A few days ago, I posted a request that my cop readers send submissions as an “equal time” rebuttal of my disdain for modern police. I received exactly one response, that I enclose it below, without editing (other than to cut off the intro with the poster’s real name) there is no twisting of words here. Comments are open, but remember the blog rules on posting. Anyhow- this is his post, so no comments from me, other than to thank him for his submission.
Some of you might know me better from ‘The Bitter Centurion’ blog I formerly ran. I decided to take our generous host, Divemedic, up on his offer to submit a post regarding the good cop/bad cop issue – something I was obligated to do since it was me that prompted him to issue this ‘challenge’ of sorts and open the floor.
For those of you who don’t know or didn’t follow my blog prior, I was a law enforcement officer for just shy of 20 years. I worked with consummate professionals, but worked with some of the worst people I ever met. I helped people who needed it, but sometimes I watched the system fail. I share our host’s utter disdain for corrupt, cowardly, and incompetent law enforcement. In fact, I’d go so far as to assert that my feelings veer more towards sheer hatred for those who dishonour their oaths.
Where I took issue with the host’s stance is his assertion that ‘90% of cops out there are dishonest, corrupt, lazy, and gutless’. That’s a steep number. I’m led to wonder how he came to the conclusion that 90% of police officers fall within that category. Did he don a labcoat, safety goggles, and a clipboard and tabulate these results? Of course not. It’s a number he pulled out of his ass, quite probably because of the volume of mainstream media reports on police misconduct, which when combined with his own sour dealings with law enforcement, tempered his opinion on the matter. But…rather than argue the point, I’ll instead offer some food for thought:
Much of what we DO hear of police misconduct is through the mainstream media. But you’d have to be a moron to not know that the mainstream media is not the bastion of truth they want people to think. We know they’ve been dishonest about the scam-demic/COVID-19 fiasco, the gun violence issue, the conflict in Ukraine, as well as other conflicts abroad. We know that they’ve been dishonest and biased towards race, gender, and sexuality issues, and they’ve been dishonest about Trump, Biden, the Clintons, and a whole mess of other swamp rats. In short, the media exists to mold our opinions and sell us a narrative, not tell us the objective truth.
So, is it any different when it comes to their reporting on law enforcement? Why would anyone, keeping in mind everything else the media has been dishonest about, expect them to be on the level when it comes to reporting on the police? Have you ever stopped to think that all this bad press is being done to deliberately discredit the institution of domestic law enforcement, not much unlike what happened to the US military during Vietnam, for instance, when the left wing media, activists and people like ‘Hanoi’ Jane worked overtime to convince the American public that every troop in a ‘GI lid’ was a rapist and a babykiller and atrocities like ‘My Lai’ and ‘Tiger Force’ were commonplace, even though that wasn’t the case at all?
Just as in Vietnam, where we never heard about the good that soldiers, sailors, and marines were doing over there, we almost never hear or read about police doing good in the communities we live in. But we almost never hear about the lives saved or the people helped. Instead, we’re fed vicious narratives on how career criminals like George Floyd, Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin were innocent, gentle souls who were mercilessly crushed by the evil, cowardly, racist cops and how the institution is systemically racist and must be stamped out. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we hear this crap from the same Marxist idiots who force feed society bullshit stories like ‘the earth is melting and only communism can save us’, that ‘a woman can have a penis’, and that ‘we must all surrender our guns to the government for our own good’.
So it seems to me, then, that if that’s all we read and our prior dealings with cops are less than pleasant (and dealings with cops are generally not on great circumstances anyway) then it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that ‘90% of all cops are rotten to the core’. I’m not saying there are no rotten cops. Unfortunately, there are. I AM saying that there are more good cops out there than rotten cops, we hate the rotten cops too, and we DO deal with them – a lot more than you might think, even if you don’t get to see us doing it. A compelling argument? You be the judge. But I offer you this to ponder nonetheless.
37 Comments
Divemedic · September 19, 2023 at 10:28 am
My statement that 90% of cops are bad was, of course a made up number. Where we disagree is apparently you think that a cop who actively does these things is the only way that a cop can be bad. Be honest with yourself and answer a couple of questions-
1. have you ever not arrested someone who needed to be arrested, simply because they were a cop?
2. Have you ever arrested someone on dubious charges because they pissed you off? No?
Then have you ever witnessed another cop doing either of those things? What did you do to stop that from happening? Did you report it? Arrest the cop? Why not? Was it because he was a cop? Should it matter that he is a cop? You claim that these sorts of things are being dealt with, but we just don’t see it.
