Interesting discussion, from both sides.
As a couple of posters have pointed out, there are a few posting here who clearly have no love for cops, but the forum proscriptions prevent them from being too obvious about it. With a least a couple of them, that opinion has been obvious from past posts, so no surprises there.
What any of us writes tells much about who we are. I plead guilty to that.
I have been around this since my earliest days in LE, and it has never deterred me from sticking with my own principles. It never caused me to question the career I had chosen.
I started going up the promotional ladder early on. I also started teaching early on. In each of those I always had to be a role model.
Over my years of teaching many of my students went into LE and had successful careers, and they have told me that it was my example that caused them to go on to those successful LE careers. We now live about 450 miles from where I worked. Despite that distance, one night we were dining in a restaurant in Redding, CA when an individual came over to our table and introduced himself. He was a recently retired RPD officer, but he knew me. He had taken my AJ courses years (decades) before at the local college where we used to live. He recognized me even after all these years. He came over to thank me for being that role model and inspiring him to become an LEO. After a few years in LE he had lateralled to RPD because of the outdoor activities, finished his successful career, and retired.
Another such instance happened around Christmas 2022. We were down where I used to work staying with family. Some of us had gone out to dinner in an excellent seafood restaurant in a very popular area. As soon as I had finished my meal, I came outside ahead of the others to take some night photographs. As soon as I exited into a very crowded area someone called out my name starting with my title, and rushed over. Turns out he had been one of my AJ students, who had just retired from his career as a USPS Inspector. It was the same thing as above. I had influenced him to pursue a career in LE. He had never forgotten and immediately recognized me. He introduced me to his family, told them this was how it had all started and took a selphie of all of us. He was very pleased, after all these years, to be able to say 'thank you'.
Besides my students (many more examples than the two I cited) I have had countless of my old cops thank me for my leadership and being there for them.
These unanticipated contacts have more meaning to me than any other elements of my career. They make it all worth it.
I relate this because this is what I can look back on.
That more than offsets the bashing, the inability to mention LE in any context without reference to bad cops they have run into or heard of, the damning with faint praise the acknowledgement that there just might be, somewhere out there, a decent LEO.
We know what we did, what we faced, who we are. No one can take that away from us.
