Posted on r/GlobalTalk: [Question] What are the police like in your country?
If you’ve been following recent events in the US (disclaimer: I’m not an American), police brutality is a big, controversial topic over there, leading to protests and calls to defund the police and such, popularizing the phrase ACAB (meaning “all cops are bastards”)
In my own country (the Philippines), cops don’t have a very good reputation either; they are often seen as corrupt extortionists and some may be complicit in extrajudicial killings in Duterte’s drug war; recently they have done some bad moves such as attempting to interfere with community pantries that popped up to help the poor during the pandemic.
So that left me wondering what police are like in other countries. Are there countries where the police have a generally good reputation (maybe my country or the US can learn something from those places)? Or are they generally just tools for enforcing the (often unequal) status quo?