It’s cool lol, this was one of my half lunch break rambles. And I totally get the anxiety lol

But yeah the fact is that if cops want to be liked and safe they need to make it easy and beneficial to comply and to follow the rules. As it stands if they decide you’re a bad person who’s committed a bad crime they’ll ruin your fucking life if not end it. So if they can’t catch the people who commit violent crimes against people like me or even bother to pretend to try, but they can decide to kill someone for running away from them despite none of the accused crimes being potentially capital offenses, then what are they for. If they can ruin your life on a hunch then the only thing stopping people from being violent towards them is that most people aren’t violent unless pressed.

I can see ways forward for American policing, but they all require the police to display a humility, vulnerability, accountability, and restraint that I’ve never seen from them. It will require them to learn the law, follow it, and accept punishment when they break it. It will require them to embrace a duty to protect all people in their jurisdiction, including both the accused and convicted. It will require them to see their job as impartial collection of evidence for the only entity that has the right to determine guilt: a jury consisting of the peers of the accused. It will require them to argue for evidence based legislation and justice that seeks to minimize harm to both victims and the convicted. And it’s going to require them to be ok with the dangers inherent to their profession where not accepting those dangers puts the rest of us in danger, because that’s what everyone else in a dangerous job does. And it’ll also require them to have mandatory therapy where the therapists can put them on paperwork duty because that’s obviously something they need, we shouldn’t have traumatized gunmen with a license to kill for a police force, but currently we’re preloading them with trauma responses as training and probably barring them from therapy because that’s how we handle mental health in this country.

Sigh, i just want this world to be better and I understand that it’s not easy. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible or not worth trying.