Borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke, and shifting the often overgenerous connotations of Hanlon's razor, I say that: "any sufficiently advanced ineptitude or ignora

Borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke, and shifting the often overgenerous connotations of Hanlon's razor, I say that: "any sufficiently advanced ineptitude or ignorance is indistinguishable from malice." The rather "Up With People" connotations conveyed by Hanlon's Razor (i.e. "do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") may be preferable to the more cynical tone of my chosen phrasing when dealing with inconsequential events. However, when effectively malicious incompetence and lack of foresight occur within societal institutions capable of sufficient influence, a perceived lack of malicious intent should not distract those affected by the offending institution from aggressively rooting out the sources of the incompetence. I would also like to make a subtle point regarding the way in which you seem to have associated the phrase "the police" with a collection of instances of "police(wo)man". As suggested by my previous paragraph, I think it is worth distinguishing between "the police" as a societal institution capable of profoundly affecting those within its sphere of influence and those individuals from which it is composed. In particular, it seems that attributing systemic problems to the individuals through whom they are expressed leads to a pair of difficulties. The first difficulty is that which you encountered, in which one hesitates to apportion any blame due to the perception that any assigned blame would correspond to an attribution of evil/malicious intent to a fellow flesh-and-blood human. The second difficulty is that pursuing solutions to a systemic capacity for sustained malicious ignorance/incompetence/ineptitude through actions targeted at the individuals through whom this capacity is expressed offers a potent example of the potential futility of treating symptoms rather than causes. Note that my view converges with (my interpretation of) yours in the sense that I consider it important to avoid unnecessarily shifting blame earned by an institution onto its constituents, as this is unlikely to ameliorate systemic problems while generally producing negative consequences for those onto whom blame is shifted.