So do you have any proof that most people will abuse power?
Not interested in talking about dictators. One, it's very off topic, since there are no dictators that I'm aware of in the US. Two, cops aren't dictators.
Cops are also held accountable. If they aren't in your area, you need to go to the state office and get that fixed.
I just remembered a couple of studies that support my contention:
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard.....Twenty-four male students out of seventy-five were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as t
he guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it.
The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days.....The results of the experiment have been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. The experiment has also been used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.
The results of the experiment favor situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution (a result caused by internal characteristics). In other words, it seemed that the situation, rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behavior.....
Stanford prison experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Less directly related, but relevant, is the Milgram experiment which demonstrates how one person in authority can easily get others to act immorally :
"The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.
'I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.'
..Later, Milgram and other psychologists performed variations of the experiment throughout the world, with similar results..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
The film Compliance is based on a real event in which restaurant employees were convinced to harm a co-worker after being told to do so by an authority figure.
"The strip search phone call scam is a series of incidents that extended over a period of about ten years before an arrest was made in 2004. The incidents involved a man calling a restaurant or grocery store, claiming to be a police officer and then convincing managers to conduct strip searches of female employees and to perform other bizarre acts on behalf of "the police"...
...Some notable incidents were:
- On November 30, 2000, a female McDonald's manager in Leitchfield, Kentucky, undressed herself in the presence of a customer. The caller had convinced her that the customer was a "suspected sex offender" and that the manager, serving as bait, would enable undercover police officers to arrest him.[1]
- On January 26, 2003, an Applebee's assistant manager subjected a waitress to a 90-minute strip search after receiving a collect call from someone who purported to be a regional manager for Applebee's.[1]
- In February 2003, a call was made to a McDonald's in Hinesville, Georgia. The female manager (who believed she was speaking to a police officer who was with the director of operations for the restaurant's upper management) took a 19‑year-old female employee into the women's bathroom and strip-searched her. She also brought in a 55‑year-old male employee, who conducted a body cavity search of the woman to "uncover hidden drugs." McDonald's and the GWD Management Corporation were taken to court over the incident. In 2005, U.S. District Judge John F. Nangle granted a summary judgment to McDonald's and denied, in part, a summary judgment to GWD Management.[3] In 2006, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the judgments.[4]
- On June 3, 2003, a Taco Bell manager in Juneau, Alaska, undressed a 14‑year-old female customer and forced her to perform lewd acts at the request of a caller who had claimed he was working with Taco Bell management to investigate drug abuse[1]
- In July 2003, a 36‑year-old Winn-Dixie grocery store manager in Panama City, Florida, received a call instructing him to bring a 19‑year-old female cashier (who matched a description provided by the caller) into an office where she was to be strip-searched. The cashier was forced to undress and pose in various positions as part of the search. The incident ended when another manager entered the office to retrieve a set of keys.[5]
- In March 2004, a 17‑year-old female customer at a Taco Bell in Fountain Hills, Arizona, was strip-searched by a manager who had received a call from a man claiming to be a police officer.....[6]
"
Strip search phone call scam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia