National Review: The Right is deluding itself about law enforcement

Kevin Williamson over at National Review has an article that asks a lot of good questions about how conservatives seem to have a double-standard when it comes to government corruption when it comes to the police:

Is it really so difficult to believe that there is widespread wrongdoing, and widespread lying about it, among U.S. law-enforcement agencies, particularly those in big, Democrat-run cities infamous for the corruption of their other municipal institutions? Why do conservatives find it so plausible — obvious, even — that the IRS and the EPA and the Atlanta public schools are corrupt and self-serving, but somehow believe that the Baltimore police department isn’t?

Take for example this chilling paragraph:

In Fairview, Tenn., a new police detective was just fired after responding to a prostitution ad. An NYPD officer was awarded $15 million in damages for being kidnapped and beaten inside his own home by other NYPD officers with a score to settle. Honolulu announced that in 2015 it fired a record number of officers for misconduct. A cop in Memphis is being charged with “official oppression” — though not rape — for using his position to pressure a woman into performing a sex act on him while he was on duty. Pittsburgh’s DA is refiling criminal charges against a police officer for assaulting a man while moonlighting as a security officer. A New Orleans police officer saw his 17-year sentence reduced for his conviction in burning the body of a man improperly shot by another New Orleans police officer. Elsewhere in Louisiana, authorities have settled upon “suicide” as the explanation for the death of a man in police custody who somehow managed to shoot himself in the chest while his hands were handcuffed behind his back in the back of a police cruiser.

These things will happen, you say. And that’s true: But all these things happened last Friday.

Williamson goes on to conclude:

We do have to deal with the facts of the case. And those facts suggest that our police departments have the same problems as our other government agencies, exacerbated by the fact that police are, inevitably, in the business of violence. It isn’t a few scattered misdeeds when it’s the NYPD, the LAPD, the Baltimore PD, the Los Angeles sheriff’s department, and more. That’s not a few bad apples — that’s the orchard. And it needs pruning.