I'm not so sure about America, but in India once you have a criminal record you don't get education or jobs anywhere, you can't migrate or travel abroad, you're socially shamed, marriage is restricted, and even decisions for your own future is close to negligible, no matter how small your crime. Many youths have even been led to commit suicide due to this. But hey! The Police have nothing to lose, right?
And I imagine that the people who can avoid such encounters reliably are able to bribe the cops, right? everyone else has to hope that they just don't have an encounter with them. As Sajainta said, they enforce the will of the rich/powerful. That's awful about the criminal record -- it damns you to a life in the lower classes and possibly freaking
suicide, all because you got on someone's bad side. What you said is exactly right: we need these people and want to trust them, but there are so many people working the system for their own benefit. And they have power over us.
I'm definitely willing to believe the American cops are better than cops from other countries; my dad is from Mexico, where basically most cops enforce the oligarchy/drug cartels by working on the bribe system, and that's one of the better things I can say about them. (And I wouldn't be surprised if it were worse in the Philippines.)
But those experiences I mentioned -- which were offensive on principle because I saw them beat the shit out of my boyfriend, but
most offensive because they wasted our time with us and ignored Houston's real problems -- as well as working in the city's worst ghetto really clued me into the fact that the American police can be unbelievably corrupt. Bribing is more difficult, but they're still motivated by cruelty and pride, and they really take to heart that idea that American cops are better than cops in other countries. (Hence whenever they step out of line, it's not
that bad.) The cops will mess with you just to mess with you, often with catastrophic legal consequences, and often justifying their actions with truly titanic egoistic delusions and pure racism. I'm sure that's the case a lot of places, and I wouldn't doubt that the ratio of good cops to bad cops is dramatically better in America, but make no mistake about it, many, many American cops are
not there to help you, or society, or anyone.
They are not above lying in the most blatant and shameless manner to their superiors and to the justice system just to satisfy their egos. This had life-altering consequences in the lives of the kids I taught.
That said, there was one time when I thanked a cop for helping me deal with a homeless dude who was harassing me. She was
incredibly surprised and grateful; she acted as though that's one of the only times when that's happened. There's definitely some self-fulfilling prophecies at work here, both on the cops' part and that of citizens.
