Because cause and effect is something most people don't understand. Especially if the news, and media in general obfuscates the cause AND effect.
They are told police are bad, and that it's all those evil Conservative gun nuts, because all the police are evil racist white people who just want to beat on black people.
The police
are bad. Or more accurately, there are a shitton of institutional problems with cops. This thread highlights them.
But people don't understand the cause. It was never 'Cops are bad.' It was 'Not enough cops. Too many DA's letting criminals walk and commit forty felonys before they finally end up in jail. Lack of pay into police, means less and less training.'
No. These are seperate problems that you are conflating. Bad cops (I include any cop who 'just obeyed orders' when shutting down a bar for covid, for example) are bad. Crime is bad. A lot of cops stops non-cop crime, but also just letting cops do what they want enables cop abuse (also crime).
Now don't get me wrong. There are bad cops out there. The Audit movement that has been picking up over the last couple years has proven that fairly well. But there are ways to get around that. The problem is that thanks to the internet we see every bad cop. Every bad interaction. Hell sometimes we see good interactions shown in negative light thanks to deceptive editing, or media pundits telling us what we are seeing is wrong, despite the cops doing exactly what they are supposed to.
It's not a few bad cops. There are institutional problems.
Let's just start with a lack of liability or skin in the game. If a cop violates rights, there's almost no chance of anything happening to them. First, the thin blue line of silence needs to be gotten through to even know about it and get evidence of it (including stuff like abusing crime victim's rights acts to keep their name out of the public). Now once a bad cop did something bad and got caught for it, there are 3 avenues of justice, all of which must be pursued, but none of them are in 99% of cases.
First, they need to fire the cop to stop future harm. But this immediately runs into problems. In most cities especially, the cops are unionized, and public sector unions lobby for contracts and law changes that protect themselves. In fact, the things that cops are going to be fired for are for are usually when they do good, like reveal that stuff is corrupt or wrong (search this thread for the Maine detective who was fired for revealing massive government overreach in searches). Or maybe an example from my hometown of Huntsville, where the city is
willingly (not even forced by contract!)
paying a cop convicted of murder.
Second, you get a civil case, to get the victim of the cop abuse restitution. Only Judicial Activism invented qualified immunity, which effectively means that it's not a crime the first time, civilly speaking. So long as the cops do something ever so slightly new and awful, they are not liable. There are plenty of examples of that in this thread as well.
Third and finally a prosecutor has to charge the cop to fulfill retributive justice. This almost never happens, because DA's and cops are on the same side. On top of this, Juries give them wide leeway, their defense is usually paid by the city, etc.
So no, the cops are institutionally bad, because there is no pressure on them to do good. None at all. The only pressure they face from their institution is to enforce laws (including bad ones) and meet ticket quotas.
But I'm not even done! We haven't even gotten into the legal bullshit they pull, including: SWAT raids for weed, civil asset forfeiture, shutting down businesses defying covid orders, stopping people from paddleboarding without a mask, taking your guns, etc. Because cops
will obey orders, as they've shown time and time again.