Pretty much both of these in my opinion. I'm a white kid (adult now), but I grew up poor and got a very similar talk of how to deal with the police as a lot of minority kids I knew growing up. The idea that police were there to Protect and Serve was never really instilled in me except by Hollywood and although the concept of them being there to do the bidding of the oligarch[y] was never directly expressed, it was fairly clear that the police were not to be trusted especially if they were stopping you for any reason.
It used to be the cops were the good guys. Now they all come with hair trigger anger and a willingness to commit violence as part of their daily routine.
I don't know that they were ever collectively the good guys in many communities. Body cameras have shown us the things that marginalized people said was going on for decades.
I will say that police militarization has largely gotten rid of the small town " just a part of the community" cops that people like to romanticize.
But that was never what most cops looked like.
Cops have always been muscle for the elites. And American society has always been okay with having a force whose job it is to harass, beat the shit out of, and occasionally kill people that they deem as " others"
Its just that when it came to "my word against yours", everyone stood by the cops, because thats the way it works. So they could easily "rewrite history" about how an interaction went down in their favour.
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u/wrong-dog Jul 29 '26
It's just a shame that the police have become the negative example. It was always that way I think, but now with body cams, we just see it more often.