Police are tasked with maintaining law and order. Laws are equal for all people. Order is a set of subjective social rules that keeps everything in its "corre

Police are tasked with maintaining law and order. Laws are equal for all people. Order is a set of subjective social rules that keeps everything in its "correct" place. Maintaining order often requires not enforcing the law equally. This is the essential moral difficulty of the police. If you have people who appear poor in a rich neighborhood, they are highly likely to attract law enforcement attention at a minimum. Not because they've broken the law, but because they are out of place and "disorderly". We really really like order, by the way. You can't just do away with the maintenance of order, although a strong argument could be made that we should not enforce it via state-licensed violence.