That is, do racist assholes disproportionately gravitate towards the police force? Or does the police force disproportionately turn ordinary people into racist assholes?
This one, probably, as usually racist+fascist assholes are the ones who dream of wearing an uniform and carry weapons so they can "feel the power" over other people. It's a selection problem, which I'm sure those responsible are very aware of and have no intention to change. A violent cop is a perfect weapon for corrupt governments and politicians: he does nasty things for you and when he retires he becomes part of your private "police" as eternal gratitude for having saved his ass multiple times for those nasty things. That is also very likely the reason why there are many accounts of cops abusing steroids (side effects very similar to cocaine) but so far it seems no serious investigation has been started.
You can't be expected to punish the police when you need them to do your job, which is the position DAs are in. If they were to lose the trust if the police then they wouldn't have the super they need to go their job. A statewide role of internal enforcement that's separate from the DA and is an unelected role appointed by the governor or legislative body would likely be the best one could do for this role and provide the freedom to do the job effectively.
Add to that punishments should come out of the insurance funds for the force meaning police organizations that are truly terrible would get shut down when they could not afford their insurance. Also a national police database with all punitive actions against officers that is permanent and not removable unless ordered by a judge would go a long way to prevent officers who get punished in multiple locations from just moving to a new job.
Do you have evidence for this?
If anyone of us had evidence of this the cat would be already out of the bag, so unfortunately I don't. There is however evidence that selection is deeply flawed, so I wonder why the same criteria that would have me sacked in no time by any company HR department if I behaved as such can't apply there. Racist violent people aren't usually that smart at hiding it, I know some of them and usually 30 minutes of chit chat is more than enough to expose their ideologies and how wrong would be to give them that power.
You’d have to get a department to consent to the random sampling of its officers’ social media histories. (Can’t just use public data due to the selection bias it entails.)
The data are there, being dutifully logged by everyone’s cell phones and flung off to servers across the world. Ethically accessing them is the political problem.
He talks at length about how the skill sets necessary to investigative work and community policing have largely been lost as a result of the focus on meeting drug war quotas.
These individuals should be punished no doubt and likely will be as a result of this article.
I don’t have the source on hand. But the elevated rates of domestic violence (like 4x baseline) in policing households is unusually prominent in the United States.
If the US or job is higher that could be a serious problem that they need to look into (if it isn’t already, which I doubt). There has to be more to this than the police are just over-selecting for evil people.
Although the US has to be one of the highest numbers of police dealing with people with weapons. I remember the WaPo database of police shootings showing that almost all of them (95%+ except one or two involved people with weapons). Adding all the people who didn’t get shot but still had a dangerous weapon, that can have some PTSD. Which famously rears its head in many unexpected self-destructive ways.