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And thus, opens a dialog.

I can only judge the police on a person by person basis when they act independently.

Myself, I respect the police, and I obey and cooperate with them as required.
I've never done anything to necessitate any negative behaviour from them, so from experience, I have only good things to say about them. Though, I must admit, I've encountered some that were amazingly nice, and also some that were absolutely on a power trip.

BUT I know of three scenarios which Make them less than desirable.

1). The term Police should be synonymous with Peace (Peace officer). They are a team created to keep people safe. They uphold laws. Laws are meant to keep people safe.
But when they are used for other things, like aggressively engaging groups of protestors, they often behave against the people they have sworn to protect in insite more violent behaviours just so they can create arrests.

2). Police are given quotas. This is inherently corrupt. It's only purpose is to extort monies from the public and creates tensions between them and the people they are supposed to be helping.
It serves no purpose and forces even the good police to commit crimes against the people just so they can keep their jobs. These quotas are often passed down from ranking officers or higher up in the system.
This includes everything from Stop-and-frisk policies, to Speeding-infractions, to Roadside-vehicle-searches. It gives police a legal excuse to badger, bully, extort and abuse the people.

3). There are police not cut out for the job, and we've seen this in video time and again. The officer labelled as the "Hot Head". They over react, insight conflict, and use their position to create problems where none exist.
I can only attest to this example from what I see in the news. Being from Canada, we have different laws than the US, and I see this abuse most often in news from the US.
This type of officer either joined the system so they could be above the law, or has been tarnished and gone bitter along the way. They need to be weeded out and removed from duty.

All this being siad, the Police is an exclusive club. They are a close knit group of members which stand up and support each other. This could be a good thing. they need to rely on each other, especially in times of life or death.
Unfortunately, they also stand up for each other in times where they shouldn't. They protect the wrong doers in the system, cover up irregularities and just basically lie to cover up those officers breaking the law.
It's a system of "not covering up, means you can't trust others to come to your aid."

So, yes, we need the police. We like the police.
But if they don't rethink the way they operate, they only increase the gap between helping ind hindering the people. On the current course, they are forcing a large wedge between themselves and the people that are paying their pay check to keep them safe.
If you can't trust the police, they are no longer the police -- just thugs.

The good police need to stand up against the police that are abusing the system and making their job harder on a daily basis. Fix the system, fix the interaction, and then it will fix the work environment police work in.

*promote lanterns first post

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, September 15th, 2014 7:01am PDT - promote requested by enoch.

Sympathy-grab: fail.
The dialogue has been open for decades, it's just more of a monologue from the public.

This video seemed to be searching for sympathy and understanding for the poor abusive cops. Of course it makes a claim that they all took the job altruistically to help people but dealing with the public made them all turn into violent criminal dickheads that hate all non-cops. (not) If that were the case, why do other professions with more, worse contact with the public and no authority, training, equipment, or 'legal rights' (or more often the ability to get away with illegal inappropriate activity) to do anything about it not have similar instances of outrageous inappropriate violent conduct...or the rest of their profession creating a (pick your color) wall around them to protect the 'bad apples' in the profession rather than get rid of them. If 'unpleasant contact' with the public was an excuse for poor behavior, why do we not have people attacked at the DMV daily?
I have 2 things to say about that. First, if some unpleasant contact is going to make you paint all the public in the same 'criminal/opponent' light, you are not the right kind of person to be a cop. Second, if unpleasant contact IS making you feel the public is against you, CREATE some POSITIVE contact with the public. As the 'authority', it's up to YOU to create and control the tenor of your contacts and conduct. (you yourself, @lantern53 have repeatedly said it comes from 'above', like the chief) That goes for each contact, the 'authority' is in control, and is responsible for the tone of the contact.

