The Police-Force Paradox

Blender Dumbass
October 13, 2025

👁 4

https://blenderdumbass.org/do_login : 👁 1
https://blenderdumbass.org/ : 👁 1

#police #paradox #law #freedom #humanrights

License:

Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike

In 2011, French writer and director Maïwenn Le Besco went to the police station in Paris in order to try to get some information about how the police works. The research she ended up gathering, ended up portrayed in her 2011 film Polisse about which I already wrote a review. But one thing about this movie suck with me. And if the intention of the film was to shine light on the police-work, this means that to some extend that thing that stuck with me shows a certain, very depressing truth about the world that I don't know how to process quite yet.

The film shows the police force ( of a child-protection unit ) to be utterly emotionally unstable son-of bitches. Yet throughout the movie you understand exactly why. They are trying to do what they believe to be right, which involves dealing with some utterly depressing shit ( specifically because they are a child-protection unit ). And yet a lot of their work contradicts their other work, to such an extend that one of them ( in the film ) literally cannot handle this contradiction and she kills herself in the end of the movie.

It feels as if police officers tend to be psychopathic little sons-of-bitches because this is a sort of defense mechanism that they have to develop in order to simply handle the job. A job that is so utterly contradictory and so utterly important. And yet in the same time carries so much weight that these people will snap, just because of all this weight.

We all know ( especially now in 2025 ) that not all laws are good laws. We are still fighting the "Chat Control" proposition in the EU ( at the moment there seems to be a great victory happening due to efforts by fightchatcontrol.eu, but the situation is still rather unstable ). In the UK there is the whole online age-verification disaster. Australia did similar bullshit. And the USA goes bananas with their complete degeneration of democracy.

There is a good chance some laws in your country are utterly incompatible with basic human rights. Or at the very least are too broad, to vague or too illogical, for their indented purpose. Take for example the arrests of people for holding signs in the UK. Technically illegal. But that is a very technical technicality that stems from a very vaguely worded law that, due to it vagueness attacks a basic human right of the people ( freedom of speech ).

In a way the laws of a country is like a badly written program, which would not even compile. There are so many bugs in the legal system that it is utterly insane we are even treating it seriously in the first place. And yet without it everything would become even worse.

Police officers that enlist themselves to protect that law are believing ( at first ) that they are doing the right thing. That they are helping people. But then as they do their job as police officers they slowly realize how utterly incompatible their work is with helping people. Sometimes they might help people, but other times they will just enforce laws against those same people. Or even do outright terrible things to the people because the law says so. And that could get very psychologically demanding very quickly.

The film that Maïwenn made examines this beautifully from every possible angle, using only the real cases that she either saw herself, or been told about during her research. From one side the policemen help save kids from abuse. In some instances they are really trying to save the kids, just to get into a legal technically that doesn't allow them to do so, letting a bad guy go free. And then the other times the film shows that they themselves also abuse kids. Not illegally of course. The law demanded from them to do so.

If you ever been a teenager you may remember the distaste toward police at that time of your life. These motherfuckers always seem to stick their noses too far into your personal life. And all you want to do as a teenager, is to finally become a free person. You rebel your parents, because they were too strict. And you obviously rebel the police, because they are absurdly strict.

As a kid I personally remember how incomprehensible it was that basic things like alcohol or cigarettes ( I didn't smoke myself, I still don't smoke, but I did drink since I was 13 ) are so hard to get across because of the damn police. And ultimately because of the damn laws about it all.

In my country for example it is not illegal for a kid to buy an energy drink. But in Russia you have to be at least 18. I remember back in 2015 or 2016 my mom and her boyfriend decided to lend a part of their apartment to a tourist family with a 13 year old boy. I was something like 18 at the time. So I went to show the boy around the town. And we entered a supermarket and bought some energy drinks. He was utterly afraid of the damn thing. He was trying to hide it all the time. He was paranoid that the cops will see him and take him for having it. Even after I explained to him that here it was not illegal, he still followed his preexisting habit about the damn thing.

The thing is, it was not like the law stopped him from buying those energy drinks back in Russia. He totally still got them. And that is why he has the habit of hiding them in the first place. He was breaking the law in his country. Which was not even a law in my country.

When you utter something about this to regular people you immediately understand why the law is as broken as it is. People would make anything they don't like, or think is wrong, illegal immediately without thinking about it even a little bit. If you say that checking for the person to be 18 when buying alcohol is pointless at best, they jump on you saying things like "you want little 5 years olds drinking alcohol?".

I've been to my father's house a few days ago. I bought for myself a few energy drinks. And my father had a few bottles of wine ( because holidays ). Non of those items were locked away from the kids. Kids simply didn't want anything to do with them. They expressed some interest, of course. Because they don't know what a Monster tastes like. But when I offered one of them to taste it ( since it isn't illegal in my country ) he expressed that he didn't want to do it. And it is still not illegal in the county.

