The term “worship” is used here, not to mean “bowing and praying”, but to imply “they can do no wrong.” Every time there’s an article about police brutality that makes headlines, you can always find comments about how the suspect probably “had it coming”
But the truth is if you went and asked these worshippers about this specific case, or other cases I’m sure you consider egregious, a majority would say yea this is bad.
If you really think that a significant chunk of Americans actually believe something akin to “literally every police action historically and every practice is ok” then you’re totally delusional.
No one thinks that. These super general polls are terrible because they really just serve to confuse. But what’s worse is when people who should know better latch into them because it makes the other side look bad.
The fact commenters here actually think that people who generally happy with law enforcement are also in agreement with every action taken is a really bad look on them, it shows they are happy to reduce their opponents to strawmen publicly, and also that they think that sort of argument is convincing.
For example, I think we need more and better policing in general. I’m happy they exist, but obviously they can be dramatically better. There’s any number of polls that would capture me as status quo. Yet the truth is so far from that - obviously police have a ton of stupid policies, laws are flawed, abuses are rampant. It’s just my solution isn’t removing police or whatever, it’s a case by case fix for each issue.
You can be pro anything but also anti abuses within it. I could come up with a massive amount of strawmen against liberals this way and you’d rightly point out similar refutations.
As far as what I assumed about the "worshippers" comment, I didn't think it was meant to be taken literally. If nothing else that comment can be taken as an indication of how some people perceive those who politically defended the police during recent protests. It's hard for them to understand why nothing has changed.
> It’s just my solution isn’t removing police or whatever, it’s a case by case fix for each issue.
There are several systemic problems with policing in the U.S. The whole idea of "internal affairs" is the biggest, and maybe the most straight-forward to fix. Why are the police allowed to investigate themselves? That is totally inconsistent with the idea of checks-and-balances in our political systems, and should be changed. There seems to be a culture in police departments protecting bad cops, and nothing is being done to change that.
There's so many things we could be doing better, but too often all we get from our representatives are platitudes and partisanship.
