I agree with what you have to say about the police. Not only that, but people forget that most of the people police come into professional contact with are, in fact, criminals. Quite a lot of informal but institutionalized racism results from taking people out of middle class neighborhoods and plunking them into the middle of very poor, broken, homogeneously black or hispanic neighborhoods, and then making them a magnet for every bad thing that happens in those neighborhoods. It should surprise nobody that people placed in that situation act the way they do.

To me, that suggests that we need sweeping and creative reforms not merely to make the police more effective or impartial, but to actively combat the psychological effect that policing has on veteran officers. Instead, we seem to be pulling them off foot patrols and sticking them into cars to create rapid response forces. That may work as an emergency triage against violent crime outbreaks, but it exacerbates the damage the job does to the professionals who have to do it.

On the other hand: 90% of what was upsetting about this article was the result of judges and the probation system. I have much less sympathy for a judge than I do for a police.

Urban criminal judges are almost completely unaccountable. Chicago judges are elected, and each election cycle, papers and blogs run horror stories about incompetent judges who no rational elector could vote for. And every election cycle, the exact same slate of horrible judges gets reelected. A civic-minded hacker that wanted to improve the criminal justice process in the US could make a large dent in the problem by coming up with something that would help the electorate handle judicial elections. For virtually everyone living in a big city, judicial elections are entirely opaque; city papers don't even cover them.