That's a very interesting and moving article. I'm not sure I agree with the author's strict dichotomy between sheep and sheepdogs: I suspect there are a lot of us who choose not to be warriors, but who will rise to the occasion when needed.
I'm also not so sure that dislike for police officers stems solely from their "looking like the wolf," as the author writes:
"The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, can not and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheep dog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours."
Most people don't dislike police officers by nature. Little kids tend to admire cops and to trust them implicitly. Loving the protector is instinctive, and for the protector to lose the love of those protected means that something changed somewhere along the line, and it's not about something trivial like parking tickets.
Certainly some part of it comes from the cop as a representation of limitations on our personal liberty. But as the article points out, most Americans aren't inclined to break the law in such ways as to get the police involved in their lives, anyway. Most people don't murder, rape, steal, and so forth, and the occasional parking ticket isn't enough to cause a shift from the child's wide-eyed worship to the outright disdain many grown-up people have for police officers.
Rather, I think that the dislike begins with the bad acts of the small minority of officers who violate the author's stated rules for sheepdogs and their masters --
"Any sheep dog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed" -- but is energized by the well-deserved reputation of some police departments to cover up or justify police misconduct.
In other words, if more police departments actually took acts of police misconduct seriously, I think the public opinion of police in general would be better. The failure of many departments to police the police is what causes anger at a particular officer for his or her misdeeds, to mushroom into disdain for police in general.
Another problem is that cops are notoriously clannish. Most of them rarely talk to the rest of us except when they have to. How often do you see
one cop in a diner having breakfast in the morning before work, just shooting the breeze with the rest of us? You may see two or more, talking only to each other, but rarely do police officers want to associate with civilians except in the line of duty.
That's a bad thing for their public image because by nature, people tend to dislike and be suspicious of gangs. It doesn't matter very much whether they're wearing gang colors or police uniforms. They're viewed with suspicion. I think that's just human nature.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I admire and respect police, and my experiences with them have been positive. That doesn't mean I think they're perfect, nor that we necessarily need as many police officers as we have, nor that the laws they are sworn to enforce necessarily make any sense. But the police don't write the laws.
I also believe that bad acts by the police are the exception, rather than the rule; and I understand the dismay cops must feel when a community judges all of them by the over-publicized bad acts of a few. But realistically speaking, when departments cover up, minimize, or attempt to justify these bad acts; and when police themselves live in a gang subculture that avoids non-essential contact with civilians, is the public response all that surprising?
-Rich
