The stakes are not just "higher" than most occupations: it's basically the highest-stake position someone can hold.
Pilots, surgeons, and the military come to mind as positions that can have similar stakes. Not 100% of the time, of course, but same goes for cops.
Indeed...
Last I checked, police were the only profession that regularly arrest and kill other people (for right or wrong). It's a completely different occupation from anything else, yet cops treat each other like they're working a regular 9-to-5 gig. You better believe that a job where you can be judge, jury, and executioner is going to have a lot of publicity, as it should. Since, as I said, the police sure don't seem to police each other.
I don't have a problem with the publicity. I'm just saying, they're still regular human beings doing fairly standard stuff about 95% of the time. Being one of the other 3 cops in this situation would be an incredibly weird and scary situation. This guy that you've worked with, trusted, and had a relationship with, possibly for many years, suddenly turns out to be a murderer, and you're watching it happen in real time. You're probably in complete shock. How do you stand up for a total stranger and possible criminal, against the guy you know and have a relationship with?
You can't just simply quit trusting another cop. Trust works both ways. You're kiboshing your relationship with him, possibly even risking your own job, not to mention your own life, by publicly disagreeing with or "policing" another cop. Doing that goes against your entire training and the entire fundamentals of the profession. As devastating as it is when there's a bad egg cop and something like this happens, cops still have to put trust in each other, or the entire concept of law enforcement crumbles. That's what makes this such a tough problem to tackle.
Of course they're just doing regular bullshit most of the time. Every job has its busywork, but it's that other 5% that ultimately define a cop. Lately, I've not got the impression that some cops are handling those other 5% too well.
I think you're giving cops too much leeway. They're supposed to be trained for situations like this, and apart from the cop with his neck on George Floyd, the rest were just doing regular busywork from what I could tell. There was no impression of shock. If they were sitting there, and another officer was kneeling on someone in a matter that was restricting his breathing, and he wasn't posing a risk to the officers, why didn't
anyone step in? My guess is: too much trust in each other. Too much blind faith between officers. Too much assuming that every cop is absolute and right in the justice they serve.
You can have trust without completely turning a blind eye to blatant murder. If my friend was outside a pub, strangling someone who was saying "I can't breathe", you better believe I would step in. I sure as hell don't want my friend going to jail for murder! I almost get the impression that the officers didn't step in because they knew what would happen (arrested, charged with murder or whatever) and wanted it to happen, because they didn't like Derek Chauvin.
