I've known some great guys on the Toronto Police Force, level headed and honest. And also known, although they were just acquaintances, not friends, some real assholes. There are 5,000-plus on the force, simple math tells you there will be some bad eggs who will abuse their power or are corrupt.
One friend of mine, who just recently took early retirement after 30 plus years on the job, told me the worst thing a cop can do is not have a circle of friends outside the force. As he explained to me, he always told newbies on the force not to just socialize with other cops, include people from other walks of life. As he pointed out, most of the time when people deal with a cop it's not a pleasant experience: they're either a victim of a crime or in trouble with the cops, whether it's a minor thing (traffic ticket) to major crimes. So how often are you really happy to interact with the police. So if cops just hang out with cops, they just bitch about dealing with the public which creates an us versus them mentality. That was how he looked at things. The only cops he hung out with was a long-time friend (they went through police college together) and on occasion whoever he was partnered with.
My buddy who just retired never talked much about the job when we hung out, but would be more than willing to be helpful with minor legal advice such as how to handle minor traffic tickets etc. I never heard him bitch about his job; whenever he brought up his job was only to share some funny anecdotes.
My favorite story: he's on patrol in the Regent Park area, stopped to grab a coffee. On his way out of the coffee shop a crack whore type runs up to him yelling "officer help me, I've just been robbed."
"What happened?" he asked.
She pointed at some guy running down the street and replied, "I just gave that guy a blow job and he ran off without paying me."
Years ago I was playing on a slo-pitch team; we had 3 cops on our team. One of them loved to play outfield but had a terrible arm, terrible accuracy. He was a sharp shooter with Emergency Response Unit. He took a lot of ribbing about that. After one game, over beers, one of the other cops had the best line about him, "You'd think a guy who's a master marksman would be able to JUST ONCE hit the cut-off man."