White America didn’t always have this love affair with the cops. You can find lots of media from the 70s and earlier that depicts cops in a neutral or negative light.
It was only as America became less segregated, starting in the 70s. Up until then, of course the cops were used to oppress black folks but that was largely out of sight from the white folks. Once the suburbs started to desegregate more (they are of course still highly segregated), white folks started looking to cops as the saviors of white supremacy. Even then, this really only achieved the current incredibly high levels of bootlicking after the Michael Brown shooting, when white folks began to explicitly, uncritically support cops as a way to express white supremacy without coming out and saying it directly.
White America didn’t always have this love affair with the cops. You can find lots of media from the 70s and earlier that depicts cops in a neutral or negative light.
It was only as America became less segregated, starting in the 70s. Up until then, of course the cops were used to oppress black folks but that was largely out of sight from the white folks. Once the suburbs started to desegregate more (they are of course still highly segregated), white folks started looking to cops as the saviors of white supremacy. Even then, this really only achieved the current incredibly high levels of bootlicking after the Michael Brown shooting, when white folks began to explicitly, uncritically support cops as a way to express white supremacy without coming out and saying it directly.