Suburban white people tend to think criticisms of cops are either suicidal liberalism or libertarian idealism. The reason is suburban white people tend to have a vastly different experience with the cops than downscale whites and minorities. That’s a changing reality as more and more suburbanites have their dogs shot by storm troopers raiding the wrong house, but there’s always a lag in these things.

The Conventional Right tends to side with the cops, but the libertarian insurgency may be changing that a little. The Ferguson shooting was remarkable not in how the Left cynically tried to exploit it, but in how many on the Right jumped to criticize the warrior cop stuff. The thing is, the Right really should not be so quick to side with the cops, as  cops and their unions are constantly agitating for more money, less work, more benefits, more protections, etc.

The worst aspect of it is the cops work hard to avoid accountability. This story in 538 is a good example of how the cops undermine their credibility.

Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.

Not counting how often cops shoot people is inexcusable. Forty years ago every round fired from a state issued firearm was logged. It was standard operating procedure for police departments to have cops check their firearms in at the station when their shift was over each day. A cop discharging his firearm could expect to fill out a lot of reports and answer a lot of questions. Today, when we have much better tools for documenting this stuff, we do less of it. The ATF, of all people, routinely lose their own service weapons.

Like so much of what haunts our age, the cop problem is not staying in the ghetto. The news has a stories every day about cops doing something nuts in the suburbs. Whether or not that will change the politics of the issue is a mystery to me. My sense is it will not as the suburbs are now littered with traffic cameras and soon will have drones buzzing around. Having a fat mental defect pushing around soccer moms in the burbs is probably going to face little resistance.