>I am totally with you on that. This is a violent and armed society -
>and this makes police work extremely difficult. When I was at SJSU one
>of my classmates was a Black cop - a middle age liberal guy taking
>sociology classes to improve his chances for a promotion - hardly a
>scumbag that the macho wannabe gangstas on this list love to describe.
>We had a few lively discussion of police brutality as the interest in
>the subject was fed by a documentary aired on public television.
It's wrong to focus on the personal characteristics of cops, esp for historical materialists. The job is what makes them the way they are in every way, and it probably attracts a certain kind of personality in the first place. It's a socially approved way of being violent ("just as every cop is a criminal," as the man sang). They're constantly thrust into dangerous and ugly circumstances. Years ago, I saw a cop - a high-up one, in a suit - on the Ted Koppel show, who said something like, "We're expected to solve social problems. We do society's dirty work." In a society like ours, which mass produces poverty and violence, it's not surprising that cops are quick to shoot.
Doug