While raising education and training standards is surely important, addressing brutal cop culture in the United States is something that educational alone cannot handle.
With the rise of body cameras and cell phone videos, more and more Americans see police brutality first hand, every day, on YouTube. I'm one of those Americans.
Just yesterday, I watched a video that will never make the news. Two cops stopped a guy on his way to work for something very minor, easily addressed with a warning or a citation.
The guy had questions, and he wasn't entirely — I don't know the right word — obedient, respectful, fearful, or something.
The cop ordered him out of the car, and before you knew it, the cop violently threw him to the ground and pepper sprayed him directly in the eye from about 2 inches away. The cop charged him with resisting arrest even though he never told him he was under arrest.
Then he took the guy to jail where he sat for 36 hours without medical attention to his eye.
The local prosecutor dropped all charges against the guy. Lawyers who have looked at the case say the prosecutors didn't have much choice, that no charges could possibly be substantiated.
But here's the kicker. Internal Affairs at the police department exonerated the cop and said that he had met all professional standards in the course of the arrest, which they said was justified. A separate complaint review board also exonerated him.
The victim has filed a federal lawsuit against the police department and the individual cop, but winning will be an uphill battle because of the "qualified immunity" doctrine.
The public in general are outraged. Anyone who watches videos like this usually ends up outraged at cops.
But this is ordinary cop culture in the United States. Videos like the one I described come out many times every day. Brutal cop culture is exposed every day.
People like me and many more become more outraged every day.
Yet nothing changes, because that brutal culture is who cops are in the United States. It's how their peers teach them and expect to behave after they enter the force. And the system validates them. It's extraordinarily rare to see a police department discipline one of its own for excessive force, even when ordinary citizens are outraged by that excessive force.
It's the culture, not the training.
American cop culture is sick and rotten to the core. Yes, we need cops with better education, but injecting good people into a rotten system isn't going to solve the problem. Because those good people are either going to become rotten, or they're going to leave.
