The police are suffering from believing themselves on a war footing in their own country. I think that's at the root of all these shootings. They're being prepped for it and trained for it and told every day to watch their backs....and the retaliation attacks have been just the thing to make that mindset stick. There are good cops fighting against of a tide of expecting trouble everywhere and finding it with ease. It's a organizational behavior that has never been great but has just gotten out of hand lately. Either that or we just know about these things happening more than we used to thanks to technology. Police get treated like a special class of citizen when it comes to them as an organization, and that's really what's got to stop. Every police department IMO should have a civilian board with the actual power to do something to make change if police chiefs can't reform the cops they have and properly train the new ones they get. But since cops have their own unions, are city/state employees and all that jazz, bringing them to heel is harder to do.
I appreciate there are good cops out there but frankly their presence doesn't do anything to prevent bad cops from being bad. If police chiefs and city/state government can't reform their own institutions, and may well be encouraging the kind of behavior we as citizens find unacceptable, what chance do "just some good cops" really have?
We need to start viewing cops as people, and treating them as people. Fallible, flawed, lazy, scared. The hero worship of police for political gain has gotten to the point where some people are completely deaf to the idea that there is a systemic problem with policing in this country.
And days where you're cursing their problems in one state and mourning their murdered dead in another doesn't make it any easier to come to terms with shit.