Just curious, what do you guys actually do for a living?
Scrolling through comments here, you can tell there’s a huge mix of people, some clearly technical, some more creative, some who sound like they’ve been in the working world for decades, others who feel like students or early in their career.
No particular reason for asking, just genuinely curious what kind of professions make up this community. Feel free to keep it as vague or specific as you’re comfortable with.
Drop your profession below, and if you want, one thing about it people usually don’t expect.
Statistically speaking it’s likely that I was somewhere close to a 5/10. If you consider that “good” so be it, but I reject the notion that just because a(n ex-)cop goes on Lemmy they must be or have been good.
I’ve tried to address the issue across many spaces, but there’s never anywhere near a consensus on what makes a cop a Good Cop, so I don’t think I or anyone else will be able to truthfully answer that question about me (or any other cop) in a way that suits most/all people.
My joke was that there are no good cops, because even the “good” ones still uphold the blue wall of silence and passively enforce systematic oppression. The entire system is designed so that cops who refuse to fall in line are quickly weeded out. Even if the “good” cops don’t directly oppress people and abuse their authority, they keep quiet about their coworkers who do. There is no “good cop changing the system from within” because the system is designed from the ground up to expel anyone who tries. So the only way to be a good cop is to stop being one.
I don’t strongly disagree with that notion, but I strongly believe that spreading the idea leads to making cops worse as a whole.
Say your message reached the eyes/ears of every single (prospective) cop, whether they (think they) (will) contribute to that problem or not.
The ones that want to contribute to that don’t care what you have to say about it; they might even get a kick out of it.
The ones that don’t want to will either be motivated towards mental gymnastics into ignoring criticism of law enforcement (“they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about” and other similar cop-outs) or look for a way out of that line of work. In other words, making people think “it doesn’t matter what I do, I will still be considered evil,” will push a lot of otherwise good people to either ignore criticism, deviate to the worse, or get out entirely. The former two are basically the logic behind Labeling Theory. Do you know who invites them with open arms? Bad Cops.
So by subtracting (potential) Good Cops and not affecting (or bolstering) Bad Cops, you make the ratio worse.
Finally someone else who shares this opinion!
One of the biggest deflating sentiments that ruins the ACAB meme is the one-two question:
“Do you think you are a good person?”+“Do you want to be a cop?”
If they’re answering truthfully, most ACABers would answer: “Yes.”+“Of course I don’t.”
The reasoning behind the latter varies, in my experience with them, from “Because there are too many bad cops (therefore I am afraid for my personal safety).” to “Because I qualify for better jobs.”
The former is, frankly, an argument from a place of cowardice. Imagine a world where nobody put out fires because fires are dangerous. Sure, it’s totally rational for one person to avoid danger, but if everyone avoids danger we are all screwed. Further, though no group is a monolith, you also see “Cops always protect their own no matter what,” come from ACABers, at which point wouldn’t that person trying to be good be one of those cops that is above any adverse action?
The latter is an argument for incentivizing good people to join law enforcement, most directly with better pay, and indirectly with not shitting on every cop just because one/some/most/etc. of them are shit.