It is considered good manners in the US to call somebody "Sir" or "Mam" when you don't know them. This does not imply subservience. A police officer has a gun, a taser, handcuffs, a long flashlight and a club. He also has the authority to put those handcuffs on you for no reason. He has the authority because he has a gun, a taser etc. If you object he may beat you senseless, and then trump up charges to have you spend time in jail. I have had a cop come to my home, threaten to take my children and put them in state custody simply because I didn't think that I needed to be polite to an aggressive asshole on my front lawn when I was flipping hamburgers on my front porch. The simple fact is while I may have won in the long run, his abuse of his authority would have been damaging to my children and there was no defense regarding that but to roll over and acknowledge he had the power. It is not a good system, but it is the one we have. My experience has been that more than half of all cops are good honest public servants who are pursuing a professional career of protecting and defending the public. That leaves millions who are power mad assholes who abuse their authority regularly. We do have a severe problem with police and public figures that abuse power. Our difference is that we point it right out and say so and regularly arrest them and put them in prison. We just haven't done it enough yet. In the US we air our dirty laundry in public. That means that everyone hears about it. You never hear about the career public servants who provide honest service for 40 years and retire. We have our problems, but we are honest about them. We are also tired of you pompous fools telling us how superior you are to us. We don't ask you to come here, we don't really want you to come here, and we certainly don't give a flying fuck about your opinion of us or our system. So kiss my Yankee ass, I'm going to have a beer with the good honest cop who lives across the street.
