> Im not yet sure how we should address this

We could start by banning police unions. Make individual officers accountable for their own behavior. Fully transparent data collection on everything they do. Turn some of our fancy machining learning technology loose on that data to identify the bad seeds and weed them out.

How about a separate agency that is accountable to citizens who has the power and mandate to police the police? Not just another department of the existing police, but someone accountable to the governor, or the citizens directly.

At some level I would expect that good cops want this accountability as much as the general public does. Is it really true that cops are predominantly bad? I sincerely hope that is not true.

Also, stop expecting police officers to be social workers. Police officers project force, power and violence on behalf of the state. Migrate a subset of law enforcement officers to social work positions. That is assuming that crime doesn't spike in the process.

Wouldn't doing that imply we expect police officers to behave the exact way they're behaving now? How does that help?

Isn't it better to expect police officers to provide an actual benefit to society, and construct laws from that point of view?

Was speaking with my Co-worker from Beijing earlier today, apparently many (all?) neighborhoods have dedicated officers that focus just on solving social problems in that community. Seems like a great idea in theory.

That's true, that neighbour watch officer is also an extra pair of ears for the government

That’s a good idea as well. I just read a couple of articles (They’re back at my computer so I don’t have links handy, sorry) and apparently the Minneapolis mayor has put together a task force on different ways to completely dismantle their police force and build it from scratch–I suspect an idea like yours would fit in nicely, take some of the current forces overblown budget and redirect a bit more of the funds towards programs which are aimed at making a community healthier rather than an enemy.

I think these are absolutely all things which need to be included in the (likely long) list of things to be done, but my suspicions are that the most difficult thing to address is going to be that a tremendous fraction of the police view american citizens as an enemy (And no, I don’t think that’s hyperbolic, I think these past few days demonstrate this pretty clearly.)

And I’m absolutely not discounting your thoughts, those need to be done as well.

What a fucking mess.

When you mentioned retaliation, I assumed the police would be roughing people up or harassing them over trivial offences or something. (Classic TV examples: going wild on parking or DUI enforcement at a targeted politician's fundraisers).

But this is a work slowdown.

"We should have less policing."

"Okay, here's less policing."

Isn't it the point of "defund the police" that fewer incidents get a police response?

I have seen examples where the police union was able to turn off the 911 service and simply give a phone message that said something to the effect of, "we wish we could help you, but your city council has denied us funding".