I do have an anti-police bias. 100%. I'm glad you picked up on it 'cause I wasn't trying to hide it. I'm proud to proclaim it and I have no problems telling people that the police are not our friends and we shouldn't treat them as if they are. The police are agents of the state whose job is to enforce the status quo. They work hand-in-hand with the prosecution (which is inherently political in nature) to do this. I live in an area where that status quo... is not so great for a lot of people (just for reference: that neighborhood where Michael Brown was shot? A stone's throw away from me). No, I'm not going to cheer the people whose job is to defend that status quo.
The police operate on a presumption of guilt, so I'm going to do likewise and presume their own guilt. I do look down at the police and I do live my life with no use for them. Staying away from the police has definitely been the better course of action than engaging with them, in my experience and in the experience of many people I know. On the other hand, I do know what that officer is like through his words and actions. Cops make a judgment off of somebody based on how you interpret what they do or say, and proceed from there with a presumption of guilt. That's what you do, so that's what I'm going to do to you. There's a certain "personality profile" that fits a lot of people who become cops. You like to profile people, so people are going to profile you. Aaron Dean fit my profile of the "typical cop," as did the guy on the show. Is that limited to my experience? Yeah. So what's my experience? Well, let's go down the list...
I know a guy who had a run-in with the local police when he was 16. Why? Because he got into a fight with a kid who was an officer's brother. They've been harassing him ever since, twenty-plus years, for something that happened in high school. Every chance they get, they pull him over and find some reason to give him a ticket. When his truck was stolen, they basically just said, "Too bad," and left it at that. Another guy I know gets harassed by his local police essentially because the mayor and the city attorney tell them to. This guy's a pretty vocal critic of the mayor, and oddly enough, whenever he raises a stink about something, he somehow magically finds himself getting pulled over by a cop for one reason or another. I know another dude who was in prison for three years for some bogus white-collar crime and another guy who was in prison for five years for a sexual crime he didn't commit. I also know people whose family members have been shot and killed by police (maybe justifiable, maybe not--certainly the family members didn't think so), and I myself was frequently harassed by police (thankfully never arrested) in my younger days (during college and shortly thereafter) because I "fit the profile" of a potential troublemaker--I kept to myself, I was quiet, I was a social outcast, and above all, I was ugly. I was a big guy with a fairly mean-looking face and I often looked like I was brooding. In school I was drawn to the "dark" elements and frequently wrote essays, plays, stories, or poems (I was an English major) that examined the dark side of human nature. I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was 15 and I was not shy about admitting that. People always assumed that I was up to no good. I tended to make people, especially women, uncomfortable simply by being alive. Even to this day people tend to be scared of me when they first meet or even see me. We've all seen visible examples in the last year of how white women weaponize their womanhood by calling the police on bad (i.e., black) guys. I could've told you about this basic phenomenon from personal experience 20 years ago.
That's not even getting into stuff like quotas, or the police being used as a collection agency, or the "good ol' boys" culture which pervades a lot of small-town police forces.
I tend to hang out with the lower-crust of society. Remember, the police exist to defend the status quo, which ultimately involves keeping the wealth in place (that's actually literally the reason why the institution of the police force was created in the first place). Although I actually come from a middle-class white neighborhood, that's not where I fit in. This kind of stuff happens all the time in the places where I hang out. Does it happen often in the lovely suburbs where all the white women who hold the real political power in this country live? Probably not as much, I'd assume.
You can stick your head in the sand and pretend stuff like this doesn't happen, but it does, and it goes a long way towards forming people's opinions of the police. When the police make mistakes, it can be world-ending for the people they victimize. Even if it doesn't end in death or false imprisonment, it can end in lifelong social stigma and ostracization.
And of course I don't think the jury's going to convict him.
Again, the question: would you give anyone other than an officer the benefit of the doubt that you're giving Aaron Dean?
