And the people that I think are those who most want to help those in need and are compassionate, careful, and would take accountability seriously are those who don't want to do the job.
There is also a kinship/bond that grows, which is hard to break. It's natural. You see it among sports fans, school alumni, console fan boys, company workers, etc... You see things through exceptionally biased glasses. Try to find a sports fan who feels like their team tends to be FAVORED by refs? You won't find them -- they all seem to think the refs are against their team -- every team's fans feel this way. Every team's fans feel like the fight on the field was instigated by the other team.
Given these things, how do you mitigate against them, and construct a police force that is reasonable? I personally think it has to be external oversight, but this hasn't been easy to implement historically.
Not discounting your point at all, but the best response when someone says this is to point out that the saying is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". It's very literal- an apple that's going bad releases fumes that cause other apples nearby to spoil. So it's very important to find them and get rid of them before that happens.
Completing the analogy is an exercise left to the reader.
[0] - https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-can...
[1] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/deadly-force-police-...
Show me a group that doesn't do this.
In Seattle's 2020 cop-free zone CHOP/CHAZ, the self-appointed "security forces" killed an unarmed 16-year-old. It's all on video, and the statements made by the assailants in the aftermath are heinous. Plenty of people were there to see it, but nobody's talking, and at this point it looks like they'll probably never catch the killers.
I don't excuse or accept bad behavior by cops. But I can't call policing unethical by nature unless you can show me an alternative that is more ethical. Seattle got an experiment in the alternative, and it was not good.
The 16 year old was Antonio Mays. He drove a car through the occupied park and at a group of protesters. It's all on video? Not only parts of the aftermath? Where?
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/seattle-police-carried-...
I realize this answer is lacking, but I've had this argument so many times and it drains hours out of my day to pursue it - because the supporting data is complicated and people are correct to provide counter arguments (and then I have to respond and it goes back and forth for a while). I encourage you to do your own research on statistics regarding police officers in the US. The one everybody likes to cite is how many police officer's beat their wives - 40%. And even this data point is very complicated and requires a lot of nuance and so on.
But since people enjoy stories, here's one egregious example of a sheriff's department abusing their power. Even I think this is exceptionally awful and most police departments aren't this bad, but it's well researched and makes for a good read.
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...