This is what happens when 90% of your applicant pool are flunkies and/or fascists (the other 10% are do-gooders with "I Can Fix Them" Syndrome). Very few people with any shred of intelligence, integrity, and/or empathy wants to be a cop, and deal with the institutionalized biases that run rampant throughout American policework.
The only way to save policing and law enforcement in this country will be for those of us who are open minded to make the same concerted effort that the right wing and fascists have made over the last 40 years to take it over.
White nationalists and white supremacists had been making that concerted effort to "legitimize" themselves by infiltating law enforcement. It wasn't necessarily like this a generation and more ago. Yes, there have always been problems with policing and law enforcement when it came to racism and profiling, but when I was a younger person (from my teenage years through my young adulthood) I was close to a lot of people in law enforcement.
Neighbors were cops. Family friends and friends of my parents were cops. One of my dad's best golfing buddies was a chief-of-police in a Michigan town. One of my best friends throughout high school and I both considered a career at one time in law enforcement (which boggles the mind of anyone who knows me well now) and my first foray into post-secondary education was as a criminal justice major. My friend ended up going into the profession and was one of the good cops out there we all wish were the norm.
Things were probably already changing in the 1980s, and certainly as our politics began to get really ugly during the Clinton years things changed more. 9-11 took that up about 250 notches when we began to reflexively kowtow to all things law enforcement and local police forces began to really militarize themselves. And all during this time white supremacists and nationalists were filling out more and more applications to become law enforcement officers.
We didn't do (and still don't do) nearly enough oversight on who becomes a cop, and instead of weeding out the 90% who are unfit, the morally unfit have actually begun to overwhelm departments to the point that, as Fade notes, no one with the actual combination of intelligence, integrity and empathy it takes to be an exceptional cop will touch that profession with a ten-foot pole.
It's a shame really, because as much as I rag on law enforcement, it isn't as if we do not need it in our society. But what we need and what we have are nearly polar opposites. And one of the by-products of the downfall of good, efficient policing is more and more people feeling the need to arm themselves, since the police are actually terrible at doing the jobs they SHOULD be doing.
Now then, back to browsing... how much does Cabelas want for a new Sig Sauer P365...
Don't worry, I'm sure that soon I'll be back to wanting them all shipped to Saturn. ;-)