The 1972 Knapp Commission into police corruption introduced some really great vocabulary to express "the rank and file are complicit".
"Meat eaters" and "grass eaters".
The meat eaters were the officers that actively pursued opportunities to be corrupt and spent a great deal of time on the job engaging in corrupt activities instead of police work. The grass eaters were essentially normal officers who would turn a blind eye or do things that had been normalized such as accepting or soliciting small bribes opportunistically.
In the words of the report, "the grass eaters are the heart of the problem".
Recently I've been reading the report of the Knapp Commission, which was a 1972 inquiry into police corruption in New York City. That sounds tangential at first but it really isn't, the findings of the commission are broadly applicable. One of the major points of it being that corrupt officers correctly judged they had very little to fear from prosecution. There's this great table on page 250 showing the complete lack of prosecutions in the years leading up to the commission, driving home the point.
The reasons for that utter lack of prosecution leading to massive corruption is a microcosm of the broader circumstance to which you've pointed out.
Having read the Knapp Commission report, I am no longer of the view I have anything original to say on this.
On account of the earth spinning, and all the globally universal constants that derive from this fact, from the magnetic field to the sun rising in the East, at the very least an orientation which puts a cardinal direction on top was inevitable.
Oh really. Have you actually visited that childhood home recently? Did you move away at a young age by any chance and never went back since?
I know I did. Until one night I randomly pursued the place in street view. It's uncanny, looking at it, not being sure which things changed and which you don't remember correctly. Was the swingset in the park always yellow? Was that store always on that side of the other one? It really fucks with your sense of reality