I feel like a lot of the discourse I hear about "all cops are bastards" or "there are no good cops" is fundamentally missing the point of what is meant by it. It's not a statement about the average, everyday moral character of individual police officers, it's making a practical observation that, when you agree to become a police officer, you are agreeing to undertake all of the contracted duties of a police officer when required, some of which are just straightforwardly morally evil.
This also is not making the claim that everything done by police is morally objectionable. In fact a lot of work that ends up being done by police departments is pretty unambiguously prosocial. But even if it were the case that most or almost all of it were, if you take a job at a food kitchen where the contract stipulates you need to shoot every 1000th client, you're still the guy who just agreed to murder a bunch of folks for your boss. "But 99.9% of it was just serving nutritious food to my community!" is not a good defense to the charge leveled especially when you could in your own time dedicate yourself to serving your community without also agreeing to wield violence against it.
For the record I don't think that the percentage of police work that is "good" is actually that high, but the point is that it is immaterial. The point is that intrinsic to the role is the use of state violence to uphold unjust structural power. That's the point; not that every cop is an asshole in an interpersonal way, or personally evil in their every day life (although many are). But I'm just as sure many are extremely personable or even typically fairly kind people who are uninformed or have bought the propaganda, to the point that they can ignore the reality of what they are doing.
Still acting as a state bastard when they help toss you in a cell for nonviolent drug crime, though. The system is evil and they have accessed to acting as its agents.






