Here is a great example of what I am talking about. There are two cops in the post- the cop who is being a douche, and his partner who is standing there without stopping him. There is a felony being committed by his partner right in front of his eyes, but he is doing exactly nothing about it. This makes him an accomplice, and a bad cop.
Then there was the cop just a few weeks ago that I watched attack a shackled prisoner with a Taser, then denied the entire thing when 5 different people turned him in. The responding supervisor? He took the cop’s side and said that all 5 of us must not have seen what we were telling him we saw. Again, cops covering for cops makes them both bad cops.
Stories like these are how I arrived at the 90% number. You tell me to believe you, and not my lying eyes.
I want to believe that this isn’t as widespread as it appears to be. I just haven’t seen anything to disprove it.
Bman · September 19, 2023 at 11:20 pm
State Trooper was driving in the middle lane down a major interstate. The trooper was driving 60 mph and no one was interested in passing her. Well, I passed her ass with the cruise on at 65mph (the speed limit). She proceeds to pull me over. She got her vagina in an uproar after I lambasted her ass for parking in the middle of the interstate, causing traffic to build up, and putting every driver on the interstate at risk. She gave me some bullshit warning for having not yet updated my driver’s license, after I recently moved (I had moved a 3 days earlier).
She pulled me over, because how dare someone question her authority.
Fido · September 19, 2023 at 11:49 pm
Yeah, those well articulated questions occured to me in the simpler more dismissive trite form:
“If there were any good cops, there would not be any bad cops”.
Thank you for saying far more constructively.
Fido · September 19, 2023 at 11:54 pm
Actually, I *have* met good cops… if you count ex-cops… who quit… as rookies… and then left the state… for their safety…
I met them teaching “traffic school”… stay during lunch and sometimes they’ll open up.
Georgiaboy61 · September 19, 2023 at 11:29 am
Re: “We know that they’ve been dishonest and biased towards race, gender, and sexuality issues, and they’ve been dishonest about Trump, Biden, the Clintons, and a whole mess of other swamp rats. In short, the media exists to mold our opinions and sell us a narrative, not tell us the objective truth.”
“So, is it any different when it comes to their reporting on law enforcement?”
It should be borne in mind by both sides of the debate that the ruling class has a specific endgame in mind with the delegitimization of the police and the defund the cops movement.
The communists – and that what Biden and company are, communists – always move to seize control of the enforcement arms of the state when they gain control of the state, namely the military and the police.
The current effort is designed to drive out the last remaining police personnel who actually honor the old ways – the Constitution and Bill of Rights, et al. – and then replace them with ideologically-compliant regime-approved personnel. Ultimately, the final move in this scheme will be to nationalize police forces – thereby eliminating local and county forces as a factor at all.
The current regime has already taken moves in this direction. The dramatic expansion of the Capitol Police being one, and the hiring of some 60,000 armed IRS agents being another.
Perhaps you are familiar with the old saying “Better the devil you know,” and this may be an example of that. Whatever problems LE has had, their regime-approved replacements are likely to be worse by orders of magnitude. They will also be tasked with enforcement of the globalist NWO – public health lockdowns, climate emergencies, and so forth.
Don W Curton · September 19, 2023 at 12:18 pm
I’ll weigh in. I agree, 99% of the media info is false, misleading, or worse. You’re correct there. And in those cases you called out (George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin), most of the people on this site and other sites I frequent knew the media was full of shit. We all instantly distrusted the media account and looked deeper into what happened. So no, that’s not what’s driving the belief that most cops are bad.
No, what gets our dander up is not MSM propaganda accounts. It’s stuff like the above, personal accounts posted on social media. Actual video of the events, not someone else account of it. Personal interactions, for those of us unlucky enough to have to deal with unpleasant situations. The video posted above this is just one more added to the list. It isn’t George Floyd media manipulation, it’s direct video that has a cop respond (5 hours late) to a report of child grooming and the first thing out of her mouth is that the girl can be charged with a crime.
I think the audience here is a little smarter than what you think. And yeah, all those social media videos probably have more backstory than what we hear about, but still.
Dirty Dingus McGee · September 19, 2023 at 12:46 pm
While I’ll agree that 90% is high, I’ll say the real number is over 50%, probably closer to 60-70%. This solely based on my interactions over the years with various LE departments, from small town to federal.Small town departments seem to have the most “short man syndrome” officers, feds the laziest. Have I met decent cops? Yes. Problem is I can count the number on one hand and have a finger left over to pick my nose with.
