I was travelling a few years ago, and hanging out in the hotel bar in Portland, Maine, and I listened in on a heated conversation between some guy and a lady whose husband is a cop. They were discussing police brutality and the protests at the time (Baltimore maybe?), and the lady's point was basically "do whatever you want with regulating police behaviour, but I will take my husband coming home at the end of the night over anything else"
It's possible with the falling rates of crime, this may just solve itself (though increasing police training and standards is a good thing regardless).
- https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/09/30/new-fbi-data-v... - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about...
The latter indicates that, depending on which data you use, the violent crime rate dropped 50–75% between 1993 and 2018 (the larger drop is from BJS, which has some methodology for estimating unreported crimes). The property crime rate dropped at 50–70% over the same time period.
Various actors in society—police gangs (sorry, “unions”), public prosecutors, for-profit prison operators, and straight up fascists—have been stoking fears of Americans for decades such that there are people who genuinely believe that America (as a whole) has more crime even when the numbers completely put a lie to that.
I’m certain that the leaks from this will reinforce what we should already know: America is increasingly a surveillance state of its police against its people, that the police rarely end up doing the jobs that they are nominally hired for (solving crimes), and that there has been an overall reduction in crime but an increase in policing outsized compared to the value police forces provide.
Don’t believe the bollocks.