People like the police. pic.twitter.com/tMFousyMfu

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 10, 2018

I think this is the problem in a nutshell. People like the police, and that turns into unwavering support, which then becomes unwillingness to think any ill of police, so any story where police shoot some unarmed person, or about racial discrimination in policing becomes an attack on police in general. People can’t grasp the idea that any given officer may respond at least in part out of some racist feeling, without that officer being A Bad Person.

So, then there’s a video of a cop shooting an unarmed person, and that causes discomfort - how can a Good Cop be a Bad Person? So, they resolve the discomfort by either making the shooting victim into the Bad Guy (“Why didn’t he comply?”) or they make the cop into a Bad Person (“He’s a Bad Apple! Cops aren’t racist!”).

And we now worship cops like heroes, talk about how dangerous the job is, how their families wonder whether ‘This is the day he doesn’t come home’, and generally exaggerate the risk. Roofers, lumberjacks, commercial fishermen, construction workers in general - these jobs are objectively more dangerous than policing, which doesn’t even crack the top 10 most dangerous jobs. But we don’t talk about THEIR families wondering if ‘This is the day…’

And if I write this on FB, people will think I’m an anti-cop asshole.