Cops don't have the worst position dealing with the public on average (but on rare occasions may have the worst dealings). Cops don't have the most dangerous job by a long shot. The thing that most separates cops from other professions is their ability to get away with their illegal bad behaviors. That should change, a non-police group (like a grand jury) should investigate each and every use of force and prosecute any that are even questionable (if you did nothing wrong, fight it in court, your words, right? What's good for the goose....). That would stop most use of force (as it no longer lets them hide it from prosecution, and even legal force would no longer be a 'time saver' since it would put them under time wasting suspicion at least, indictment at best).

I think the video is much fairer than the other video since it shows cops in bad situations and good situations. It is certainly not an apologia for LEOs.

I see the video as a placard or masthead to give us a jumping off point to discussion. The video is mainly fluff and bias with no real context or direction. What it is doing is stating the questions we've been discussing for quite a while now.

"Are the Police getting out of hand?"
"Is this position of power being miss-used?"
"Is there a reason for this misuse?"
"Who is to blame"
"is more police education needed or required?"
"Should there be better counseling support for Police?"
...and so on...

I didn't think it had any direction either.

Kinda like a cop on patrol.

@newt boy: Out of curiosity, what jobs (outside of the military) are more dangerous than being a cop? There are certainly hazardous jobs out there, like repairing electric lines, but those are mostly predictable. With sufficient preparation and training, risks can be calculated and minimized. Being a cop, on the other hand, forces you to deal with completely unpredictable situations. A routine traffic stop can be a harmless affair or it can end with you being shot or stabbed to death. Cops bear the burden of risk when dealing with the public. Civilians can generally assume that cops aren't going to try to kill them. Cops can't make that same assumption. Their position of authority and responsibility to enforce the law puts them in an inherently antagonistic position. People don't like being told what to do and they definitely don't like being punished for not doing it. It's no surprise then that cops tend to be wary and defensive when doing their job. Some cops (the minority) simply take this too far and try to neutralize perceived threats before they become actual threats.

The ideal solution is to have all cops wear cameras while on duty. That way, there's objective footage of all their interactions, violent or otherwise. If Darren Wilson had been wearing a camera, the whole Brown debacle could have been avoided or at least minimized.

Moving this video to lantern53's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Crab fisherman, among dozens and dozens of others. Being a cop is less dangerous than many many jobs not considered 'dangerous', but because cops complain and whine so much, most people would believe being a cop is the most dangerous job out there. Statistics say it's no where close.
EDIT:The 10 Deadliest Jobs:
1. Logging workers
2. Fishers and related fishing workers
3. Aircraft pilot and flight engineers
4. Roofers
5. Structural iron and steel workers
6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors
7. Electrical power-line installers and repairers
8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers
9. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers
10. Construction laborers
(notice anything missing there?)

There are more unpredictable dangerous situations to be dealt with in MANY other professions. It's not a lack of preparation that kills crab fishermen, it's the unpredictability of the ocean. It MAY be true (can't find statistics) that cops are more likely to be attacked by a human than most other professions, that doesn't make it more dangerous or unpredictable than other unavoidable, unpredictable dangers in other jobs.

Far more civilians are killed by cops than cops are killed by civilians. (This means your assumption/assertion that civilians can assume cops won't kill them, but cops can assume civilians will kill them is ridiculously wrong and backwards.) Last year, 111 cops died in the line of duty, of those, only 39 were 'killed' (as in homicide, 33 by firearms), the rest were all accidental. In that time, cops intentionally killed 316 civilians (that number also does not include 'accidental' deaths). That's almost a 10-1 ratio where it's 10 times more likely that a cop will be a killer than be killed.

It is no longer a minority of cops that perceive threats everywhere and 'take things too far' before they become actual threats. If citizens did this, they go to jail. Cops should not be above the law in any way.

I agree with 'cops should be on camera 100% of the time they're being cops (which is all the time, so includes at home, if they're armed there). It may not have avoided or minimized the Brown case though, it may easily have proven he was shot at and executed as he surrendered, adding fuel to the fire.

PS dangerous and hazardous are synonyms.
PPS. It's @newtboy....one word.

The only reason this video got 7 votes is because of the title. I'll bet most people didn't even watch it. Meanwhile, true quality videos go ignored. Therefore, videosift is rather moot.