RE: The 5th Amendment and You
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I can count on one hand how often I met the police. And when I did, it was in my younger years within traffic. They were usually nice and helpful in those times and think many of them are still. One day I was driving to visit my mom and had already mastered over hundred kilometers when my second back light went off. I did not notice, of course, until a police car stopped me. They asked if I knew about the back lights and I said "No". They wanted to know where I was heading and I told them I have only 20 kilometers left to my destination. They decided to give me an escort and drove behind me until I got home. Even though they easily could have told me to park the car and see myself how to solve the problem, they did not. In Germany, you usually were not lectured by cops, rarely was implications of "how dare you to brake the law" but rather a cool attitude towards speeding or driving without belt and just shrug shoulders on both sides (exceptions confirmed that rule). Sometimes I was even unfriendly to them, but they kept being polite to me. Dunno, maybe because I was a young woman.
In the States my experiences with cops were quite different. They seemed way more scary than our cops and also liked to lecture when stopping our car. How it is nowadays here or there, I cannot really tell.
Where police de-escalate they do a good job. Where there are bad apples amongst them, they increase violence and high emotions. Public gatherings are a different matter, though.
Police face an insoluble dichotomy. Where public safety, such as your lights breaking, is best facilitated by the service you received, an entirely separate system and training are required, while investigating crimes is something else completely. Since criminals inevitably seek to control law enforcement, for obvious reasons, law enforcement in the USA has suffered far longer infiltration by criminal gangs than has Germany, because modern Germany and it's institutions is so much younger than the US states.
The only solution to this dilemma I can see is the elimination of institutional power that is beginning as the decentralization of the means of production eliminates the advantages of centralization by eliminating parasitic losses of wealth endemic to centralized production.
You raise something very important, thank you. Well said. When public safety is at risk, it is often not because ordinary citizens deliberately and maliciously endanger it. The service the police provided in my case was the best option of all. They helped instead of aggravating. It was such a good experience because they did not make me feel like a criminal and because they solved the problem in the most elegant way.
When people don't treat each other like criminals, a lot is gained.
The dichotomy for a sincere police officer to turn against his fellow citizens and treat and prosecute them like criminals is one I'm sure many have found themselves in over the years.
How the decomposition of moral principles can occur is not easy to answer. But I think it has to do with the fact that modern people are brought up to be immature in matters of conscience, or that we people in modern societies do not believe in anything that gives us an inner compass.
Finding spiritual orientation can be a task that serves as a counterpart to what we find insoluble in the world.