If you honestly believe that, you live in an echo chamber on this topic. This Gallup poll from 2024 reported a majority of Americans have either "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the police: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-...
Having confidence in the polices ability to be police doesn't mean you like cops. I'm confident that police are quite good at their jobs, because we don't measure "good" by how little people get hurt or killed in the act of policing.
There is a chart at the bottom of the article I linked that ranks different institutions about which people were all asked the same question "How much confidence you you have in institution X". Note if you include the "some" answer, the "generally positive responses" tally rises to 83%, with only 17% saying "very little" or "none".
But more importantly, the police were the 3rd highest rated institution, behind "small business" and "the military". They ranked above "higher education", "the church or organized religion", "public schools", "organized labor", "banks" and "newspapers".
> everyone hates cops. I legitimately have never personally met someone who likes the police. ... maybe they have family in the police or something
I know a couple people in different police forces. From what I have been able to tell they are like myself and the other people I tend to be around. Mostly decent people trying their best to be good humans for themselves and society.
People don't hate cops, they hate the things that happen when corrupted people make it into the job and do corrupted things because of the power that job wields. Or when they are or have been caught breaking the law by cops who are doing their job to enforce the law.
I have never heard of anyone hating cops for showing up to help when their assistance was needed.
Agree but even though they feel this way, there are institutional forces at work.
> [...] Mostly decent people trying their best to be good humans for themselves and society.
What do you think would be an honest answer to "how many times have you let another police officer off the hook for something that a civilian would have been arrested/given a ticket for"? Like - how many times per year? How severe are the violations?
Considering the small-ish/mid-size forces they are on, I am not sure they would be in that position. They are uniformed and the two that I know better than the other one are female. Most stories they tell that have any "excitement" are of dead bodies, accidents & natural causes mostly, that they respond to reports of--which tbh was a shock to learn about how often/how many dead people they see.
[added] I don't disagree that there are institutional forces at work and that does happen. At the same time, when it is very obviously illegal that ruins others; if they cover that up, that puts them in the corrupted people category for me. The individuals not the entirety of the force
> I have never heard of anyone hating cops for showing up to help when their assistance was needed.
Oh, the naivety. It's hard to hear someone hating cops who showed up to help after the cops who showed up to help shot them in the face to death. For example.
"If you have a problem, and call the cops, now you have two problems".
IAAL. If you’re in the US, you may have noticed the explosion in plaintiff attorney advertising over the last 15 years. Do you want to sue: the other driver, Monsanto, the Boy Scouts, 3M, the Catholic Church, Aesbestos manufacturers, etc. Notice that you never see ads for suing for police misconduct? It’s because it’s such an anomaly that it would be a waste of money.
It’s one of those things that’s upsetting, so our brains exaggerate the actual relevance.
Just because you've never seen it advertised doesn't mean it isn't happening. And there's 3300 counties in the US, and fifty state police entities, plus however many municipalities with police forces. Also, if you AAL, "qualified immunity" makes it difficult to "go after" individual police, so most suits are filed against the city and the department for having "bad policy" - because proving civil rights violations is quite difficult, even if it seems like a cut and dry case.
I get calls everyday about suing everybody: employers, gas stations, doctors, dentists, teachers, banks, landlords, etc. Cop calls are rare.
A couple of times in my first five years or so, someone called and had a story that sounded plausible, and I got the video - either from the car or the venue. After watching them, I basically stopped taking those calls.
I've been to countries where indeed most people hate law enforcement, which is widely known to be corrupt and inefficient.
The US cops are paragons of professionalism and courtesy compared to that, and most people in the US, like, don't mind with cops, compared to those places. (This is with all the known non-ideal performance of the US cops.)
