andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> They
> freaked out, called in cops from all over the city,
> bottled us up on Chicago Ave (keeping us away from
> Michigan Ave., the main shopping drag), and starting
> busting people (500-800 of them) and heads.
Police work _attracts_ a variety of applicants -- _some_ of whom are attracted to the work because they enjoy being brutal. (Quite a few are attracted through an honest belief that they can "do good things" for people as cops. The first of these two classes are, perhaps, more prone to stick it out and to achieve at least some rank in a department.
In many cities, at least part of a department's duties come to resemble those of an army of occupation in hostile territory. Such work (regardless of the initial motives and intentions of those involved) is inherently brutalizing.
Quite a few of the people they deal with _are_ brutes themselves, establishing the basis for an escalating round of mutual brutalization.
Police have an extremely high divorce rate, perhaps indicative both of the tensions within the work _and_ of the initial or developed personalities of the cops.
Like marines, cops are to some extent anyhow _taught_ to see themselves as as a morally superior elite within a corrupt culture.
And so on.
Teachers, social workers, etc. can _choose_ to be pricks (i.e., scabs); cops very nearly by professional obligation are scabs. Everyone ought there is the Enemy and it just isn't fair & I say fuck 'em (and club 'em).
Carrol