I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately. Are cops ever found guilty of the violence they commit / inspire / impose? We of course have a word for this patterned behavior, "police brutality," but it seems to me that we need a new word for the spectacle of court cases against cops that inevitably find them not guilty for whatever crime they committed -- especially murder.

Now perhaps if they had embezzled some money they would be in some trouble, but the idea that they would use their authority to get away with murder -- part of the job, folks. I mean the logic is this: they're protecting the people, and sometimes in doing so they have to make split-second decisions in dangerous, high-stress situations that sometimes end up with innocent people being killed. This doesn't make them at fault, per se. It just comes with the territory.

But we know that this is bullshit. We see videos -- like this one of the police at UCLA repeatedly tasering a non-violent student -- of situations where it wasn't a split-second decision. There are many, many instances of calculated, drawn-out police brutality in which it does not seem clear that any given cop was faced with a hairline choice to fire or be fired upon. There's something else much more perverse going on here. It's a freakish combination of the kind of thing described in the Milgrim Experiments (in which participants repeatedly were complacent in their apparent violence against another participant) and a kind of masculinist, militarized police culture (obviously racism is also a *huge* component here as well).

We need a new word to describe this pattern of cases in which there's always a "thorough investigation" followed by a trial in which the dependents are always acquitted. The glove never fits. It's never their fault. They're just doing their job. It's morally repugnant.