If you’re not asking as a gotcha, “good police” stories are a dime a dozen. You can routinely catch them on the evening news, and they frequently rise to national news as well.

Practically no other profession gets such exceedingly positive and prolific press for doing the most charitable version of their job description. You never see stories like “trash collector relieves neighborhood of unwanted refuse without crushing anyone in the compactor”, even though their job is more dangerous and much less controversially beneficial to society.

The reason there’s even an appetite for “stories about good police officers” is specifically as a counterpoint to the continuous story of cops behaving badly, either by their direct action or pointed inaction, or by their collective activity to protect other cops from scrutiny when they directly do harm.

If cops want a better rep, they could be more deserving by not doing bad things and protecting other cops who do the same. If they don’t want to do that professionally (understandably! actually good cops are afraid of retaliation, or become afraid when they exercise their principles and find out what the consequences entail), they are always welcome to leave the profession.

Admittedly there should be a better support system for cops who want to change careers for these reasons. But there isn’t a lot of demand for that so

> Do you ever read stories about good police officers?

I could do 10 really nice things a day for you all week long, but if on Saturday I rape your whole family you're not going be happy with me. This isn't about keeping score, it's about making sure that things that should never happen don't, and that when things do go wrong the police are held accountable for their actions, and meaningful steps are taken to prevent situations like that from happening again. Cops don't get to save up enough "nice points" that they still get our support after they murder one of us and get away with it again, and again, and again.

Once the problems that allow the abuses by police to persist start to be addressed trust between the police and the people they've been abusing will improve, but until that happens, the "good cops" who are sitting in a barrel full of rotten apples will just have be patient with us when we're embittered and skeptical after seeing example after example, week after week, of what the "bad cops" have been doing.

I get the point that you're making: that there is a perception bias. You're absolutely right that there is. But also consider the old clique "a rotten apple spoils the barrel." The takes here would probably be a lot different if there was good evidence that these "bad apples" are being removed or adequately punished. I don't have a problem with a policy of paid leave during an investigation. Investigations need to happen and removing them would be going too far in the other direction. BUT we frequently see these people stay on their jobs, be let go and join another neighboring force, or at best be let go. That's a big issue. Yes, we should believe that police have to act quickly and make quick judgements BUT they are supposed to be trained for exactly that kind of thing. They shouldn't be held to the same standard as an average citizen because they aren't. They are a trained expert and thus should be held to a _higher_ standard. People have every right to feel like the system is corrupt, there's tons of evidence that it is. I mean just look how easy it is to become someone who has some of the most power that a normal citizen can expect. Compare that to other countries. I'd say it is one of the many issues.

We can both have a perception bias AND have the system be corrupt. I'm pretty confident that this is the situation we're on. If you want to get nuanced, let's. But comments like these are swinging too far in the opposite direction, hand waving away objectively terrible things. If it is bad, it is bad. Doesn't matter if 1% of officers or 100%, the incidents are still bad and should be dealt with accordingly.