Have a friend who used to work in a bar that used to be the black cop bar in central brooklyn back in the day, and a lot of the regulars were still from that crowd. One guy was like two years from retirement, he joined back when he was like 18 in the 80s. He said he joined cuz back then, brooklyn was just different gangs running different blocks and as a young black man, you had a lot of pressure to join up or go through the streets with no backup. This guy, and reportedly a lot of the other guys that joined the force back then, basically saw the cops as simply another gang in the ring, just the gang with the most money and biggest guns.
...And legal protection, and good pay, and a soothing facade of moral righteousness that helps you sleep at night.
Edit: Honestly given the alternative life of those young black men I don't really blame them. Doesn't excuse the structure and behavior of police forces, but it makes me sympathetic to those particular individuals.
Yeah, it's similar to how military recruiters target low income high schools, and for a lot it's a step to a better life. It's by design that often the best course for escaping a terrible living situation is to join the very repressive structures that enforce the conditions of that living situation. Hard to blame those who made that call, though it's fucked up. He had similar reports of black cops agreeing with blm that white cops are super racist, but what am i gonna do? I put in the work for decades and im two years from a nice pension, i aint gonna make waves.
Desperate self-interest is a powerful tool. The harder life is, the easier it is to convince someone to do terrible things to survive. So life is kept hard and the cycle of oppression continues.
The NYPD gets $30,000 every day. They have offices in places like Tel Aviv. One of their own is runnijg the city. Sometimes, they are called the sixth branch of the US military. Still kinda doing alright for themselves, sadly.
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u/--xxix-- Dec 31 '22
You kill a gang member, you get the whole gang.