Barr's comments make sense from a psychological perspective. You want cops to be better? Then take the first step and be better yourself. Someone has to break the cycle. Given certain "advocacy" groups' low regard of cops and harping on "victimization by cop" we are at the point where cops can't be the ones to make the first step. Too few of them, too many critics.
Once cops start seeing that "everyone" (i.e., citizens, politicians, etc.) is not the enemy, they will start to have less incentive acting "as if." A perfect example of this dynamic is NYC from the 1960s to the 1980s (with positive results remaining through the early 2000s).
--- End of line (MCP)
Police have routinely been given more and more power. Hell, they have their own Bill of Rights. What Barr is doing is saying that the cops he was there for (like the heroic ones who rescued a kidnapped baby) are the exact same cops as the ones communities are upset about. He's mirroring the "bad apple spoils the whole bunch" by basically saying "you want good apples, you'll eat bad ones too, but if you want to choose you'll get none".
Unions are quick to excuse their officers and even if the officer gets fired (which is rare), the union helps them get another job.
Does Barr expect communities to respect Officer Pantaleo? In the communities' minds, this officer put Eric Garner in a choke hold and killed him for selling loose cigarettes. The DOJ and a grand jury refused to do anything and Pantaleo may get his job back and may get back pay. But Barr can't seem to figure out why communities may be upset that an officer killed someone for selling loose cigs only to be fired and perhaps get his job back?
There's a new law in CA that allows the public to finally see police misconduct records. Dozens of officers are still on the job after being convicted of crimes. One officer was convicted of manslaughter after running over two people responding to a call. I guess the communities there should respect officers who killed members of the community without consequence because they chose that job.
In Barr's mind, and in the minds of many others, the public should simply sit back and shut up when cops plant drugs, shoot someone begging for their life on the floor, continually ignore the rights of citizens to record police, arrest a nurse who refuses to draw blood from someone who can't consent, shut off water to a cell and kill an inmate, turn a jail shower into a torture chamber, text each other talking about how black people are "monkeys", bribery, money laundering, higher rates of domestic abuse, lack of even trying to get a case right, and a litany of other specific examples easily found....because of their profession, right?
Maybe the community should just forget that Kelly Thomas had his face bashed in with a taser by multiple officers while calling out for his dad only to die while the officers who killed him walked free.
Police should respect
their communities. Not the other way around. But we're inching ever closer to a police state where everything is illegal and even legal activities are used as justification for force by police simply because the police felt unsafe or because "their training" tells them that drug dealers or bad people may have those same actions.
Police are
trained to perceive citizens as the enemy. It's us vs. them and anything outside of complete 100% compliance (even that doesn't work some times) is "resisting" and subject to whatever punishment they want. It's a shame that a country built on snubbing their nose to authority is at this point.