I seriously doubt it was intended to say anything about you.

As for our exchange:

I'm not saying that the police are all paragons of virtue or should never be criticized. I'm just saying that stress tends to push people towards absolutist thinking in a way that actively worsens problems.

In most cases, focusing on "this behavior or outcome is undesirable and needs to stop" will be more productive than framing it as "these people are simply bad people." That second tends to entrench problems and should primarily be used to justify removal of specific people after efforts to remedy the matter by other means have failed.

You are more likely to find effective solutions if you approach it with some understanding for why the police fail to behave at all times like paragons of virtue. Simply branding people as bad people tends to yield no path forward for finding better approaches to the problem.

When upset, people tend to exaggerate and to make more damning claims than they might otherwise and we should be cautious about where that leads, especially during a global crisis. Now more than ever, we need cooler heads to prevail.

Generally speaking, being fair and evenhanded is most needed when it's the hard choice to make. This is part of why police forces behave badly -- because they are asked daily to take the high road while dealing with awful stuff and they get jaded and burned out.

In their case, they are often dealing with the threat of imminent physical harm to themselves and the physiological responses that elicits, a la an adrenaline rush that causes a fight or flight reaction. That's especially hard to overcome.

Public discussion in a forum doesn't involve those same elements. If it gets too harried, we can step away from the keyboard.

Surely, this is a place where we can work at having cooler heads prevail.

Some of the first few comments on this piece were sweepingly dismissive of the police as simply straight up bad people who don't care. You showed up later, so you may have missed that context. By the time you showed up, there was meaty discussion and a variety of views.

But there mostly wasn't when I left my remark urging people to not forget that cops are human.

I think you could have added your observations about police behavior where you live without asserting that I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong, but I also don't think my point really says what you seem to see it as saying.

The discussion here is about police behavior in a specific time and place. It's not wrong to feel that it's appropriate to talk about police behavior across the globe as part of that discussion, but it's also not accurate to act like I was suggesting "Police in Argentina are all paragons of virtue." That's a bit of a stretch and leaves me not knowing how to reply because it seems like such a far fetched interpretation of my remarks.

I was actually homeless in downtown San Diego for six months and in San Diego county for more than two years. I have first-hand experience with engaging with police while homeless in San Diego. My above anecdote comes from a police encounter that occurred while I was homeless and camped in San Diego county. So I think it's directly pertinent to the discussion here.

I've never been to Argentina. I wouldn't presume to say much, if anything, about policing there.