Cop-worshipers often acknowledge that there are a few bad cops, just like there are a few bad doctors, construction workers, car salesmen, barbers, etc. I’ve never thought to ask what percentage they would admit are bad apples, but I’m going to guess they’d admit 1% of cops are bad.

That would mean that potentially 1% of citizen contacts could be bad. But even then, it’s not like that 1 cop in 100 goes through his day having only bad interactions. A bad cop can give a lot of unjust, illegal orders, and if people just do what he says, he gets his power trip, and nothing ever comes of that interaction. I would guess that happens a lot, and a bad cop could go a long time without really running into someone that causes him to flip out and show his true colors.

Let’s say a bad cop has one bad interaction every 2 years, meaning a lawsuit against him is filed or he gets some sort of reprimand in his file. Let’s say the average cop has 2 citizen contacts per day (to be conservative). There are 250 working days per year (52 weeks per year minus two weeks vacation). That would be 250 x 2 interactions per year, or 500. We’re assuming he can go two years without an incident, which would be  1 incident every 1000 contacts (as an estimate).

Working as a pair, it would only be 1 in 10,000 pairs of cops that are bad (.01²). Let’s assume a pair of cops still averages 2 citizen contacts per day. Out of these 10,000 pairs of cops, there is one bad pair. These 10,000 pairs have 2 contacts per day and work 250 days per year. They’re having 5 million contacts per year. And the bad pair still has an incident once every 2 years. So that means, 1 in 10 million contacts with bad pairs would have an issue arise.

This video says there are 53 million citizen contacts per year in this country. That means there ought to be about 5.3 issues per year with bad pairs of cops.

I realize I’ve made a lot of estimates and assumptions, but the problem is that I’ve posted many, many videos on this blog of bad pairs of cops, bad trios and more. Here are a couple more.

This guy was just videotaping, and 3 cops beat him, pepper sprayed him and tried to smash his phone. He’s suing them, and named them in the lawsuit. The odds of having 3 bad cops teamed up would be 1 in a million (.01³). That’s not even considering all the other cops that were present who didn’t lift a finger.

The guy in the video below was clearly not being confrontational, yet ended up having to be taken to the hospital, because a psycho nutjob cop came along. If this one guy was in the bottom 1% of cops and all the rest are good, why didn’t they stop this guy from abusing the citizen? There were at least two additional cops that showed up while the bad cop was abusing this guy. Not only that, but the Arlington PD said the force was justified in this case. Did you read that? Higher-up cops said the psycho nutjob did nothing wrong. Clearly, believing only 1% of cops are bad apples is preposterous.

Let’s say 2 higher-up cops reviewed this incident, and said the cop behaved the way a cop ought to behave. What are the odds that a psycho nutjob like this is cleared of any wrongdoing? Let’s say it’s 25% of the time. (75% of such incidents lead to consequences) That would mean that 63% of cops are also psycho nutjobs (.63³ = .25). 63% of cops being bad apples isn’t a few bad apples.

Even if you wanted to say that the odds of this psycho nutjob’s behavior being approved is 1%. (That is you think 99% of cops behaving like this guy face consequences, and I’d say you’re in lala land). You’re still saying that 22% of cops are bad. One out of five isn’t just a few bad apples. (Verify this for yourself by punching this into your calculator: .22 x .22 x .22. You’ll get about 1%.)

And I’ve shown an incident in the past where 50 or so cops abused people, and such incidents happened repeatedly in that era, and are still common today in different contexts. At that point, you’d have to admit that either the vast majority are bad, or there is some psychological thing that causes decent people to behave badly in big groups or that the whole system is broken. I don’t really care what the answer is, but it’s just clear to me that we should abolish the police.