The problem with the police is they have become absolutist in protecting themselves.
Rather than living up to their oath to protect and serve the public, they seem to care only about saving themselves.
The position of police officer, like being a soldier, requires personal sacrifice and part of that sacrifice is putting your own personal safety at risk to protect the community. What I think has happened to police departments across the country is an unguided move towards ensuring the personal safety of the officer at ANY cost. These kind of shifts are incremental and taken one step at a time don't appear to be as malevolent as they eventually become.
Now we have police forces which possess little accountability to the citizens with the sole interest in keeping officers alive. When all the departments care about is the lives of their officers, and I really truly mean that is all they care about, there can be no weight given to the lives of others. At the first sign of protest, when there might be just an inkling of physical threat, officers can kill you. Not just beat you or taser you or throw flash bangs in your face. They can snatch the life out of you.
They justify this by saying their own lives are at risk. But the truth is their lives are always at risk on some level because of the nature of their work. This demands a different set of justifications for self-defense than the average citizen. It requires a greater threshold for what constitutes a threat worthy of lethal response.
What we have now is exactly the opposite. Not only is the threshold not higher for officers, it is much, much lower than what exists for the average citizen precisely because the priority of officers and their departments is self-preservation.
We, the citizens, have become a monstrous enemy of the police. At every turn, with every movement of our bodies, we constitute a "real and present" threat to every officer. Every time we reach into our pockets, we're grabbing a gun. Every time we stand up, we're taking a fighting stance. Every time we dare give an officer a look of contempt, we're stepping out from our subordinate role. And God help you if you're a minority because the already low threshold bottoms out to the point where simply breathing means you're about to kill.
In this alternative reality where officers exist, one which is constructed around pathological levels of paranoia, everyone else is expendable.
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And...
Two policemen, Gary Roteman and Arthur Cesare, stayed outside, while the third, Paul Halley, stood in front of the apartment building. Serpico climbed up the fire escape, entered by the fire escape door, went downstairs, listened for the password, then followed two suspects outside.[7]
The police arrested the young suspects, and found one had two bags of heroin. Halley stayed with the suspects, and Roteman told Serpico (who spoke Spanish), to make a fake purchase attempt to get the drug dealers to open the door. The police went to the third-floor landing. Serpico knocked on the door, keeping his hand on his 9mm Browning Hi-Power. The door opened a few inches, just far enough to wedge his body in. Serpico called for help, but his fellow officers ignored him.[7]
Serpico was then shot in the face with a .22 LR pistol. The bullet struck just below the eye and lodged at the top of his jaw. He fell to the floor, and began to bleed profusely. His police colleagues refused to make a "10-13", a dispatch to police headquarters indicating that an officer has been shot.[7] An elderly man who lived in the next apartment called the emergency services and reported that a man had been shot. The stranger stayed with Serpico.[7] A police car arrived. Unaware that Serpico was one of them, the officers took him to Greenpoint Hospital.
The bullet had severed an auditory nerve, leaving him deaf in one ear, and he has suffered chronic pain from bullet fragments lodged in his brain. He was visited the day after the shooting by Mayor John V. Lindsay and Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, and the police department harassed him with hourly bed checks. He survived and testified before the Knapp Commission.
The circumstances surrounding Serpico's shooting quickly came into question. Serpico, who was armed during the drug raid, had been shot only after briefly turning away from the suspect when he realized that the two officers who had accompanied him to the scene were not following him into the apartment, raising the question whether Serpico had actually been brought to the apartment by his colleagues to be murdered.
On May 3, 1971, New York Metro Magazine published an article about Serpico titled "Portrait of an Honest Cop". On May 10, 1971, Serpico testified at the departmental trial of an NYPD lieutenant who was accused of taking bribes from gamblers.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico
