It's hard enough to find good people (note the qualification) willing to be police already. Add more restrictions and penalties and you'll soon find that nobody will be willing to take the job.
Or you'll start the end of entire minorities fearing the police, the "system" and everything legal that you expect to represent fairness and justice. Fixing this undermines the gangs that operate in plain sight because locals fear them less than the police. It could even mean that your life isn't limited by where you grew up.
That is all to say by just improving police standards, you improve the entire country.
If you want better, train better. Hire better. Pay better. Don't keep settling for scraping the barrel for these gun-ho lunatics.
(I'm sure there are some very responsible, conscientious police out there but if they want to stop being tarred with this brush, they need to sort this shit out from the inside too!)
I don't accept that this is the case. Restrictions which disproportionately burden bad people in the job may make the job more attractive, rather than less, to good people.
Especially if those restrictions result in improved working conditions by mitigating police/community relations problems (either directly, or by disproportionately burdening, and thus encouraging job changes by, the bad people already in the job.)
> Add more restrictions and penalties and you'll soon find that nobody will be willing to take the job.
That's probably fine. If we really need them we can pay more to get them. What's happening now is that we're paying them with "get out of jail free" cards instead of money.
> What's happening now is that we're paying them with "get out of jail free" cards instead of money.
Which, just to emphasize this, disproportionately (compared to paying in cash -- I'm not saying that the majority of police have this preference) attracts people who prefer payment in "get out of jail free" cards, who may not be the people you want doing policing.
It's hard enough to find good people (note the qualification) willing to be police already. Add more restrictions and penalties and you'll soon find that nobody will be willing to take the job.