Here is the real question: how do you do community policing in the low-income black neighborhoods of Baltimore? How do you rebuild trust?
[1] As well as the practice of ignoring the deaths of gang members. Maybe they got themselves into their predicament, but you're not going to build trust among their friends and family by treating their deaths as inconsequential, especially given the prevalence of gang membership along a wide spectrum of involvement.
You arrest and prosecute the perpetrators just as quickly and with just as much or more punishment than the "regular" public would get. And you keep doing that to any cop who breaks the law. You also get rid of (and prosecute) the "good" cops who don't report the bad ones.
IOW you show the community that you (the local government) means business when it comes to ending the problem.
This is why I say the police are corrupt. Looking the other way is corrupt, even if you didn't take part in the corruption.
Would the officer in McKinney the other day feel compelled to resign if he hadn't been caught "red handed" on video? Would his fellow officers have even reported him? I seriously doubt it, and because many of us probably have that doubt then it's up to the police to make that idea unthinkable among the public.
Time.
Unfortunately trust is earned, and once it is lost it takes twice as long to win back. Baltimore might have issues between the police and community for tens of years to come, but if they start working closely with the community, and actually making changes based on community feedback you may see it turn around slowly.
It may also help to recruit from within the community, more black officers, and more locals in general. That will help sew the bonds of trust between the police and the community (rather than it feeling like us Vs. them).
In general the police need a much better attitude from the top upon down.
I don't know how true that is or if Camden is typical enough that the experience would generalize.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/us/politics/obama-to-limit...
What might exist in Camden that doesn't exist elsewhere is that, at least as far as local government goes, Camden doesn't have the governing tensions that exist in other cities, with a rich "governing class" (read: white yuppies) doing all that they can to "protect themselves" from "the others". Like all cities, it gets thoroughly screwed by the State, but at least locally, has far less of an internal "us" and "them" than, say, Philadelphia (which lies just across the river, and has neighborhoods with similar problems to Camden, but less policymaking authority to address them).
I'm no expert on this, but I can think of important counterexamples, so I'm not sure this is true at all.
Counterexample #1 - New York. It seems that this name is pretty much synonymous with the city plus a bit of surrounding area, and the upstate regions are completely forgotten. In particular, the areas that have to host NYC's water supply get particularly hosed: their economies are significantly based on tourism and fishing, but the flow of the Upper Delaware is entirely governed by NYC needs, ignoring the fish. Further, the State has banned fracking, largely in order to guarantee the integrity of the reservoirs, and at the expense of the only opportunity that those living on the Marcellus Shale have to escape their rut.
Counterexample #2 - Austin, TX. Again relating to water, it seems that the city gets priority access to water (a scarce commodity in much of TX). Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan were sacrificed, emptying to something around 30% capacity (I forget the exact numbers) until our recent floods, so that Ladybird Lake (the center of the city) could be kept beautiful and full - and they're even talking about building a water park. So suburban and rural interests were subordinated to aesthetics in the city.
I suspect this has already been pre-co-opted in the United States. Journalists and community leaders and pastors and all sorts of others reflexively support, admire, and praise the police.
> A lot of other countries do this, and it works well.
They can do it because their culture(s) isn't so toxic.
The expectation of unlimited trust is just as bad for police work as total distrust, because neither is well aligned to what is important: That the police are there to serve the community, not to serve some laws or some ideals. When policemen feel that they are better than other people, nothing good can come out of it.
This is part of the American police's self image too. I can find plaques for sale at the supermarket with inspirational sentences about the superiority of law enforcement above mere mortals.
I can only imagine how those products would fail to sell back home in Spain.
If a bunch of gangbangers "hate" cops then that's fine. But when the good law abiding citizens within a community lose faith in the police service, then that police service becomes ineffective since the community won't help with the police's core mission. Or to phase it another way, the police are an arm of the community, they aren't a law upon themselves (in the figurative sense).
A lot of other countries do this, and it works well.
It is a completely different mindset. All law abiding citizens are now allies in this "war" rather than potential law breakers. You actually have police respond to legitimate community concerns rather than trivial things only the police care about (e.g. DUIs might be a big community concern as opposed to prostitution stings).
Honestly the first thing the US absolutely needs is citizen oversight of police (and police complaints). As long as police police themselves, nothing constructive will happen.