Oh I think most likely both are punished unjustly. I do, however, like the ideal of holding officers to a higher standard through harsher punishments, but it is simply an ideal. In practice, what we really want is for police to have a higher standard for themselves which is all about institutional culture largely set through systems that dictate how things are done. In fact, if they have a more accountable culture, actions like this would indicate more significant deviance and a just punishment would be harsher. I think officers themselves would advocate for it too.
But I want to live in the real world. We are not there. I don't want to put the cart before the horse. We should hold individuals accountable, but more importantly the system that permitted such deviance if we find that the behavior wasn't so abnormal after all, just the consequence. We aren't doing that. And so our officers are constantly fighting against the idea that they are corrupt, racist, and going to be punished by people who neither understand nor care about the complex and dangerous job they do no differently than any other. And this is the feeling for good officers. As I said, someone who is intentionally deviant needs to be held accountable (ideally regardless of consequences). All the other guys who are just doing their human best -- well, if they are feeling threatened by actions to correct deviance instead of supportive of them, something is wrong with what you are doing.
That just doesn't happen though. Look at the states that have tried to make it illegal for cops to have sex with prostitutes, the police unions and police departments fight tooth in nail to prevent those laws from getting passed. Yes, the cops in some states often wait until after the prostitute finishes giving them a blowjob or they finish fucking them before arresting them. I forget the state but one cop, using taxpayer dollars, went to a massage parlor and got sexual services including full on intercourse on FOUR different occasions before they busted the place. Evidently once wasn't enough proof or he had to sample the entire menu to charge them the most? Keep in mind, this is long after they have not only agreed to swap money for sex but did money did actually exchange hands which is pretty much the gold standard in proof against prostitutes.
"Only weeks before Freddie Gray’s death while in custody of Baltimore police, cops from around the state filled a committee hearing room in Annapolis to aggressively lobby against a wave of reform bills aimed at increasing police accountability in Maryland. The police won: every bill to make it easier to investigate and prosecute police misconduct went down to defeat"
Even worse are the contracts that the police unions negotiate:
"
Hector Jimenez, an Oakland police officer who was dismissed in 2009, after killing two unarmed men, but who then successfully appealed and, two years later, was reinstated, with full back pay. The protection that unions have secured has helped create what Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and an expert on police accountability, calls a “culture of impunity.” Citing a recent Justice Department investigation of Baltimore’s police department, which found a systemic pattern of “serious violations of the U.S. Constitution and federal law,” he told me, “Knowing that it’s hard to be punished for misconduct fosters an attitude where you think you don’t have to answer for your behavior.”
For the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block policing reforms of all kinds. In the seventies, they opposed officers’ having to wear name tags. More recently, they’ve opposed the use of body cameras and have protested proposals to document racial profiling and to track excessive-force complaints. They have lobbied to keep disciplinary histories sealed. If a doctor commits malpractice, it’s a matter of public record, but, in much of the country, a police officer’s use of excessive force is not. Across the nation, unions have led the battle to limit the power of civilian-review boards, generally by arguing that civilians are in no position to judge the split-second decisions that police officers make.
Earlier this year, Newark created a civilian-review board that was acclaimed as a model of oversight. The city’s police union immediately announced that it would sue to shut it down."