I’m an ex cop and the whole attitude is really reductionist and lacks any insight into how police organisations actually tend to work. Especially when it comes to large forces with tens of thousands of officers and staff - for example, by assuming that corrupt officers and cultures are evenly distributed throughout an organisation, which they’re not. It just doesn’t work like that and it’s a frankly juvenile attitude lacking in any nuance.
I’m saying this as someone with a degree in Criminology (in which my dissertation was on policing in ethnically diverse communities), a Master’s in human rights law, and several years of experience in a large force (which I left due to service related PTSD). I feel quite qualified to comment on it. ACAB is detached from how corruption actually works in the real world, discounts the good work of a lot of very good people, and offers zero solution or viable alternative. I can completely understand having a negative impression of the police given their media attention these days but ACAB is teenager-level critical thinking that does not acknowledge the complexity of the problem and spits in the face of many good people.
To be clear I’m not just bootlicking - I hated my previous employer (for separate reasons) and have no good will for them. There ARE problems with policing in 2024, as there always have been before, and they need acknowledging and fixing. But the ACAB narrative doesn’t work for me. And it’s more than a little ironic that you are using that narrative while simultaneously criticising an “us vs them” approach.