The Minneapolis city council has pledged to disband the city’s police department and replace it with a new system of public safety, a historic move that comes as calls to defund law enforcement are sweeping the US.
Police Officers should be held to A HIGHER STANDARD. This is commonly expressed. But simply disbanding police departments and replacing them with essentially another name isn't enough. There needs to be policy and changes at the MO level that enforces transparency and accountability. More screening also needs to be done to ensure that recruits are not trigger happy warmongers excited to try out their military grade weapons any opportunity they get.
My suggestion: change the presumption of innocence to presumption of guilt for excessive force complaints and deaths while in police custody. If the officers can't prove innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, they are convicted and sentenced.
This will require breaking police unions, which is a political conundrum. As a rule, every political candidate has to tip their hat to law enforcement. Nobody ever ran against Law and Order.
Police forces were originally organized out of posses formed to capture and return escaped slaves, so re-construction is necessary in many cases to break the founding tradition of racism.
Further, police work attracts sociopaths, psychopaths, sadists and narcissists and it may be easier to put all of them through a re-hiring procedure to weed out personality disorders.