Full disclosure; I have been a member of motorcycle clubs for over half of my life, right now coming up on 35 years since I first joined one. Because of this, I have a more than average amount if interactions with LEO’s. YMMV.
Cederq · September 19, 2023 at 2:17 pm
I gave some serious thought to posting a Guest Post. I could not offer anything you have said different Area Ocho and did not want to parrot you. I wanted to be a cop, watched too much Adam 12, Police Story and Dragnet. I joined the Army as an MP, served five years and nine months. After I terminated I joined the county Sheriff department as a reserve deputy and served for a year and a half while in nursing school. While an MP, I was a good investigator and was good at finding AWOL and deserted soldiers. The interaction with numerous police departments and sheriff departments and even federal agencies. It left me with a sour taste and a revulsion with the corrupt officers, deputies and agents. Incompetence and blatant corruption and an indifference to a persons Constitutional Rights, whether a innocent or a criminal. Way to many to list, just watch an hour of the cop videos and I saw it. I detested being on Arm Forces patrol with civilian cops. you are paired with a civilian cop in an area frequented by off duty servicemen mainly outside of military installations. The cops were often lazy, and I was witness to bribes and drug deals, excessive force, depravation of rights committed by those cops. I reported them and testified at their trials, if they got that far, most times the cop was reassigned. I was posted at numerous CONUS bases and some overseas. The foreign cops were not much better in my experience, but we didn’t interact much with foreign police departments, mostly higher ranking NCOs and officers were assigned that. After discharge and joining a county reserve unit I was exposed to much the same and after a year and half I quit, because of the hotdogging and lazy bastards I was exposed to in the Army.
noway2 · September 19, 2023 at 2:25 pm
In response to: “we hate the rotten cops too, and we DO deal with them – a lot more than you might think, even if you don’t get to see us doing it.”
Then why is it that there are multiple channels, including on YouTube, that have case after case of allegedly good cops standing by and not intervening when one goes rogue, usually in response to a failure to assume the position and “respect my author-I-tay”. I will present one particularly egregious example from about six years ago: the case of nurse Alex Wubbels. Not only were the cops actions criminal and cost the tax payers $650K, the department was all too happy to try to sweep it under the rug until a month later when it went “viral”.
Why did all those “good” cops stand around and do nothing? Why did they try to cover for him afterwards. Had the nurse turned the tables on the bad cop and physically handed him his ass, which would have been 100% justified, how likely is it that they would have reacted then on his behalf. I guarantee you they would. Gotta stand behind that goddamn thin blue line.
Mike Hendrix · September 19, 2023 at 3:27 pm
Agree with you or not–and, if memory serves, I usually have–it’s great to see you back, Centurion, if only just this once. Whether you know it or not, your voice has been sorely missed.
Aesop · September 19, 2023 at 4:40 pm
“The media lies” is a cop out. (No pun intended.)
We know – because we’ve seen the videos – what happens when a citizen screws up; anything from a quick concrete tune-up up to and including sidewalk execution (and frequently justified).
But when it isn’t, the commensurate number of videos and stories of police officers getting walked out of their department like Chuck Connors at the opening of Branded,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlUS5-ag_g
and subsequently frog-marched into a squad car, convicted at trial, and ass-raped to death in prison afterwards should be similarly legion for the times when they screw up.
They are no such thing, nor anywhere close, because that almost never happens. You should police yourselves more harshly than the rest of us, but instead you don’t do so, or do so barely at all, and only when the transgression is so egregious and virally seen as to be a virtual white-hot fireplace poker up administration’s ass to push it forward.
We award you no points for those, and may God have mercy on your souls.
And before Rodney King, it was twenty times worse.
The only thing that should be scarier than an ordinary citizen breaking the law, should be the spectacle of the mills of justice grinding an officer who’s transgressed. Punishment should be draconian, and more fearsome than being kidnapped by drug cartels.
Instead, it’s mainly wristslaps, if it happens at all, and even then, mainly only honored in the breach. That’s why departments have lists of officers with 10, 20, 50 verified major screw-ups, and even fired officers just drift to other departments, and rack up serial bad conduct rap sheets without the hammer falling until they kill somebody or make the national news, rather than being black-balled from the profession for life.
If it were otherwise, the blogs and YouTube videos of the hazing other officers would deliver, let alone official (metaphorical) floggings-around-the-fleet
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/under-lash
by management would be more numerous than the bad cop videos, by orders of magnitude.
