The only thing more predictable than a sitcom premise is that the American public can be surprised each and every time someone in uniform steps outside the law gets away with it.
That we can be shocked by this is, in itself, shocking. Its a characteristic of the intellectual disconnect inherent in American life that we are bombarded with messaging on an almost daily basis - sometimes by the very same people who decry the results of grand juries that let officers like Pantaleo walk - that a uniform instantly ennobles a human being. In doing so, we set ourselves up for great disappointment every time (and there are more "every times" than we want to admit) someone in a uniform does something ignoble.
Whether that uniform is adorned with a badge or stripes, we are taught as children not just to trust and admire but to blindly trust and reverently admire everyone in a uniform. How does that make any sense? Is our need for heroes so profound that we willingly shut down the part of our brain that would remind us that a certain percentage of any group of human beings is going to range from ineffective to downright abhorrent?
I grew up near Philly during the time Frank Rizzo was police commissioner and then mayor. Mounds of evidence existed that there was an "us-versus-them" culture within the PD. It's a culture that is decades old, and yet people still have the capacity to be shocked when they see it (Google "stop and frisk Philadelphia You Tube").
Our military especially benefits from this peculiar defect in the American hippocampus: Read "I Had Rather Die: Rape in the Civil War" by Kim Murphy; read about the Lodge committee; read about the Canicatti and Biscari massacres; read about No Gun Ri, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and Haditha.
Read anything you can find about the epidemic of military sexual trauma.
No, it's not every person in a uniform, and I would never make that claim; however, given the scale of certain crimes, it's enough. And when you factor in the otherwise good people who look the other way along with the people in power who feed and water the myth of 100% perfection, the number grows.
We do things a bit backwards, I think. I have nothing against ennobling someone who has risked his or her life so that I never have to. It's just that I prefer to wait until the full measure of their service can be evaluated. Most certainly, we can respect men and women for the bravery it takes to don a uniform. But just as we don't give gold watches on a new hire's first day, it can only be once someone hangs up their uniform for good that we will ever be able to make an honest assessment about their nobility.