My sense is that the reality is less dire but more disempowering than that.

I just don't think they care.

I think the Black Lives Matter movement nailed it: to too many cops, black lives don't matter. You stay in line? Fine, whatever, you don't matter. You get out of line? Fine, you're dead, who cares, you don't matter.

(Everyone outside the police forces: also, nobody really matters. If it doesn't directly impact me, who cares? Yes, of course these are overgeneralizations--lots of people do care, and lots of police do care, but the failures are far too widespread.)

I don't think there's any organizing principle. No goal, not aside from a few crazies. Just indifference. Look at Uvalde--did officers even act like kids from their own community mattered? Nope.

When you have a heavily militarized police department (both in terms of hardware and attitudes), indifference kills.

Of course there are some genuine racists, supremacists, and the like among the police forces. Why wouldn't there be--where better to go if your idea of fun is to lord in your superiority and be able to bully your lessers around?

But mostly, I just don't think they care about their whole communities. Maybe they care about part, maybe only themselves. But everyone should matter.

This is why I think we need drastic criminal justice reform, including police forces who are better trained, better funded, better equipped (with body armor and nonlethal alternatives, not more guns!), and have the to serve part of their mission first and foremost in their hearts.

I don't know how to deal with the Gendrons of the world in a realistic way. But police violence? As a society, we just need to make caring the #1 requirement for the job.

Then people stay alive far more often, and killing really is retained for only the very last resort.