Cops and soldiers, believe it or not, have very different motivations and experiences that lead to very different outcomes. Lots of soldiers come back from the mistake they made at 18 thinking "god damn that was a huge fucking mistake I should fight against the thing I contributed to".

Cops don't do this. Cops get pay raises for twenty years then do shitloads of overtime and then retire with six figure pensions.

There are a lot of leftist veterans because most people become soldiers for reasons like "I wanted to serve my country" or "I'm from a military family" or "I want to get out of this one horse town" or "I want to see the world". Then they spend four or six years not doing that, realize their country is bullshit and everything they've been taught about it is a lie, maybe directly do some war crimes, and then when their contract comes up they've got PTSD, disability, and a seething hatred for the US government.

Cops don't have that experience. People become cops either 1.) Because they want to help people in their communities or 2.) Because they get off on authority and want to use fear and violence to make other people respect them. People in group 1.) usually wash out within a year or become people in group 2.) People in group 2.) do cop shit for twenty years then retired with huge pensions because being a cop is pretty easy and unless you die of a heart attack or do too many crimes too publicly you can basically just cruise til retirement.

Are their roles in imperialism similar? Sure, they are. But the people involved are very different, the way they experience imperialism is very different, and their outcomes are very different.

To whit; At one point during Vietnam there were commies trying to organize the enlisted troops and they almost got away with it.

No one has ever tried to organize the cops.

I honestly don't know where this hand-wringing about The Troops comes from. It certainly doesn't come from theory or the lessons of any revolution ever, anywhere in the world. Reading through here I'm starting to suspect it's a cultural diffusion of the conservative canard that "Anti-War protestors spit on returning soldiers", like people just assume that the Troops must hate the left and the left must hate the troops because that's what we were taught growing up and everyone just believed it.

Are we talking about advocacy and empathy or are we talking about extremely online people trying to score points on twitter by being more woke than thou?

Contributing to orgs that actually do things is advocacy, listening to people who have experienced the sharp end of imperialism is empathy.

Deliberately poking a sleeping shark in the ass on twitter because you know it'll do something exciting is neither of those.