One question that all the systemic issues boil down to is: Do police departments want people of high moral integrity? Does any organization really want those? Or is it best to have people that only show just enough to not incite too much public scrutiny?
A certain malleability is a basic requirement to work in an organization and whoever runs counter to the culture will not have an easy time and may have a very short career. Putting the immediate company / working group goals before certain small qualms about how things are supposed to run and how they actually run is a common occurence. The formal requirements are met by clever documentation.
It's even hard to have a competent and integer police force in an environment where it's highly unlikely that a person the officers interact with has a gun. Even in that environment lethal or crippling accidents happen, though maybe not as amplified in number by the exterior threat of firearms in the populace. But and an esprit de corps (and a kind of brotherhood between executive and judicial branches) still prevails.
In Germany for example, the young officers are the ones who have to go on riot control duty for weeks, because they're physically up to it - that's something that I'm sure will at least subconsciously color a person's view of the civilian public, if pushed hard enough.
Even if they did want policemen of high personnal integrity, the lack of consequences for the bad ones (it's painfully obvious that a badge is a licence to kill consequence free at least once, as long as you're smart enough to do it to a minority) means people for which such a situation is attractive will flock to the profession.
Tests and interviews can only weed out so many of them.
Also specific to the US is the multitude of law enforcement agencies, meaning one bad cop fired from his jobs is very likely to be able to be hired in another agency, as long as he escaped condemnation, which they usually do...
By making the position attractive to would be killers, and not having an efficient mechanism to get them out of the system for good once the issues are identified, it was pretty obvious what would happen...
> A certain malleability is a basic requirement to work in an organization and whoever runs counter to the culture will not have an easy time and may have a very short career.
This is part of what civil service procedures and the unionization of police is supposed to solve. You're supposed to be able to stand up for your principles, and prove to the governing body (Civil Service) that you were justified, and part of the union's responsibility is to watch from the outside to make sure you're not railroaded. Instead you end up with CS commissions disqualifying applicants who admit to smoking pot 12 years ago when they were in high school.
Unfortunately, current police unions spend more time attacking the public on behalf of corrupt police officers than defending principled police officers against employers who ask them to immoral things.
In Germany, police unions lobbied against the introduction of unique identification numbers on the armor of each riot control officer at protests. Before, there were only numbers/markings identifying a squad. Maybe in the future, with better computer vision and cameras, citizens can actually gather data about the effectiveness of such measures and compare across different regional implementations.
That's a stange argument. In USA a victim with a gun (or anything metal) is an easy justification for police killing ciivilians. If more civilians pulled guns out, police would kill more civilians. Unarmed victim martyrs are the only tool the public has to generate political will to push back against violent policing.
A certain malleability is a basic requirement to work in an organization and whoever runs counter to the culture will not have an easy time and may have a very short career. Putting the immediate company / working group goals before certain small qualms about how things are supposed to run and how they actually run is a common occurence. The formal requirements are met by clever documentation.
It's even hard to have a competent and integer police force in an environment where it's highly unlikely that a person the officers interact with has a gun. Even in that environment lethal or crippling accidents happen, though maybe not as amplified in number by the exterior threat of firearms in the populace. But and an esprit de corps (and a kind of brotherhood between executive and judicial branches) still prevails.
In Germany for example, the young officers are the ones who have to go on riot control duty for weeks, because they're physically up to it - that's something that I'm sure will at least subconsciously color a person's view of the civilian public, if pushed hard enough.