[happytoexplain]

I think most people don't appreciate that a non-negligible amount of police officers are simply interested in the opportunity to exert violence, and even to kill. The same mindset is observable in homeowners/storeowners with fantasies about defending their property/family from an intruder (exactly where they land on the conversational spectrum between "defend from" and "kill" depends both on their own morality and on the present company). This mindset is expressed even more openly in the military, which makes sense.

If even 1% of police officers have this mindset, that's a spectacular failure of civilized society. In apparent probability, it's somewhere north of 1%. But how small could we realistically get this number via policy (assuming a magical ability to measure it)? It might be so ingrained in present society and/or human nature, and so hard to test for, that we can't eliminate or even satisfactorily minimize it. I hope eventually we take meaningful steps toward the one realistic thing we can attempt: Mercilessly removing such officers from the force when they do make their morality/incompetence clear. Unfortunately, to do this, we would need to somehow work around the despicable protection such officers are granted by their own, and by voters, which is complicated by consisting partly of genuine support for an incredibly difficult and critical job, and partly by unspoken (and sometimes spoken) support for oppression and violence.