The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well.
Edit:
There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -- Stainslaw Jerzy Lec
If we assume there is such thing as human free will (your quote shrinks the possibility of what we can affect with our free will), Police officers are agents who have the ability to see these environmental factors and {choose to stay officers, ignore employer-provided therapy, vote for the union leadership which negotiates their employment contract, etc.}.
We don't have as much control over our lives as we would want, but police (as individuals and as a voting bloc) have significantly more control over the lives of others than us non-police do.