The police in america generally have too much responsibility and consume too many of our resources. When you combine that with the privileged status that comes with law enforcement you get a real mess. The problem is, as in so many cases, fundamentally about power. Until police have less power (that is, less funding, fewer numbers, and a smaller scope of responsibilites), i fear these kinds of abuses are almost unavo…
Part if this is because many other social services are cannibalized either due to drops in tax revenue, or in order to fund the constantly bloating police budgets.
Part of the "defund" process (I know, very poorly named!) is to take both responsibility off police shoulders and $$$ out of police budgets and put those dollars into social response.
A great example are mental wellness response to psychotic breaks among homeless. Rather than having police have to deal with hours of interaction (and police report paperwork), send in qualified health workers, i.e., those that have been trained for years to deal with this rather than a rookie cop with 6 months at the academy.
This would prevent cops from having to handle all kinds of other stuff, especially situations where they are not at all qualified to handle.