That they aren’t shows that the whole blue gang is in on the con, and the availability of anyone with a cell phone camera to be Paramount Pictures and CNN has shown the truth of the matter.
So has the dearth of officers going on strike for cleaner departments, or quitting and/or whistleblowing because they can’t stand the corruption and mollycoddling of their fellow thugs and crooks in blue.
That behavior is what earns Divemedic’s percentage: misprision of a felony, accessory after the fact</b, and criminal conspiracy. In the penal codes of 50 states and 7 US territories.
But apparently, they don’t cover this in any police academy in the nation, except with a wink and a nudge.
(And telling me about one or two exceptions doesn’t disprove the other two million that never happened. Statistics are a bitch like that.)
You guys are a blue gang, pure and simple, with a Mafia-like code of silence regarding in-house problems, from simple screw-ups to criminal conspiracies and organizational corruption, and when confronted, you shrug and mumble, and walk away. if nobody got caught, it never happened.
Frank Serpico remains a cautionary tale, from coast to coast, bottom to top, and even then, only for people old enough to remember the story.
That’s why nobody trusts you, and why nobody likes you. Your entire profession has squandered any trust and integrity you ever had, collectively, and you’ll never get that back, short of figuratively (or literally, at this point) putting the heads of defaulters on pikes at the doors of the station house.
That would be a good start. And I’m not exaggerating.
And at the rate things are going, the people – all of them, good and the bad – are going to start doing that for you, to drive the point well home, even knowing what that means for society for some good time. You’re a cure that’s become far worse than the disease.
That truth may hurt, but the sting doesn’t disprove the thesis.
90% is wrong.
It’s probably 9% too low
Your profession has made its bed.
Very soon now, they’re going to see what it feels like to lie in it.
And the entire society will pay.
It’s always the people you trust the most who fuck you the worst, and stab you in the back the hardest.
Because they’re the only ones who can.
Et tu, Flatfoot?
JL · September 19, 2023 at 5:10 pm
I’m gonna start off by saying thanks for posting what I wrote – and those are indeed MY words – and sticking to gentleman’s rules. This being your site, you have every right to change the rules on your whim. That you did not speaks volumes to me of your honour and character.
It wasn’t my intent to debate your stance on police issues with you – again, and I need to emphasize this here, we appear to agree on much more than we disagree on, if we disagree on anything at all. As you alluded to with regards to my post, the issue I had was the arbitrary ‘90%’ number you cited, but going back further, that was in response to my jab at one of your earlier posts where you had lamented about some ANTIFA dirtbags getting off with a slap on the wrist for trying to torch a police station. Given that you do come off as though you have a real hard on for cops, I wondered why you’d be mad about something like that, even if it’s ANTIFA. It was more meant to be sarcastic than anything else.
I wanted to go more in depth on the matter with you, but another reason it’s difficult for me to flesh out my point on how bad cops actually do get dealt with is because the examples I’m aware of and would be prone to cite are Canadian (given my geographical location), which are quite different from what happens, stateside. Hell, for that matter, even what happens in the US seems to vary depending on location, since police departments there are different in many ways, from hiring standards to disciplinary procedures for police officers, and everything in between.
With regards to your two questions, being honest with myself and the audience, I will answer both your questions with ‘no’. I have never given another police officer a ‘pass’ and not arrested them for a crime they have committed, but I need to add that the reason for this is because I have never been put in a position where I have had to. The closest I have come to this was awhile back, when a young lad I trained came to me with a dilemma of sorts. He witnessed a colleague on duty, in uniform, slamming back ‘road pops’ in a marked police vehicle. He was aware of the illegalities of this, as well as the obvious safety liabilities towards both other cops and the public, which is why this bothered him. But, he was very young and therefore not sure how to deal with this properly. I told him to do his duty and do what was right, explaining to him that if he allows this to continue and someone gets killed, he will have to live with this on his conscience because he did not do anything when he had the chance. The ‘bad rep’ he feared would be a small price to pay for having a clean conscience. In the end, he did report what he saw through proper channels, an investigation was conducted, and the officer in question was summarily dealt. I honestly cannot say how, but I do know it was in a manner where he is no longer in a position to do this sort of thing.
