For the time being, it would seem that the vast majority of encounters with police in the United States is entirely uneventful: traffic tickets, a stern talking

For the time being, it would seem that the vast majority of encounters with police in the United States is entirely uneventful: traffic tickets, a stern talking to, etc. Naturally, every police encounter where a gun is not drawn/no one's rights are apparently violated will never make the news. It's the exceptions that make headlines, and it's the internet that has empowered those exceptions to be made public and spread much farther and wider than they ever had even 10 years ago (what with everybody and their mother and grandmother on Facebook these days). This is perhaps one upside of the true eternal September that we've entered (much more so than the advent of AOL back in the day). This is not to say that there isn't a problem. The fact that stories like these have popped up in basically every state in the US suggests that there is indeed a culture that has developed amongst law enforcement/government that facts and science and reason play second fiddle to a number of other factors (not to mention the "thin blue line"). I do believe that most cops in the US act in the public interest to the best of their knowledge/ability; the problem is that it's most and not all, and the minority with perhaps ulterior motives now has access to a great deal of surplus military equipment manufactured for various recent US military operations (and provided to local law enforcement at tremendous discounts), and laws that allow them to behave in ways that they should not be allowed to behave.