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I have a question for those who follow ACAB. What about ATAB?

Will clarify ahead of time that my relationship with the ACAB crowd is nuanced (while considering the word "bastard" such as in "All Cops Are Bastards" is not in my daily or sometimes even annual vocabulary). When you live in a semi-rural area, it's harder to register your opinion of cops as a dichotomy. Questions always come up, like... do you view city cops differently (for me, the answer is yes at least in some ways)? Do you view the cops the same way off-duty (for me, not all that much)? Do you have a "favorite" cop (since you can often count the cops you encounter on one hand, and/or because you often know these people on a personal level)? Things like that.

If you put a gun to my head and asked for a brief opinion, I would indeed say law enforcement needs a hard reform in key areas and that, at least in some countries/cities/towns, the distrust for cops is natural. However, the more I ponder this though, the more I think about other occupations. And the one that always comes up in conversations is teachers. Hence the T in ATAB. Teachers don't have a "line of duty" where the stakes are life-or-death, but they do exercise an absurd amount of power and immunity, with effects on social life, how much education you can say you've reached, and even on law enforcement itself.

Which then brings me to often asking people if they believe in ATAB like they may or may not believe in ACAB. And this in turn brings me nothing but confusion nine out of ten times, as the majority of those who adhere to ACAB will call me crazy for bringing up ATAB. I can in fact understand both sides of ACAB, the side that says it's applicable and the side that says it's not, and I can understand both sides of ATAB, but to say ACAB is righteous and ATAB is wrongful? People have even adhered to ADAB ("All Doctors Are Bastards") for a lot less than it has taken for people to adhere to ATAB.

Unless the mindset for some reason was to focus on the exact stakes, I would not believe in ACAB if I was going to be shunned for believing in ATAB, especially if we take ACAB close enough to the end of the scale where we're going to say there's no such thing as a good cop, and help would be needed in understanding why this is wrong if it is (I don't see it).

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