> They were “just doing their job,”

It's always this one exact excuse. They were simply "following orders". The police don't have their own brains capable of thinking.

You are meaningfully misquoting here ("doing their job" not "following orders", which has a different ring to it, at least for me).

Also, apparently they do have brains capable of thinking because: "Eventually, they accepted that we were journalists and that they disagreed with detaining us."