That seems to be the key issue?
You can even fund the police adequately, but not spend that cash in distinguished mentally-challenged fellowed shit like APCs and military gear like you're stationed in Fallujah, which actually sends the opposite message about what a police force is even supposed to be, in a civilized society.
Being a cop definitely shouldn't be something any fucking idiot can sign up to do and get in.
If the job entails asserting your authority on other people (physically and otherwise) and has a culture of impunity, trying to only hire angels won't change much. Dozens of Buffalo PD walked by that old man as he was lying on the ground and bleeding not because every individual one of them was a particularly bad person, but because of what sort of behavior the system rewards, punishes, and conditions the officers to see as normal.
Better screening probably couldn't hurt though. I just wouldn't put too much hope into it.
I agree, and "hiring better people" is such an abstract condition in practical terms, that means little, beyond "don't give a badge to the psychopath with the Mussolini tattoo" (a standard most police institutions around the world are still below, nevertheless).
Still, i think you can consider the concept of "funding" beyond the idea of larger wages, and "better training" shouldn't just mean: better ways to beat the shit out of people.
Basically, start from renouncing the idea that a cop is merely a guard dog to capital interest.
This is a cultural shift that takes decades, anyway.
I don't like to generalize the idea of police brutality as just a global phenomenon, because it takes away from what is clearly a huge issue in the US in particular, but it is true to an extent that the position tends to attract a certain
type of person (
).
So that type of behavior is really what you should specifically look for, identify, and curtail as much as possible.
As an outside observer, this seems especially hard for the US, because it looks like a society particularly uncaring in structure (from work culture, to healthcare, bootstrap rhetorics, homelessness), but again, that's just the view from my distorted lens.
