The attitude in society towards law enforcement officers has always been special. Respect, fear, even contempt, but not indifference. This explains the abundance of slang names that people "reward" police officers with.
One of the most famous slang names for police officers (in the recent past - the police) - "garbage". This word cannot be called respectful. However, it was born in a criminal environment, and from these people, respect for the servants of the law should not be expected.
Sometimes the name "trash" is compared with the English phrase "my cop" - "my policeman": if you perceive the letters not as Latin, but as Slavic, you can really read it as "trash". But, of course, it is impossible to take such a popular "etymological theory" seriously. Borrowing a slang name from another language is possible (suffice it to recall the established custom in Russia to call the American dollar a "buck"), but such borrowings occur through oral speech, not through writing.
The version about borrowing from Yiddish, where the word “muser” means “informing”, raises no less doubts.
The origin of this slang word should be sought in Russian, and you can point to a specific source of the offensive nickname.
The emergence of the name
The custom of calling the police "rubbish" was born even before the October Revolution.
Everyone knows the abbreviation MUR - Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. But the name of this department was not always like that. From 1866 until the abolition in 1917, the Russian police service, which carried out the inquiry, search for criminals and missing persons, was called the Criminal Investigation, and in Moscow, respectively, the Moscow Criminal Investigation. The abbreviation for this name looked like "ICC". It is from this abbreviation that the word "garbage" was formed.
In Soviet times, other departments were created with different names and abbreviations, but the language retained its former slang name.
Other nicknames for police officers
"Garbage" is not the only slang term for law enforcement officers.
No less popular is the name "cops", the origin of which dates back to the same era. Employees of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department wore a special distinctive sign - a patch with the image of a hunting dog of the breed of cops.
The word "cop" came into Russian criminal jargon in a more complicated way. The borrowing took place at a time when Poland was still a part of the Russian Empire, the Poles called the "cop" of the prison guard.
The Poles themselves borrowed this word from the Hungarian language. The word "cop" is translated from Hungarian as "cloak, cape". This was the nickname for the police in Austria-Hungary, since they really wore capes.
