Another story of a bad cop

See, I don't have a problem with officers making mistakes. Getting too emotionally charged and snapping. I mean, they ARE people, and people have the tendency to overreact at times. I would like to see that officers are appropriately screened in order to weed out such people from such civic duty, but it can happen to anyone. But what pisses me off at police as a whole is when, after making a mistake, the officer in question lies about it. I have a strong suspicion that most people feel the same way as I do: that a mistake, even one that involves physical harm, might be excused by the general public (and by that I do not mean no discipline, just that the general public might not hate cops so much) if the officer were to come straight out and say "I am guilty. I screwed up. I apologise for my actions." This doesn't happen though. Officers seem to have a disposition to lie about what their mistakes and wrongdoing, and other officers back them up.

Just to showcase this line of thought, the story below contains a video where it shows a citizen speaking to an officer and then out of the blue, the officer punches the guy in the face, then punches him some more when the guy is down. It took first-hand viewing of the tape for the prosecutors to drop the charges because the officer was stating that the citizen was the one to attack him!

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/the_edge/video-shows-detroit-police-officer-beating-man-at-mgm-casino

The officer, however, claims Poisson made the first move. He was facing charges, but they were eventually dropped. "As soon as the prosecutor's office saw the videotape, the charges disappeared," said Mueller.
Poisson is now suing the department for money, as well as the officer's resignation.

It is stories like these that help the general public believe that cops are criminals (and in this case, this officer was since he blatantly lied about what happened). And if you watch the video in the link provided above, you will see that the cop was not alone. What did the other officer do? Tell the prosecutors and his chief what really happened? Doesn't seem that that is the case.

I honestly want cops to be the good guys, but with so many incidents lately that are showing how bad the cops are... it is easy to see why the public opinion of cops is so bad.