Most police do not report the abuses of their fellow officers or interrupt them when they are doing something questionable.
How do you know this?
By the lack of reports of abuses and by watching videos in which a police officer is doing something objectionable and the others around them are not recorded as either speaking up or requesting assistance from higher up.
Police disciplinary records are public record in a dozen states. There is limited accessibility in 15 more. In 23 states, they are totally obscured from the public.
But we have case after case in which there has been broad corruption in a department, with no complaints filed or actions taken. In some cases, like Baltimore's, where there has been widespread corruption, the disciplinary actions and related information was secret, until the courts demanded the information.
In Massachusetts, the records are also secret, but with exceptions. So, we can't see disciplinary action, but we can often see complaints against an officer and internal affairs investigations. It is the lack of the latter in the face of the former that can be especially damning.
Up until 2015, Missouri had a similar standard to Maryland's, but a court ruling determined that an individual officer has no privacy interest in misconduct committed while they were working, so suddenly a ton of information became available.
Minnesota holds all such information to be public, which is why we so swiftly learned of the prior issues that ex-officer Chauvin had and the failure of him to be held accountable for it.
We also see it in various scenarios in which one person will direct the others to turn off their bodycams and the others in the crew will do so, without question. Nor do they turn them back on during the moments of questionable (or criminal) wrongdoing.
All of this still doesn't get you to "most" engaging in that behavior.
Really?
If it isn't most, then we get a ton more reports than we get, Yank.
We don't have Baltimore where the rank and file were silent. We don't have scene after scene after scene in which Officer A is doing something awful while Officers B, C, and D are keeping the bystanders back instead of any of them trying to stop Officer A.
We have scenes in which Officer Q tells others to turn off their bodycams and Officers R, S, and/or T indicate they should not be doing that or refusing to do so.
We don't get those scenes, Yank! That's not what happens.
How can you argue that it is
not most? How many examples in which a regular officer has turned in another are
you aware of? Are you claiming that somehow none of the other police know what's going on?!
Poll
5 (45.5%)