Policing Debate (Moved from the Confessional Thread)

[John Wilkes Booth]

Originally Posted by tore

I'm with Fiddler on this. The job is to enforce the law and so that's what you do. If a constable gets to pick and choose what laws should be enforced, that hurts the integrity of the whole police force.

i actually agree with the sentiment that if you are a cop, you should enforce the law, as that is your job. i will say, however, that i would wager just about anything that every cop has at one point or another decided to 'look the other way' at least once in their career. this could mean not ticketing someone for jaywalking, not arresting someone for possession, etc.

the severity of the crime they are ignoring may vary, but i would be surprised if there are actually cops out there that always enforce every law with 100% consistency. so with this in mind, then if enforcing the law is 'doing your job' then any instance of you being lenient or not enforcing a particular law is you 'not doing your job.' so if you want to live up to the standard you are espousing, then you should avoid ever falling into this trap.

that being said... i do think that enforcing a law you think is wrong is compromising at least one of your principles. even if it is what you are supposed to do, as a cop. i'll back off on the whole career vs job argument, as i think that's a bit of a digression from the real point here, which is about compromising your principles. if you compromised them because being a cop is important to you for other reasons than money, then you still compromised them. i really don't see how that is any better tbh.

it could simply be that doing some jobs requires sometimes compromising on your ideals. i'm not actually judging cops/soldiers/politicians/whatever in making this statement, as i've been in the situation myself. a few examples come to mind...

working at walmart, i had to sell **** to people. i worked overnight and was the only one who could sell **** in electronics and run the register in sporting goods, etc. so there were a few items i had to sell to people that made me feel a bit uneasy. one of them was air duster, which kids use to get high on, and which causes permanent brain damage. i would sell it to them nonetheless, as long as they had ID, as it wasn't my job to deny sales or judge what people buy.

i also had to sell ammunition in the sporting goods section, which is all well and good if i'm selling it to a normal legal gun owner who's going to use them responsibly. but not all of the customers i had were like that. many of them were obviously gang members, and a few of them even had gang tattoos that i recognized because these gangs were based in the same neighborhood that i lived in. meanwhile, this kind of **** was on the local news almost constantly:



but once again, wasn't my job to judge who could and couldn't buy ammo, aside from checking ID. if you're of age, you can buy ammo; it's as simple as that.

i could try to wash my hands of any moral compromise and say hey i was just doing my job. but i can't deny that i basically did **** that i thought was (morally) the wrong thing to do. but the circumstances were such that doing so was the better option for me at the time. so i feel it's only honest to admit that i'm willing to compromise on my ideals for pragmatic reasons. i would honestly have nothing to say against cops or soldiers or politicians if they made a similar admission. and some of them probably do. but some of them don't. they assume a sort of moral infallibility in any case where they are following protocol, because the system is such that we literally need them to follow protocol for the system to function.

which is fine. i'm not decrying that fact, as i don't have a better solution. we need cops, and cops need to follow protocol. all i was saying is if the protocol conflicts with your own ideals then that requires compromising your ideals. it just is what it is. the world is a messy place.

that being said... i do understand why they have to sort of uphold the ideology that following protocol is never wrong... undermining this kind of thing can be subversive, and authoritarian systems can't tolerate such subversion. and police and military agencies are inherently authoritarian.

final disclaimer... nothing personal against fiddler or any other cop. i do generally get along with them as people. just my view on the nature of the system.