> 99% have never fired a weapon in the line of duty. This is a misleading fixation: the police can beat, brutalize, and kill people without ever firing a gun.

> 99% have never fired a weapon in the line of duty. This is a misleading fixation: the police can beat, brutalize, and kill people without ever firing a gun. In fact, mistreatment at the hands of the police is probably overwhelmingly physical in nature. The fact that your community has sporty cops does not meaningfully change this truth. By and large, the police in the US are subject to extremely positive media portrayals. I, like millions of other Americans, grew up watching Law and Order (the good one, not SVU); the police in these shows are shown, with sparingly few exceptions, to be virtuous public servants. Such positive fictionalized portrayals have been instrumental in the public's overall opinion of policing[1], even through real-world evidence to the contrary. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230609092852/https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/197060.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230609092852/https://www.ojp.g...