I suppose living in a small town has changed my view of cops. The cops here write tickets at a mind-numbing rate to help pay for their facilities. Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong, but our previous police chief had gotten into some serious trouble for instigating quotas in which cops had to write a certain number of tickets in a week to maintain the police force and its buildings. It isn't just my small town; many of my friends come from small towns and have experienced similar situations. In my case, our cops "created" crime and made it look as if they were upholding the law when in reality they were breaking it.
I'm certain it isn't just small towns who have quotas. Can people really go about blindly believing that policemen are "there to uphold the laws and maintain peace" and that only a small, select few are corrupt or engaged in illegal activity? That's like saying the government is mostly pure and lawful and only a few bad Congressmen or other government officials exist. The media may blow some bad apples out of proportion, but really—think about it.
I seriously doubt that the police in your area have conspired to falsify and/or plant evidence in order to create crime and subsequently punish those who didn't violate any of the law that they are accused of by the police department. That is actual a pretty bold statement to accuse these workers for committing serious felonies! How would you know the police in your area were committing these unlawful acts? How do you know that the police were using this as a way to help pay for their facilities? Do you have any articles from your local paper, ect. or is this just a rumor that was spread around your area? Additionally anecdotal evidence is hardly grounds to make a generalization given the bias on the parties involved, and is essentially a rumor when not presented along with some sort of factual evidence. How do your friends know that the police are conspiring to pin crimes on those who have not committed them?
Further, Congressmen and police officers are disparate positions, thus the example is employing a false analogy argument fallacy. As a law enforcement officer, you are trained, an employee of the state, work locally, and are hired by local police officials. Congressmen are employed by garnering the public votes, pandering to different interests groups/lobbyists/political parties and campaign against their components who pander to other powerful political groups, they have a large staff that are employed under them, they are pencil-pushers in that they are the ones that write policy, not enforce it, and they have incredible resources at their devices. These two positions are literally not even close to being remotely similar!
It's not about blindly believing all or most cops always or almost always follow the law and public policy, rather it's about not making a sweeping generalizations based on fallacies, such as claiming an entire police department as well as many other police departments and their ranks falsify evidence in order to meet quotas without demonstrating causation, and rather to fulfill a personal bias. They may boost efforts to check for offenders that do commit crimes, that is why some areas exhibit crackdowns on certain crimes that are going unpunished or if the crimes are disproportionately committed in comparison to other crimes, thus they strategically allocate more resources to investigate problem areas.
All-in-all, be careful what you say. Fabrication is what causes baseless prejudices. Please develop your opinions based off the available factual evidence rather than unsubstantiated whims and sentiments that unjustly vilify a large membership of American workers.