Likewise, I have never deprived someone of their liberty (which is, when you boil it down, precisely what an arrest is, regardless of nation) without legal justification, nor would I ever tolerate another police officer who does so. I had intervened in an ‘auto theft’ call a few years ago, where a younger and inexperienced police officer had responded and located the ‘suspect’ vehicle. Unfortunately, he was so jacked up that he automatically assumed the vehicle was stolen and, well, overreacted on the driver of the vehicle who, it turned out, actually owned the vehicle jointly with her husband, who had called police and initiated the complaint. Had the responding officer kept his cool and did a proper investigation, he would have known this. The reason I was involved was because I was on my way to court for another matter and stepped in to back the officer up. Long story short, I ended up pulling him out of the situation and sorting the issue out myself. I left nothing out of my report and handed it off to my supervisor, who was not amused in the slightest. He, too, was promptly dealt with.
But there’s a lot of good work out there that doesn’t make the news either. In my career, I’ve been twice cited for valour for risking my hide in saving the lives of other people – one was an intervention in a suicide attempt, the other was during a serious traffic accident. Neither of these made the news. I have saved other peoples lives and not been cited at all. Now, I personally believe nobody who’s doing this job for the right reasons should be doing this job for the fame and fortune and kudos. But by the same token, these things happen every day, across the nation, and nobody ever knows about them. It goes back to my original point – all we hear about is the shit that bad cops get up to. We rarely hear about what happens to these bad cops, nor do we hear about the good things they do.
Anyway…I think I’ve stolen enough of your bandwidth. Thanks again for letting me say my piece. Take care.
Divemedic · September 20, 2023 at 10:38 am
Thank you for your contribution. It isn’t that I have a hard on for cops. I just believe in honesty and integrity, and will call out those who fall short. The main problem that I have with the “90%” is the existence of what is called “the thin blue line” where cops defend the actions of other cops, even when crimes are being committed. Read this and see what I mean.
Again, thanks for reading, and for contributing to the discussion.
JL · September 20, 2023 at 2:01 pm
My pleasure. As I said, since it was I who prompted you to throw down the gauntlet, the least I could do was accept.
I will say that ‘in defense of cops’ as the title for this post is somewhat of a misnomer. At no point did I so much as attempt to defend any of the examples you have cited of police misconduct or of them breaking the law. If, at any point during this exchange, you were expecting me to do so, well, you’re kind of SOL on that because I won’t defend actions or omissions to act that I myself have always refused to abide.
Which brings me to the one last point I want to make, just to set the record straight: I, too, also include cops who fail to report other cops who engage in unlawful or unethical activity as ‘bad cops’. At minimum, it is tantamount to negligence. If you take a look back at my posts in our exchange, you may note that I never said, or even implied, anything to the contrary. In fact, I even gave a personal anecdote of a time when I counselled a younger officer to act on something he saw when he was conflicted on the matter.
So, I’m not sure where you and some of your other readers got the impression I thought otherwise.
In any case, I wasn’t nearly arrogant enough to believe I’d change anyone’s mind on the subject. Some of the other commenters, notably Aesop, seem more content to sit on the sidelines and fling shit while becoming intoxicated on the aroma of their own flatulence – an activity in which our dear friend Aesop is without peer. I will not waste time or bandwidth arguing with those folks, partly because I don’t have the time to waste but mostly because my ‘counterpoint’, to put it loosely, was for you specifically, Divemedic. I appreciate your integrity and maturity in addressing the issue.
In actuality, whether you believe it or not, we really do disagree on very little.
Divemedic · September 20, 2023 at 2:10 pm
There are some here who engaged in some, shall we say, poor debate and attacks. The most egregious of those comments remain unapproved. Aesop is one who frequently does, but I allow many of his comments because he is occasionally correct.
As far as my pointing out that silent witness cops are bad as well, I wasn’t saying you were avoiding the topic, as much as making sure that you were aware of my stance on that.
JL · September 20, 2023 at 2:24 pm
Point taken and I wholeheartedly agree.
Aesop’s not so bad. I actually enjoy some of the things he posts. When I was down and out over the jab mandates, it was his writing, at least in part, that prompted me to start a blog of my own. So even though I sometimes take him with a grain of salt, I have to give credit where it’s due.
Aesop · September 21, 2023 at 4:23 am
So at the end of the day, you have no quibble with anything in particular I or anyone else said about things down here, not being even under the same legal system; you just wanted us to know that up in Canada, once upon a time, there have been some decent human beings doing the job.
Spiffy! Noted. Would that their tribe had increased.
That seems to have ended up there around the time the Mounties started trampling grannies in wheelchairs with horses because truckers didn’t want to be forced to get Covid vaxxed.
But it’s okay, because they were “Just following orders.”
Turdoo, like all totalitarian communists, ruins everything he touches.
We have the same problem with Biden and his lesser minions down here. Maybe you’ve read about it.
