A Vermont state trooper plunged into a frigid pond and pulled out an 8-year-old girl who had fallen through the ice while playing with siblings. The child survived and fully recovered after a brief hospital stay.
The girl and her younger sister fell through the thin ice on the pond on private property in the town of Cambridge on Dec. 17, state police said in a news release Friday. The 80-year-old homeowner was able to pull the younger girl to shore but couldn’t reach the older girl, so called 911, officials said.
Trooper Michelle Archer was nearby and arrived less than five minutes later, police said. She pulled a rope and flotation device from her cruiser, ran to the pond and swam to the girl, according to body camera video released by state police. She swam back to shore with the girl, and a second trooper who arrived as she was bringing her out of the water carried the child to a waiting ambulance.
The girl was taken to the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington for treatment of injuries that at first were thought to be life-threatening, police said. She has made a complete recovery and returned home.
I’m usually pretty hard on LE culture in America in particular. But there are people amidst these positions who believe in the position as a community leader. They grew up hoping to be a hero no differently than firefighters or nurses protecting people. Sure there are many attracted to the position as a source of power over others, but I’m very hesitant to use such blanket generalizations.
This officer jumped in when she didn’t have to. She saved a child in very dangerous conditions. She is a cop. But she is not a bastard.
Righties / racists possess the same logical fallacy when casting disgust towards people of color.
It’s just pro-cop propaganda. Yes, cops do good things, but there are regular “see? This cop did something heroic!” reports in the media, which ignores the many other times cops stomped on people of color, maybe even the same cops who were heroic on one occasion. How many thousands of stories like that has the AP ignored in favor of this one?
Why can’t we have both?
It’s fair to criticise and condemn when they do bad shit, so why wouldn’t it be fair to praise them when they go above and beyond to help people?
If you want to have a go at the media, I would start with why they don’t focus much attention on police unions that stop us from actually dealing with the badges that shouldn’t be badges.
But this cop is not a bastard.
Yes, that would be a good start. But that alone isn’t going to cut it.
At that moment sure, but tomorrow who knows. Statistically though, that cop is a bastard. The organization they work for is corrupt. The only non-bastards are the ones who have been chased out of the police for trying to fix them.
I’m going to use one of the police favorite phrases when they inevitably get caught being bastards, but I’m going to use the full version instead of the abbreviated version they usually use. “One bad apple spoils the bunch”. The lesson there is supposed to be, if you have a corrupt person in an organization they need to be aggressively purged from the organization ASAP before they corrupt others. Instead police use the phrase to mean the exact opposite, that anytime corruption is found that it’s an isolated incident and that the organization as a whole is fine.
Well, decades of ignoring bad apples has well and truly ruined the bunch. The only solution at this point is to tear the entire organization down and rebuild it from scratch, no partial measures are going to fix it.
Isn’t it the least bit unnerving to you that if you substitute blacks for cops in your writeup and leave everything else the same, it sounds like textbook generalization used by racists? That is, lumping individuals into groups based on stereotypes?
To me that speaks to pitfalls in how one arrives to such conclusions.
You don’t choose your skin color. You do choose your profession.
That’s a pretty blatant deflection and whether they choose their race or not is irrelevant to the racists’ fallacies.
In other words, so if you could choose your race, then their arguments would be valid?
No, that’s not the point at all.
The idea is that by choosing to be a police officer, you’re condoning the bad behavior of the bastards. Even if this one particular cop has walked the straight and narrow for her entire career, she’s still choosing to be a part of something we all know to be broken. So maybe she is a hero but, she’s also a bastard.
But that is a premise that has yet to be established. So goes another adage that if a good person is told they’re bad and worthless long enough, they’ll eventually believe they’re bad and worthless. So rather than promote this fast-track downward spiral / feedback-loop — call it what you will — perhaps we promote those who are on the straight & narrow their entire career? Cultures can change and police forces elsewhere reflect this pretty clearly. While the problem is systemic in nature, I just see nothing of value resorting to a literal blanket-generalization logical fallacy and using the ACABs rhetoric.
She is literally not a bastard. A career as a cop does not make someone a bastard in of itself without looking at the broader context. That is another common fallacy: Guilt by Association. What if she joined because, “if only bad people ever apply, how will it ever reform”?
If you believe there’s equivalence between believing someone is bad because of the color of their skin, and believing someone is bad because they choose to support a corrupt organization that literally murders hundreds of innocent people every year, I don’t even know how to begin to fix that delusion.
Both share the same root fallacies: (1) Guilt by Association, and (2) Blanket/Faulty/Hasty Generalization.
Since you don’t understand basic logic, perhaps we should start there?
Cops don’t get a pass until they actually start trying to fix their problems rather than cover them up and attempt to attack those bringing them to light. The organization as a whole is corrupt and broken, and until that changes nobody working for the organization deserves anything but contempt, no matter if they occasionally decide to not be bastards or not.
Copaganda.
How about we can praise a cop while hating cops. I usually say I like individual persons, but hate people. Same idea.