Cops sign up to serve and protect. They should have special obligations. Instead, we have given them special protections. They should be held to a high professional bar & pay a high price for abusing their power. Instead, there is no bar, and they’re free to act with impunity.

This idea that cops should be protected from any risk, and that their safety is more valuable and important than that of those they’re hired to serve and protect, is such a bizarre and pernicious assumption. The bar for self-defense should be higher for cops than civilians.

Police are trained. Their salaries, their protective gear, and their weapons are paid for by taxpayers. They are vested with the power of the state. That is enormous power and it comes with enormous obligations - including assuming much more risk than civilians.

But while we hear a lot about brave police, in reality they assume very little risk, and are free to physically abuse, mislead, manipulate, and sometimes kill the people who they’re supposed to protect (and yes, cops serve & protect EVERYONE, even people they suspect of crimes)

You don’t get to shoot someone in the back. You don’t get to summarily execute someone you suspect of a crime. You don’t get to shoot at someone because they’re running away and you can’t catch up. You don’t get to unnecessarily hurt someone because they made you angry.

The fact that any of this - expecting cops to behave better than civilians, having more serious penalties if they violate their obligations and the public trust - is considered “anti-cop” says so much about how we’ve made police a special category of overprotected super-citizen.