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You're just being foolish to trust them.. I'm Canadian and always heard how our cops weren't as bad as American cops, then we had protests in my city and the Canadian police proved they can be every bit as sadistic and psychotic as American cops. So can European cops. Don't let your guards down

I know several ex-cops because they saw everyone around them was a bastard, they are great people.

I live in Canada and also know several cops who are great people;however, even they would not raise a finger to expose fellow cops who are indeed bastards

That's the problem, it's not a few bad apples, it's a shit ton of them and the few remaining good apples are too afraid or just not care to do anything about the rest

It probably helps that in most European countries police training is in the thousands of hours and in America it's under 6 months.

https://www.trainingreform.org/not-enough-training

I know several cops and they are all great people.

No, they aren't. Even if they are kind and friendly to you, they are still cops. They are still the state sanctioned users of violence whose primary job is to keep the status quo in which the rich own everything, and the workers don't. Where people live on the streets and children go hungry.

Here in Vic Australia too. They're mostly legends

The only people I know who hate cops here hate them because they either didn't solve their issue, or they are generally known to act like asses.

It probably also helps that nobody carries guns here so they can operate on a shoot last, ask questions first policy

I get a different vibe from cops in Europe, and I wonder if it has to do with countries where they have mandatory military conscription / civil service.

I sometimes wonder if in the US, we had some kind of system where everyone was forced to serve as a police officer, say between the ages of 18 and 21, we would have an entirely different system. Instead of attracting power hungry psycho killers, you would have normal people who understood they were performing a required service for their community and society in general. You might then get more mutual respect between cops and civilians since everybody will have been on both sides.

Also, it’s almost as if anyone who wants to be a cop should be immediately disqualified. Same with politicians.

Same. I'm in the US, and every cop I've personally interacted with has been reasonable and professional. But I'm pretty mainstream (not a minority, dress conservatively, etc), so generally not a target for police enforcement. So it's hard for me to know whether my local police are better than average, or if our heavy demographic skew is the main contributor to our low crime rate (i.e. they could still be targeting minorities unfairly, it just wouldn't be clear from general stats).

Regardless, even my local police have far too much power, so I'm absolutely in favor of ending qualified immunity and splitting the force into armed and unarmed officers. We've had some local incidents of police overstepping their bounds (e.g. I'm in Utah and remember this incident very clearly, though that was in another jurisdiction).

It's pretty normal in say, Italy and Spain (or at least populated/Catalonian parts of Spain). Everyone immediately brings up Genoa G8 when a police do stuff.

I'm curious in which European country. At least here in Germany ACAB definitely applies

Wouldn't that be ABAC, not ACAB?