It's the same in the UK. I first became aware of it after the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. He was the innocent electrician shot in 2005 as part of a terrorism panic. Every detail released by the police to justify the killing turned out to be a lie. Having paid attention since then I've come to realise it is standard practice.
Police behaviour in public inquiries (usually stonewalling and obfuscating) has been so bad that the government has just passed a law placing a "duty of candour" on the police and other civil servants, with criminal penalties for serious breaches.
That was less than a month ago so we'll see how it works.
Similar story with the infamous NYC case of Kitty Genovese in the mid 1960s, whom was sexually assaulted and murdered. The police claimed dozens of people heard and saw her screams, but nobody did anything. The truth was many people called the police, but nobody came. It was an essentially a coverup, but it did end up becoming a symbol of NYC’s moral decay. The narrative wasn’t officially challenged until many years later. (There is a recent is documentary out there where her brother digs into it all).
Duty of Candour is a lot stronger than perjury. You can obstruct an investigation in all kinds of ways without perjuring yourself (especially since the standard of evidence is quite high). Duty of Candour basically makes any kind of obstruction an offense.
The alternative is sometimes life shattering cognitive dissonance and then a constant feeling of dread. So much of the human condition is willful ignorance it's kind of amazing anything works.
The majority of the global population still abides faith based story mode narratives.
American conviction in religion has fallen ~20% since 2000 but that still leaves ~60% bought into skywizards as media owned by older more religious intentionally helps peddle Newspeak that obfuscates attempts to bring science to the masses.
IDK, you'd have to ask the people that treat politics like their religion these days. They're everywhere. Doubt it would help, though, because those people will never admit to it being their religion even though it very obviously is.
Love me some confirmation bias about how bad the "other side" is at inserting its dogma into its surroundings.
Here's mine: at my grandfather's funeral, the head pastor was comfortable enough in himself to start complaining about "cancel culture" in front of everyone while my grandfather's dead body was ten feet away from him.
There's a difference between trusting cops, trusting the high-level branches of the US Government, and trusting the various departments of the US bureaucracy.
For example, I trust NOAA or NASA, used to trust the CDC, would never trust the CIA or FBI (because cops).
I'm sure the employees are doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. but i doubt the administration is going to be truthful about any disease outbreaks. and they're already pushing anti-vax nonsense.
Distrust isn't a single thing. Distrusting cops is an entirely different kind of distrust than distrusting RFK Jr. RFK Jr kills people with pseudoscience. Cops go hands-on. I don't know enough about the statistics to compare the magnitude of killing. But I do know that the solutions would have to be completely different.
>It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.
I wouldn't care if they were at least consistent.
What I take issue with is that the same individuals will toss the official narrative if it contradicts their viewpoint. That is a personal moral failing.
The Orwellian doublespeak is just a sign of the requisite cognitive dissonance surfacing whenever it conflicts with the necessity of maintaining in-group/out-group dynamics.
It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.