One of my daughters has been dating a black man for several years. He is a good young man, and I'm happy for both of them. Last year, he was pulled over and ticketed in the southern city in which they live. There was no violence involved, but from what I learned of the facts (one sided, I'm sure), he didn't have a chance with the officer. They scraped together enough money to hire defense counsel and beat the charge. It was her first exposure to what she now thinks can be an unfair system.
Ours is a violent, gun-happy culture in which cities of all sizes struggle to provide basic services with fewer dollars. When police are inadequately vetted, bigots get badges. When they are inadequately trained, the fear that decent officers experience in potentially risky situations causes them to do dumb and dangerous things. Add to that the kind of latent racism some have which causes them to think the danger is enhanced when the "suspect" is a black male, you have even more dumb and dangerous choices. In my very limited, small town experience, the people who become interested in police work are often the same people who have been interested in the same activities police are there to protect against. There is an attraction of some sort. I don't know if that is commonplace or just limited to my experience.
Municipalities have to vet better to keep the wrong people out of the ranks and they have to train them better once they are in. More money is not sufficient, but it is necessary. You can't take it from schools and other public support programs that provide medical care and jobs. Perhaps divert more money from the so-called war on drugs here and the war on bad guys abroad. Try, through education and reasonable regulation, to lower the number of guns out there. The proliferation of real guns also adds to the number of imagined guns.
I don't know much about the peer review, prosecutorial side of officer misconduct cases, but something obviously needs to be done to ensure that cops receive the same level of scrutiny others receive. I don't know what that is, but for each case in which a cop gets an undeserved pass there will be many cases in which a deserved pass is perceived as corruption. And like others have said here, once trust is completely lost in a large segment of the population, you have a very serious problem.
All obvious points, I know.
