Sounds like the police trying to influence the boards to me.
Police already have power to ruin lives or at least make them seriously inconvenient. A retired cop generally still has friends and/or family that are active cops, and therefore has some influence.
Which means folks aren't nearly as free to speak or do their jobs freely. This is true even if you personally don't feel this way around any sort of law enforcement - you know others do.
What's the potential positive influence here? Genuinely trying to find one. Is it that a cop can tell the board "oh that's no big deal we assault everyone?" Policing isn't hard to understand, if it were there might be some minimum training standards somewhere.
As someone who was a reddit junkie who got guilty pleasured by youtube into watching tons of police bodycam videos...
People generally have no idea what it like to be a cop and what is and isn't legal. For instance, just about every single person who resists arrest now also yells that they cannot breath. Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police (and waste taxpayer money to have an ambulance come out).
In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
> People generally have no idea what .... is and isn't legal.
Neither do the cops, in their defense. And at least the not-cops in this situation aren't paid a salary and empowered by the state to do violence to people in the course of enforcing that law.
> Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police
Those bastards, asking... public servants to... serve... the public. Gosh we beat the shit out of this guy and he has the audacity to ask for a doctor afterwards, so entitled.
> In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
The word "criminal" is incredibly load-bearing in this sentence.
I suggest watching some of the videos to pull yourself back into reality a bit. Body cam watch, code blue cam, police activity, etc., there are a whole bunch of channels that just post public body cam footage.
The overwhelming majority of people doing blatantly dumb illegal shit don't just put their hands behind their back and say "you got me!" when the cops show up.
They really genuinely believe they can convince the cops that the hammer they threw in the bushes wasn't being used to smash car windows, and all the shit in their pocket wasn't stolen from the cars with smashed windows all around them. And then they physically fight the cops, lose, and say they are suffocating and need to go to the hospital.
I totally get that there are videos of cops being evil. I wager I have seen more of them than you, since they get tons of views and attention on body cam channels. But I will also wager that you have no idea how dumb and childish the average criminal is. There are 100,000 normal police encounter videos of police dealing with total idiots for every 1 evil cop needlessly killing someone video. You just have 0 exposure to them.
> For instance, just about every single person who resists arrest now also yells that they cannot breath. Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police (and waste taxpayer money to have an ambulance come out).
I don’t have any trouble believing that your social media feeds have rage bait videos that follow this pattern, but I’d remind you that the videos recommended to you are unlikely to be representative of reality.
Some feeds support narratives like “criminals lie and waste resources” whereas others show “cops lie and hurt people”, and what you see is strongly correlated with what will catch (and maintain) your attention.
The body cam channels aren't really trying to push a narrative. They just take public body cam footage from a handful of locales and upload it with very little production work. It's almost no work and generates (comparatively) a lot of views. The majority of it is pretty mundane, lots of drunk people.
I wouldn't compare it to agenda channels that upload heavily edited and cherry picked content with "telling you how to feel" narration. The unedited average police doing average police work content is enough to stand on its own.
The thrust of the videos is not political in any way. The channels host videos of bad cops just as eagerly as any other channel. They just want views from content that they don't have to produce themselves.
The fact of the matter is though that for every bad cop interaction, there are about 10,000 normal ones.
Police already have power to ruin lives or at least make them seriously inconvenient. A retired cop generally still has friends and/or family that are active cops, and therefore has some influence.
Which means folks aren't nearly as free to speak or do their jobs freely. This is true even if you personally don't feel this way around any sort of law enforcement - you know others do.