The relative restraint exercised in war zones by US troops is more impressive than that of cops dealing with fellow civilians in their own country.

Some cops are straight up tribal, arrogant sociopaths who feel like their job makes them our masters rather than our servants. Get a bunch of these people together and they will fortify each other's sociopathy, and protect each other. Like a gang. Cops are members of a gang. They selected being a police officer as a job because they were shitheads as children and wanted authority. When they got that authority, it instantly got to their head and in their mind validated their inflated sense of their own importance that they'd had their whole lives. So when they're dealing with civilians, they see them as beneath them, as their prey basically. Many cops are embryonic fascists who, if they were born in Nazi Germany, would have been the first volunteer to give up their neighbors for the concentration camps. If they were Soviets, they'd be the type of person to send their neighbors to the gulag for questioning authority.

Now, with that said, there are obviously people out there that want to be cops because they are motivated to serve their communities. But cops are union members, and again, they operate like a gang, and any cop with a conscience who would defend a civilian instead of a fellow cop or would blow the whistle, would be considered a "scab". And since police work is higher stakes than most union labor, and involves guns, drugs, money and crime, both by civilians and by cops themselves, being a scab in the eyes of your fellow police officers is a much more dangerous proposition.

The police as an institution, across the country, are rotten to the core because they have way too much power and no oversight for the most part. Police work, when done correctly, is super important. Many police officers do great jobs with integrity and good will towards others. But the system as it exists now allows absolute maniacs to do maniac shit with impunity and victimize innocent people.

I do not commit crimes of any kind. I'm a law-abiding citizen and I'm very kind to people. But I see cops as a menace and many times through out my life I've met cops who scare the hell out of me. They don't operate under the same set of rules that others do. I have far more faith in the average person on the street to be a good person motivated by a morally sound conscience than I do a police officer. I feel far safer around armed civilians than I do around police officers. Because we're peers. Cops do not see us as their peers, they see us as their enemy, and their job is about fighting an enemy. And cops will react more aggressively to any disrespect than anyone else.