Or even a master's. Make policing its own advanced degree. Then have higher pay in order to attract top talent.

To be clear though the issue isn't just intelligence or schooling. Its partially empathy and how fraternity like they are. Also transparency. If there was a system of lawyers and human rights activist that reviewed body camera footage it would be easier. If each time we had interactions with the police there was an easier system to get the footage of the interaction things would improve too.

It’s only going to get worse. They earned the anti police sentiments that citizens give them but it’s also made it so people don’t want to be cops and departments will have less funding over time. This just leads to more s***ty or trigger happy cops since they just take whoever. Training for cops is a joke when compared to the military or even firefighters.
I understand it’s a hard job but they don’t prepare the cops for these situations at all and the citizens end up paying for it. There needs to be an entire reform of the police structure.

You can’t even stop your citizens from shooting each other; not much hope for changing police violence

You never responded with a solution to taking peoples guns

The problem is the nature of the police, rooted in the 1700s as slave patrol units who were stopping and killing runaway slaves and colonial night watch guards who stopped any revolutionary uprising. In the 1800s they were used to prevent strikes and terrorize freed black people and intimidate migrants, 1900s to prevent civil, womens, LGBTQ rights movements.

At any point in history, the police has been used as a tool of the government against its own people and I'm convinced years from now when we look back at this time period, we will come to the same assessment. The purpose of the police is to enforce inequality because this state of inequality costs the government less than to actually make the investment to solve the problems in our community and once you get that, it raises the question whether it is worth reforming at all, and we should just defund and use the money to actually fight poverty and economic uncertainity and thus eliminating the root cause of crime. I know this requires a paradigm shift in our society, but the alternative is the police will have to come up with a new excuse to trample basic human rights and justify its existence. Some data points, you tell me if it makes sense to spend this much on police:

memphistn.gov/government/finance/operating-budget-information/#36-647-fy-2023-adopted-budget-book

(Copy pasted from reddit)

In Houston we had the same thing with these vice units. They were lying on sworn documents to get judges to sign no-knock warrants for houses they thought had guns in them, so they could take the guns and sell them on the black market. They'd plant d**** to justify the raids.

One raid, they came in through two doors in the house and one officer shot a dog, prompting the whole squad to start shooting. They shot and killed the dog and the elderly couple they were framing, and shot each other a few times on accident. The man took hours to die though, as they backed out of the house and denied him access to medical care until he had perished. No evidence the couple fired a shot. It's been four years and Harris County is still dragging its feet on charges or is covering it up.

Harding Street raid.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harding_Street_raid

Edit: some charges have been filed, but no movement on bringing any of them to trial. No cameras on any of the cops because, conveniently, vice squads are not required by HPD to wear them. As an aside, the HPD police union president told the public after the raid that he'd be making a list of people who criticized HPD over the raid (presumably for police reprisal)

This is so f***ed.

You can’t fix a system that is operating as it was intended. Only deconstruct it and rebuild it with a new blueprint

"Burn everything, like gasoline!"