The resolution on either side of the border will be neither pretty, nor peaceable.
Police had a choice about that endpoint.
The citizenry won’t.
In the meantime, get back to blogging; you never know what one voice can accomplish. And when shit is all the ammo you can use for the moment, fling it, baby. For two reasons:
“Agitate; always, agitate.”
“Jaw, jaw, jaw is still better than war, war, war.”
For now.
We’ll have the other soon enough.
Divemedic · September 21, 2023 at 5:21 am
Sadly, I agree.
Trumpeter · September 19, 2023 at 6:06 pm
You sound like I wouldn’t recognize propaganda just from the choice of adjectives and verbs used without reading the story. We all recognized the obvious lies around all the usual suspects. But there ARE real stories about bad cops being covered up by “good” cops. Until you face and address this issue, you are just throwing chaff to distract from the big issue
Nolan Parker · September 19, 2023 at 6:10 pm
The good cops know who the bad cops are. It’s been that way since forever. The good cops are somehow unable to get the bad cops out. That, to me raises the 90% number.
Not everyone is a uniform. Internal Affairs is supposed to investigate corruption and bad behavior. If the politics inside the department protects the bad cops, then idk what a good man should do. Who doesn’t remember what they did to Serpico.
Is it really reasonable to expect the guys who aren’t A part of bad behavior to get rid of the bad cops? It sure Sounds reasonable, but being a cop and working to get One of Your own or ten of them fired might get a guy Accidentally shot.
I’m hoping the guy who was a cop will tell me what would happen to someone who ratted on his co-workers.
Divemedic · September 20, 2023 at 10:41 am
This raises a good point, and is exactly why the bad cops have to be eliminated as soon as they are found. IF they aren’t, eventually the bad ones become so numerous that you CAN’T get rid of them.
riffman · September 19, 2023 at 6:15 pm
its the proclivity to back the blue by the blue. You have to have your brothers back. I get it. However, when you are given hammers and everything is a nail and you are “in it” with your brother. Its a shit job. You can do good things but still look the other way when its not righteous. And you know its not. The larger issue is the Nuremburg issue. Just following orders when it gets sporty out there. You have become the standing Army our for fathers warned us about.
Skeptic · September 19, 2023 at 7:11 pm
What a load of horseshit.
Do you really think that anyone on this blog is swayed by the MSM, or gives the slightest of shits about George Floyd, Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin? My guess is that they are like me – I’m glad they are dead, and the world is a better place without them.
Here’s the issue you ducked, not very skillfully. The traditional base of support for law enforcement has been White and conservative. Since 2020, here are some of the things we have watched:
Cops literally bending the knee to black criminals under the guise of “Black Lives Matter.”
Cops arresting people for not wearing masks, for swimming, for all other sorts of offenses during the Scamdemic – which you referenced but failed to note law enforcement’s role in.
The types of cop abuses that DM catalogs on this blog – not through hyperbole but actual video.
Cops standing by when Antifa and blacks burn, loot, and destroy – but then stepping in when white conservatives attempt to defend themselves.
In short, we have supported you and yours since time immemorial, and you’ve spent the last three years pissing in our faces. Now you’re all butthurt when some of us tell you to go fuck yourselves.
Cue the standard “but that’s a minority of cops.” Yeah? So where are all the “good” cops calling out the bad ones? Spare me the bullshit about “we handle it behind closed doors.” First of all, no you fucking don’t. Secondly, the offenses I mentioned above were public – and so should all those “good” cops’ response.
What do we hear? Oh, yeah – crickets.
It’s like with Muslims. A radical Muslim wants to kill you. A moderate Muslim wants a radical muslim to kill you.
A bad cop abuses law abiding citizens. A normal cop stands by and watches in silence while a bad cop abuses law abiding citizens.
Up until 2020, I was a big “back the blue” guy. I suspect that a lot of people who come here were, as well. We’ve just seen too much that we can’t un-see.
Fido · September 20, 2023 at 1:52 pm
Well said. This is precisely my issue as well.
And like Aesop said, regaining my trust will have to happen in a future life.
I’m now in the “send bachelors” camp, and expect to die there one day.
I won’t be alone.
Steve · September 19, 2023 at 7:51 pm
Hey, used to read you before you went dark, Bitter Centurion. Always hoped you were right, that maybe Canada would bring sanity to the States. Maybe it still will, but I’m skeptical.
I don’t know what the number of decent cops is, but the last one I personally knew retired just before Obama was sworn in. As he was all packed up and headed to western Wyoming, he told me don’t wait to long before getting the heck out of Dodge. I’m semi-rural, but way too close to where it’s going to become real.
