I agree, but settlements don't hurt enough - ultimately they come out of the taxpayer's pocket,a nd unless a mayor or police chief is held personally responsible, all that happens is a game of bureaucratic musical chairs. This also needs civil suits against the officers, and jail terms. At least the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is treating it as a criminal incident, so it's possible that one or more of these police may do time.
However, the problem is systemic. I don't see a change without major adjustments to the law which would be highly unpopular, eg mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by police officers or similarly draconian measures.
We don't need draconian measures; we need substantive and reliably enforced measures. People respond much more strongly to certainty of punishment than severity.
I hew to the economic view that they respond to the combination of the two, in contrast to this position paper: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/deterrence%20briefing%2... which I think begs the question. The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve, especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-(
We should (for some value of "should") respond to the expected value plus something like the Kelly criterion. In practice, my understanding is that the research consistently shows that we are systematically less sensitive to severity than certainty. Of course the severity needs to be sufficient that it can't just be written off as a cost of doing business, but that is true long before we hit "draconian". You can insist that, in spite of the research, we're all perfect little economic calculators acting rationally, but know that you run significant chance of being wrong.
But sure, let's run with your assumption.
"The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve"
"X is hard, therefore Y," without establishing that Y is worthwhile, is a piece of reasoning responsible for many ills. Yes, it's a cost-benefit thing, but bear the following points in mind:
When you have (X * Y) in general, and X >> Y, you can make a much bigger difference with a small change to Y than a big change to X (unless it's an exceptionally big change to X).
Costs of long term imprisonment scales with the medical needs of the people we're imprisoning, which is much faster than linear.
Draconian sentencing means we're doing harm to the those we falsely convict (which will inevitably be above zero); this means increasing the risk to innocent officers, which lowers the quality of officers we can recruit.
"especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-("
This is a tremendous issue, for sure, but it is one that needs to be resolved for a whole host of reasons, of which this is only one.
Note that a more draconian sentence reinforces this - if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting sent up for life, I'm more concerned (and therefore, presumably, more willing to stretch the truth) than if I think there's a chance my innocent buddy is getting a slap on the wrist - so if I'm mistaken about my buddy's innocence, raising X might actually decrease Y. (Actually, that holds even if I think my buddy is guilty of something that doesn't deserve so stiff a penalty...)
However, the problem is systemic. I don't see a change without major adjustments to the law which would be highly unpopular, eg mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by police officers or similarly draconian measures.