were still Republicans. The older I got, the fewer Republican friends I had, but even through the Obama administration, I still knew two or three people who were Republicans. Maybe we weren’t good friends, but I knew them well enough that their number was in my phone, we’d interact on social media, and maybe we’d have a drink together every once in awhile.
See, in my naivete, I thought you could be a Republican and be a good person, and I could be a Democrat and be a good person, and we could discuss issues and have a disagreement and still be friends. You can disagree with people you like and still maintain the relationship. Even now, in 2020, years into the Trump Reign of Terror, I do believe there are a lot of Republicans through the years who were actually good people who simply disagreed with most of the Democrats’ platform on how the country should be run.
You are not a good Republican in 2020. There’s no way to justify what your President has done and what your political party has done to support him and still pretend that you are a good person. You’re some combination of racist, bully, hypocrite, and bigot. There’s just no way around that at all. You can not be a part of an organization whose only goal is to make people suffer and still say you’re a good person. You can be a good former Republican, but you cannot, as a current member of the GOP, claim to be a good Republican regardless of what you personally do in the course of being a part of the GOP. If you were a good person, you would renounce their policies, leave their party, and join the rest of us who are trying to take them down in order to make the world a better place.
You cannot call yourself a good cop when you are part of an organization whose sole purpose is to intimidate, terrorize, and brutalize.
Who are these good cops supposed to be anyway? Is it the three cops in Minneapolis who didn’t actually murder anybody…but didn’t stop their buddy from doing so? Is it the 57 cops in Buffalo who didn’t actually push an elderly man down…but walked by him while he bled on the ground and then resigned from the force in solidarity with two cops who got suspended after video went viral that they pushed him?
If there were any good cops, we wouldn’t have any bad ones. The vague definition of a good cop would be someone who follows the law and protects their community the best they can. That would include turning in bad cops for abusing that community, and they don’t do that. You cannot claim to be a good cop if your allegiance is to your shield over your community.
I do think you can be a good person who becomes a cop. I wasn’t sure about it, but the other day I was talking to a friend (a straight white Southern guy I worked with years ago) and he let me know he used to be a cop. I had no idea, because to me, he didn’t fit anything I thought I knew to be true about cops. He’s liberal, open-minded, intelligent, and non-threatening. And he left the force because he couldn’t change how evil it was.
Sometimes, it’s like white Americans live in a different country from everyone else. There is a lot they never see, not because they don’t want to, but because they never looked. Some of them don’t care to ever look and some simply have no concept of how bad it is so they have no reason to go looking for it. You don’t know what you don’t know until somebody tells you you don’t know it, so to speak. I think many good people who want to be cops don’t know how bad it is. They know that cops kill people, but they live in communities that receive a steady stream of “the cop feared for his life” and they have no reason not to believe that narrative. They haven’t lived anything else, and everything we see, from Hollywood to the news, tells us that Black people are very dangerous. The remaining portion of those good people who want to become cops do have an inkling of how terrible law enforcement is, but they come from a “change starts on the inside” mentality. A lot of us out here fighting the police still believe that to a certain extent, that good people should not resign from terrible organizations, because those good people are needed behind enemy lines in order to make those organizations better.
You cannot save the police. You cannot plant enough “good people” behind the blue line and expect them to change the culture of law enforcement. Every cop in this country who thinks they’re a good person should resign immediately, and that’s what they’ve been doing all along.
This. Exactly.
— Cris BLUE CHECK Stone (@kissmytulle) June 3, 2020
My husband was a cop for years. One day, his partner came and asked him to say that they were together the night before.
That guy had murdered his wife and wanted my husband to Back the Blue with a false alibi.
My husband quit being a cop.
Good people who think they can be good cops quit when they realize they cannot in fact be a good law enforcement officer, which is part of the reason we’re left with the worst cops left on the force. Right now we’re seeing NYPD officers turning in their letters of resignation on a daily basis, because you cannot be a good person and belong to an evil organization that beats people for fun.
If your uncle brother cousin husband says he’s a good cop, tell him to prove it. Tell him to turn in his shield and fight the police with the rest of us. Otherwise, he’s a simply a bad cop. Because there are no good ones.
Correction, 6:05pm
I misread the information about the Buffalo police department.
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