I was personally drawn down on by some messed up PTSD wacko with a badge back in ’09, over a question on a building permit. The department refused to deal with him, and a month later, he shot a couple kids, killing one, for some junk traffic offense. Don’t remember, failure to come to a complete stop at a 4-way stop or something stupid like that. So, no, if there were any good cops there, they did nothing to stop him before he committed murder. With qualified immunity, of course, so got to retire with a disability, like the thug who murdered Daniel Shaver.
I agree, we will never hear from the media about the good cops. “It bleeds, it leads.” So the answer has to be the good cops taking care of business. In my youth, there was a hire from somewhere out East that gave some old drunk Native American a beatdown for being a vagrant. So bad he ended up in the hospital, and was never the same afterwards. However, unlike today, the other police took that thug out behind the courthouse and ‘splained that’s not how we do things in SD.
I’m not saying cops need to start beating on cops. I don’t know the backstory for the link @Divemedic posted, but seems to me if that other cop wasn’t on Team Evil, he could have at least asked his partner to calm down.
Anonymous · September 19, 2023 at 8:03 pm
I followed Bitter Centurion for more than a year before he got burned out on Clown World. The Mountie Management phuqued him over for not bowing to the needle. He’s an honest man of honor.
Everybody above has good points.
Nobody has a lock on the numbers. My rural county in Tennessee doesn’t have any gestapo types, apparently. Once you get to Nashville, you can see the attitude change. I figured out, in high school, how to deal with cops. I use self deprecating humor early in the convo to indicate I’m not gonna give him a hard time. I usually ask if they’ve had any crazy stops lately and were just guys getting the business at had done. I’ve never had a problem with cops, I take my ticket or warning and beat it or get a discount in court. Maybe my attitude short circuited the butt head cops attitude, don’t know.
There ARE too many roidal or attitudinally challenged bad cops out there.
joe · September 19, 2023 at 8:19 pm
woke policing is like a woke military…a lot of officers that came in to policing during otard…they didn’t want to be police, they needed a paycheck…they didn’t learn, didn’t want to learn…add in the woke millennials who use the badge to punish people…we’ve all see it in the news…and yes, the news highlights it because in the end, they are helping the left and the goal is a national police force…and if you think they are corrupt, stupid, lazy, dishonest now, just wait…look at the tsa…basically a police force for airlines and they are a bunch of tards…the reform the left keeps preaching about is all about diversity and stupidity…
KurtP · September 19, 2023 at 9:00 pm
I can’t argue about what he says.
I’m wondering if he’s going to start another blob because I enjoyed his brand of free ice cream.
Chris Mallory · September 19, 2023 at 9:45 pm
We get as many “Cop buys starving child a happy meal” or “Cop plays basketball/breakdances/skateboards with inner city yutes” stories as we do about the bad cops. A cop acting like a decent human being is newsworthy? The mainstream media protects the LE community. Cameras on cell phones have bypassed the major media. We see daily videos of cops misbehaving. Cops escalating any and every encounter into a use of force. Cops demanding that the serfs bow and tug their forelock when they encounter a King’s Man. We hear “officer safety” and “In this day and age………” ad nauseam as reasons why We The People are treated like enemy combatants by our “public servants”. Cops have been at war with the American people for decades, they are finally starting to reap the whirlwind they have been sowing. Remember you are seldom the “first responder”. The citizen on scene is the first response. You come in later to write reports and look for reasons to arrest the victims.
Justin Bischel · September 19, 2023 at 11:33 pm
So, we’re arguing over definitions here. DiveMedic says that if a policeman doesn’t do anything when he sees another cop commit a crime, he’s bad. From what I can tell, Bitter Centurion’s definition is limited to the person doing the bad behavior. I’d call them criminal cops and accessory cops. Neither are good.
From what I’ve seen, the guys in charge set the tone of the department. They decide what will be hushed up or winked at, and where the line is. Sometimes it gets political, other times it needs to be personal. There were a bunch of homeless camping out down by the tracks, and the neighborhood was quickly engulfed with theft and vandalism. The police did nothing. Then my elderly mother was mugged. When the nice cop showed up the next day to take the report, I asked her to tell her LT about it. I noted that his parents lived 3 houses down. The homeless were gone that day. A line crossed or a son worried for his family? Who can say?
