The Chauvin conviction is good, but thinking it fixes the deep problems we have in US police forces is like thinking that electing Obama fixed systemic racism.

My son reminded me that there were 249 pedophile priests in the Archdiocese of Boston – 19% of all of them. A number so large as to be literally unbelievable until there was concrete evidence.

I bet that if actually look at police forces across the country, we will see similarly huge numbers of racist cops or cops who are corrupt. Numbers we are ignoring because they sound literally unbelievable.

Just as the "outlier" culture of the priesthood drew a set of people who were sexual predators, the culture of the police draws people are are violent predators.

Not all priests are bad; but the not-bad priests maintained a culture of secrecy that allowed the bad ones to thrive. The same is clearly true of police forces.

Any "brotherhood" (and it sure likes like a "man thing", doesn't it?) should be treated with similar suspicion. We need a group as courageous as the Globe Spotlight team to relentlessly dig into police forces.

By the way, I recall a statistic that said something like 40% of police officers are known to abuse their partners. Is my memory correct? This is probably predictive of the levels of bad cops we'll find.

Finally, I'm not a social scientists or an investigative journalist. I don't "know" anything. But the patterns are compelling to me.

P.S. "The child is father to the man." Tip o' the hat to my son for fueling this rant, both in spirit and in some of the content as well.

Um, bad the many typos in this thread all belong to me.