"Everyone who has participated and not worked to change that system is guilty."

Exactly. This is my mentality and has been for years. People like to complain about the "few bad apples" that make everyone look bad. Yeah, I'll acknowledge up front that overall in the country the majority of officers probably do their job fairly well and try to obey the rules and not violate people's rights. But my real problem is that their coworkers don't do shit about it when they know those people violate the law. They don't speak up. They don't stop them. They don't want to testify or offer up any evidence. And yet how many times have we seen these big public cases where the officer in question has a history of complaints and disciplinary action against them?

The difference between me and my coworkers and the police is that neither I nor anyone I work with has sworn an oath to uphold the law. So I'm not legally obligated to turn anyone in or do anything if I find out someone is breaking the law. But they are. And not only do they not do their job in that regard, they actively try to protect those people. And then they turn around and claim that the public is against them and that there is all this "us vs them" tribalism. Of course there is - they've made it that way. Do they honestly think that the general populace changed their view of the police of the past 50 years at random?

A personal anecdote. I got pulled over around 2 years ago for having a headlight out. Fair enough. But the officer proceeded to make up some bullshit about how I took too long to pull over, which was nonsense. I took 20 seconds to turn over (I went back and timed it) and that was because it was a one lane road with no shoulder - I pulled into a strip mall just up the block that I knew so we didn't block the street. He used that to then claim I used that time to hide something under my seat and suspected me of drug possession. Ordered me out of the car and tried to get me to let him search the car. I refused to grant permission. He said if I didn't give it to him he'd be "forced" to call the dogs and we'd have to wait around 40 minutes because they were far away. I didn't change my tune. We waited. The officer quietly talks to the dog's handler when they show up, deliberately away from me so I can't hear him and then the dog magically indicates/hits on my driver door. Which is interesting since I don't use drugs and only my immediate family has ever been in that vehicle and none of them use drugs. They toss the car and by now I'm both irate and afraid that they might plant drugs since this is clearly bullshit. I start to tell them how I know there's no drugs in the car and it's really interesting that the dog hit on the car considering I know for a fact that there are no drugs there and they will soon find out the same. I also openly and politely ponder what a lawyer might say about them forcing me to wait 40 minutes for dogs to show up since this was after the latest ruling from the supreme court about how long reasonable stops can be for things like that. I see one of them start to think things through and realize I don't actually have drugs in the car. The search completes and they don't find anything. But they also never cite me for the headlight being out and send me on my merry way 75 minutes after being pulled over. Now the real kicker - a friend of mine is in a relationship with a state trooper. I relayed this story to him and he flat out said he would have searched my car as well. When I asked why he said "you are a white male and you were traveling in the direction of a mostly minority town with drug problems (the next town over from where I was). They probably figured you were either going there to buy or you are a seller." To which I responded, "how the hell could they conclude that since I live like 3 minutes from where they pulled me over and I was going home?" And he just said that it wouldn't have matter to him either and he would have searched my car as well.