Another was a friend who had a Colt Python confiscated. He was working in a bad part of town, and was wearing it legally. The claim was that it was part of an investigation. It had been used to kill a policeman. Yep, but my friend purchased it at a police auction, so they sold it to him and then took it back. It disappeared from their locker, oh well, sucks to be you. Small claims court threw the case out, said it wasn’t in their jurisdiction, and going the full legal route would have cost way too much.
Power should come with responsibility. Police have power over the common citizen, but increasingly take less responsibility for wrongdoing. That leads to us folks viewing them as oppressors, which is not a good place to be given how Americans have been arming up lately. The small town where I’m currently living has a decent force, from what I can tell. Hopefully that’s true for all of you folks.
Divemedic · September 20, 2023 at 10:46 am
Small claims court is bullshit. That court doesn’t even TRY to follow the law. Judges ARE a group of people for which I have no, zero, a mote of respect.
Fido · September 20, 2023 at 2:18 pm
For me, the thing to note here: If you don’t trust law enforment, and you don’t respect judges, then there is no justice system. Given what we’ve seen happens to people arrested without a justice system (jan6) makes it clear:
We *cannot* submit to arrest. Ever. On any charge. On no charge.
Let that sink in. How do you plan for *that*? What else *is* there?
Divemedic · September 20, 2023 at 5:10 pm
We don’t have a justice system. A justice system would mean having predictable outcomes for what the citizens can reasonably anticipate being a crime. We haven’t had that for awhile.
Anonymous · September 20, 2023 at 2:44 am
What are the names of these good cops who will leave someone alone after they confess to using their homemade machine gun against those who would prosecute them for having it?
Vlad · September 20, 2023 at 3:59 am
You mentioned scumbags like George Floyd, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin in your defense of the average street cop.
Big Mike, (no not Obozo’s hubby) was a bully who had just committed a strong armed robbery. His death was his own making by attempting to take a cops gun. Trayvon tried to beat to death some guy for daring to follow him through a neighborhood.
Saint George’s death on the other hand was a complete clusterfuck.
When a cop continues to sit on someone unconscious and unresponsive, that is COMPLETELY beyond the scope of human compassion/comprehension.
The guy stopped breathing!
Whether it was from an OD or from some dickhead putting a knee on his neck is immaterial – the cop had a duty to see that aid was rendered ASAP.
If an OD, give freaking Narcan!
At the very least, GET OFF OF HIM.
He was in Chauvin‘s custody. That made it Chauvin’s responsibility when he was unconscious to try to render aid.
The media blew it up but it wasn’t *the fault* of the media that it happened.
The fault lies strictly in the hands of Chauvin and EVERY OTHER COP THERE for letting the restraint to continue.
Yes, the ensuing riots/protests/defund the cops BS was media driven.
(Election year straw-manning)
The fact remains that Saint George died because some cop felt like being a tough guy and overrode basic human decency.
Did he have a “fatal level of narcotics” in his system? Depends entirely on how long he’d been using.
A “fatal level” for you and I could just be a maintenance dose to an addict.
Chauvin got what he deserved. My only regret is that every cop that was there didn’t get the same sentence.
I worked closely with city (mostly), state (occasionally) and very rarely fed leos for just over 3 decades.
Some were honest and awesome. Most were marginal and some were downright FUBAR.
The real downfall in my trust was when a cop I respected and also knew off duty said when a black guy in a Cadillac drove by said: “A nigger in a Cadillac? I KNOW something is illegal there!” He was a FTO and he and his trainee ran to the car to pull him over.
I. Don’t. Trust. Cops.
TheLastOfTheAmericans · September 20, 2023 at 5:19 am
He made an excellent, and clearly stated point.
The media lies about the role of Police and who they are.
I watched a Minneapolis police station burn down after George Floyd in real time thanks to the internet. I watched all the bodycam footage of his interactions with police before he met his end. I watched that feckless moron Mayor make apologies to the people who burned it down and discredit the police after the fact while his city was still burning.
That’s the problem.
The fact of the matter is that there is a huge differences between city cops – who answer to Democrat politicians in said cities – and Sheriff deputies that answer to an elected official (the Sheriff) who will get unseated if his police are out of control.
The same people who scream about Democracy don’t want it, but are more than willing to let everyone suffer the mob.
There are lessons to be learned here.
DIY Law Enforcement in 3, 2, 1… – Area Ocho · September 19, 2023 at 10:23 am
[…] readers do a guest post, defending this sort of behavior from the cops. I got exactly one response, and it appeared on this blog this morning. His issue was more with my made up on the spot number of 90% of cops being bad ones than any […]
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