When I was little I didn't drink. I didn't want to drink. And the two times I tasted what wine tastes like as a kid, it was just to know what it tastes like. The damn thing was so bitter I didn't want anything to do with it. When I was a teenager though, suddenly getting drunk was a great escape.

Kids smoke and get drunk because the rules around them make no sense for them. And yet when I was a kid I still had hope that maybe those rules will eventually clear up and start making sense sometime in future. But the horrifying reality is that those rules make even less sense when you are adult. The law looks utterly absurd when you actually study it for a bit.

People who make laws, are like police officers, they are people with mostly good intentions. They see that there is a problem somewhere and they want to fix it. Yet they can't do it. They use language to write these laws and language is not designed to be strict. Lawyers constantly use those inaccuracies in language to do their job. Their job is literally about exploiting bugs in the legal code.

And then sometimes certain laws carry so much political meaning to them that changing them, or even uttering an intention to change them lead people to completely disown you. Sometimes, with certain people, or certain laws, expressing a distaste toward the legal system is akin to being a criminal. "Oh you just want to break the law" they would say. "Oh you just want..." this or that...

Yes! I want this or that. I want to be able to do things that I personally think are not evil things to do. Some of those, not evil things, are somehow illegal. And usually it is because people who wrote the laws didn't think too deeply about how their words effect people. They wrote their laws too vaguely, or too strictly. Or they asserted that something will work while it doesn't. Or they mistakenly created a catch, or an illogicality that renders the law completely absurd. A lot of the laws have very good reason to exist, yet they are executed to poorly, they do more harm than good.

Just to completely nail the point I will tell you about a rule from work, that made the work so utterly insane, I couldn't handle it and resigned. So we had 2 areas where people could buy tickets ( I worked in a local cinema ). They could buy it from the PopCorn stand. And they could buy it from the automatic, self-checkout ticket machines. Those ticket machines only receive credit card payments. While the PopCorn stand receives cash as well.

The rule that the directors of the place came up with was something like this: Nobody can pay with a credit card, for a ticket, at the PopCorn stand. They can only use cash. And the reason for the rule is this: There are machines that they can use to pay with a credit card, and if they aren't using them, they cause the line ( for the popcorn ) to be slower. Very logical, from the first glance. People want popcorn, they form a line. And the movie will start ASAP whether they like it or not. So moving the line as quickly as you can is kind of important. And there are machines where you can buy your ticket. And therefor why waste time on the customers that can use the machine. Only waste time on a customers that can't use the machine. That pay cash.

Then the messy reality of the world hit that rule like a tsunami, when I was working there. The were lines of people and all of them had some unique problem. A lot of people come to the cinema not alone. And some want to pay cash while others want to pay with a credit card. Trying to tell them that those that use the credit card should use the self-checkout machine immediately result in those people completely failing to cooperate when they are choosing where to sit in the auditorium. They need to buy their tickets separately. And that requires figuring out which seats to take. Which they wouldn't have thought that much about, if they just bought the damn thing together. If I just sold them the two tickets at the PopCorn stand the line would have moved faster. I would be breaking the rule, because technically I'm selling to one of them with a credit card, but I would not be violating the reason for said rule.

I decided that since this isn't a legal rule, I can break it, when things like these occur. Because in my opinion that would have been serving the reason for the rule better, in those particular instances. And also, since the reason is specifically about lines. If there isn't any line. If I have only one person buying. I would also sell them the damn ticket on a credit card, because there is literally no reason for this rule at this particular moment.

Spoiler alert, the directors were very unhappy with me. I was breaking a rule that they specifically setup. I tried to logic my way. I tried to convince them that what I was doing doesn't violate the reason the rule exists. But they just simply didn't want to hear anything about anything. I was breaking the rule that they set up. Maybe me questioning this rule, and arguing so passionately about it's illogicality, touched their egos a little too much. They were utterly unapologetic and ridiculously strict about this stupid rule they had. If anything they were even stricter than police. I didn't even have some place where I could defend my position. I had to either follow the rule to the letter, which meant violating the very reason the rule was there in the first place, or I could resign. I resigned.

With law you can't resign. The best thing you can do it to remain private, or to protest it. You didn't consent to the law. You were born into it. And sometimes you see illogicality in it here and there. And you want to do something about it. Or you want to break it because it literally makes no sense. Or because following the law would literally be violating the reason the law is there in the first place. And you need protection against it. If you have privacy you have said protection. If you can argue about how stupid the law is, as in, if you have freedom of speech, freedom to protest, you can try doing something about the damn law.

But then let's get back to the topic of this ramble of mine. The police. They want to protect people. They believe laws are there to protect them. They see some basic logic in the law. But then they actually get to work as policemen. They get to witness situations where the law makes no fucking sense. And they are left with only 3 solutions: 1 ) Be broken and unstable and depressed all the time. 2 ) Develop a tough-guy persona against feeling anything. Or... 3 ) Kill yourself.

Happy Hacking!!!