>The huge number of officers that surrounded Derek Chauvin's house, for example.
Yes, this sort of thing is of course very troubling. But this isn't anything we don't already know: many cops will support each other almost no matter what. If you try to think from the perspective of being an officer in a police department for a moment, you can see how it becomes like any other sort of politics. America does something shitty; some other country criticizes it; lots of Americans rise to America's defense. Democrats/Republicans do something shitty; Democrats/Republicans come to the defense of their team.
People with strong group identities can be very biased and have trouble attributing bad intentions or actions to their side. Their judgment is completely clouded, and they often literally will not see or accept the same facts. (This is very evident in current politics.) Many of those cops may have genuinely and truly believed that Chauvin was not responsible for George Floyd's death, for example. (Rather than holding some malicious belief like "that black guy deserved to be killed by him".)
That doesn't defend their actions or their incorrect or shitty beliefs, but it shows how the police are probably just like a country or political party or whatever. Humans are often pretty useless when it comes to neutrally and impartially evaluating their own side/tribe. And if rumors of some police departments trying to filter out applicants who have too high of IQs are true... that would exacerbate that issue, probably. And there's probably an overrepresentation of tribalistic personality types, and people working together in risky situations often develop tighter bonds, etc.
Also, it's possible some of those cops did think Chauvin was in the wrong and deserves to be fired, convicted, and imprisoned, but were there just to prevent a mob from going to his house and killing him, and possibly were ordered to go there.
And in terms of empiricism: this is still anecdotes, not really data. Even if you assume every one of those cops is an irredeemable shitbag (which I think is highly possible; it's not really provable or disprovable, though), this is 20 - 50 cops or something. Even if for the sake of argument we say it's 100 cops in front of his house, that number is tiny compared to the number of all LEOs in the country. It doesn't necessarily give you an accurate assessment of the average police officer in every town in every state.
>We actually know that the US ranks as high as many 3rd world countries when looking at the murder of black people by police. Even the murder of white people is staggeringly high compared to other western countries. The statistics are there.
Yes, this is true. I utterly agree that the situation is completely fucked. It's just a matter of, I guess, how one should think about individual LEOs at the scale of the nation. I'm not saying this is true and have no idea if it's true or what the real numbers could be, but hypothetically if it were the case that most PDs had like 10% terrible cops and 90% good cops, it might be possible that that could be enough to cause these horrible national policing statistics. Or perhaps the same could be also true if there were some PDs with like 80% terrible cops but most PDs had under 10%, or something like that.
>I agree. That's actually what we all want. And that's not happening now.
Yes, for sure. I completely support the protests and protesters. I just think people shouldn't necessarily vilify an individual law enforcement officer without additional supporting evidence about that person, basically.