[xybffmrr] Good cop bad cop

There are two contradictory viewpoints about the police as an institution and how the institution induces police brutality.

One viewpoint is, the institution has many safeguards to weed out bad people, so is mostly populated by good people who want to do good for society.  No set of safeguards are perfect, so some bad cops do make it through, and given police by the nature of their profession end up in high pressure situations with little margin for error and high stakes, both the mistakes by good cops and the malice by bad cops become unnaturally magnified.

The other viewpoint is, the institution of policing preferentially selects for bad cops, or causes good people to become bad via the Lucifer Effect.  The overarching mechanism is that society does not want police to do good: it instead wants police to maintain order.  And maintaining order necessarily means maintaining the stratifications of society, keeping down the lower classes.  Police that accomplish maintaining order -- by whatever means -- are preferentially hired, not fired, and promoted.  For the most part, society, especially the upper classes, are willing to look the other way so long as order is maintained.  (All these cameras are beginning to make it difficult for society to look the other way.)  Police forces hire heavily from the military, and military training is of course about learning to suspend the natural instinct for compassion and to obey orders to kill enemy people without hesitation.

(We've expressed these viewpoints in terms of "good" and "bad", which might be philosophically shaky ground.)

It is important to establish which viewpoint is correct in order to properly formulate policy.  It might be that both mechanisms are occurring, but we need to know which is the stronger effect.  I strongly suspect the latter is the stronger effect: as good as the people within a police force might hypothetically be, they cannot escape the incentives society places on them.

If the latter viewpoint is true but we formulate policies assuming the former to be true (wishful thinking), it will be a waste of time and effort.  No additional safeguards to weed out bad cops or to prevent bad behavior will be effective, because society will counterbalance it, somehow, with more incentives or mechanisms to maintain order.  We predict the oversight of police will do "one hand giveth while the other hand taketh away" for the net maintenance of the status quo.  (Previously, predicting lynching.)

If the latter viewpoint is true, then the correct course of action seems a wholesale dismantling of the current institution of police, and rebuilding it from scratch with entirely different goals and incentives.  I'm not sure how the new institution should operate, though one step might be to ban ex-military from police forces.