The police need to be policed.

[Answer]

There isn't one thing that needs to be done, because there are a lot of factors and there needs to be a tremendous overhaul of the justice and societal system

1. People shouldn't be getting locked up if they're not an actual threat to society. For years, many people were arrested for marijuana convictions and now half the country is openly selling it, and everyone from the federal government to wallstreet is reaping the rewards. Meanwhile, people there are still people in jail now for holding or selling marijuana. Weed is just one example of a petty crime that was treated far worse than it is, but there are many others. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, we shouldn't be so quick to just put people in jail. At the same time, the prison system also has an entire built-in infrastructure to keep people in prison so they can profit off the legal slave-labor from inmates that is an entire issue in itself that needs to be resolved.

When people get locked up, children grow up without parents, and that can lead to lack of authority figures and/or financial struggles due to one or more of their parents being out of the picture, or even struggling to get jobs because of their past convictions. That can often lead to kids turning to the community around them. If the community around them involves gang activities, there's an increased chance of those kids becoming involved in violence and real crimes, whether it be because they simply don't have some older figure informing them of the consequences, or because of necessity due to a lack of financial opportunities.

There's also something to be said about sexual education and the overall mindframe this country has when it comes to families. The fact that it's socially acceptable to have kids at 18 years old or younger, and have multiple kids without having a stable income or even a stable marriage leads to the same issues. There is a combination of people having kids who are not old enough to be mentally mature enough to raise those kids, people just making poor choices and not using protection, as well as people just having kids because that's seen as "the thing to do", and also just not choosing the right partner to commit to a family with. Having kids at a young age gets in the way of building wealth, especially for those of us who don't have family to inherit wealth from.

2. Police should only be involved when it's necessary. Police shouldn't even be dealing with petty marijuana convictions, minor traffic offenses, etc. That should be reserved for a completely different group of law enforcement officers that don't have guns. They can have tasers for self defense, but they don't need guns. Hell, maybe even start police officers OFF in this unit without guns and if they prove that they can do their job efficiently for non-criminal activities, you can promote them to a position where they can have a gun and respond to more dangerous crimes with a much bigger salary. Police officers should be getting fat paychecks, it's a difficult job. It should be a salary big enough to make people actually want to be police officers, because more money tends to attract higher quality candidates.

Police officers are currently a catch-all for too many things. If there's an issue with someone who has a mental illness, we should send out someone trained to deal with people who have mental illnesses, not a police officer. If someone is a user of drugs, they should be getting help from a rehabilitation facility, that's not something police officers need to be dealing with.

3. Police officers shouldn't be knocking down doors to enter peoples homes. That should only be something orchestrated by the FBI after a thorough amount of wiretapping and concrete evidence shows proof of a much larger infrastructure where it may actually be necessary.

4. Police officers need to be held accountable in court. If someone commits murder, they should be charged for murder. There are certain scenarios where it's understandable that a police officer could "lose their training" if they feel their life it at stake. If shots are being fired, then it's reasonable for a police officer to fire back. I understand that if that's the mentality, it's statistically inevitable that someone will get shot that shouldn't have, but police officers are humans, too and deserve the right to live as well. However, there are far too many instances of people getting murdered due to excessive force in conditions where it's very obvious that their lives were not at all being threatened. George Floyd was one example, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, etc. In all of those cases the police officers should be convicted of murder because they committed murder.

5. Bodycams are already in effect, but they should be mandatory for all police officers and they should not have the ability to turn them off. If it doesn't already exist, there should be a department that reviews bodycam footage and officers should get feedback on their interactions on how they respond to certain situations. If the department sees an officer doing something that is even somewhat unnecessary, it should be pointed out. If police officer A sees police officer B doing that unnecessary thing, they should talk to police officer A and tell them that it's their responsibility to communicate with their partner in the field and discourage the behavior.

6. If a police officer has even one incident where they do something reckless that clearly shows that they're not fit to police, even if it doesn't lead to someone dying, then they should lose the ability to work as a police officer. They can go flip burgers at McDonald's or something. Cut their salary and put them in the unit of police that aren't allowed any weapons and put down orange cones at traffic accidents, but they shouldn't be allowed back into the field with a gun ever again. Many of the officers who have committed the high-profile murders had clear signs in their past showing that they were not fit to be police officers, and those murders could have been prevented if action was taken sooner.

7. Race and implicit stereotypes are absolutely factors. You can give people all the sensitivity training in the world, but racial attitudes in this country are so deeply ingrained that watching videos won't do much to fix it. We need more police officers who are minorities, we need police officers who actually live in the communities that they're protecting. The biggest issue is everyone is willing to say "We need more hispanic/black/female/etc. police officers" but there aren't currently enough hispanic/black/female/etc. people who are saying "I'm willing to be a police officer because I want to be the change I wish to see in the world" enough to actually make a change.

People of all races and genders are affected by excessive police force, but the majority of crimes are always going to take place in high-population low-income communities. I lived in Baltimore, and I couldn't walk a block away from my apartment without running into some homeless person asking for money or heroin addict slumped over in the street. I also visited Seattle and it was exactly the same as Baltimore, except all the homeless people and heroin addicts are white.

Part of the reason these communities are predominantly people of color because we as a country have never actually resolved our failure to transition away from slavery and segregation. One day we said "slavery is over" then all of the people who were enslaved had no land or resources to make a living, so we sold them land with unreasonably high interest rates, then took the land back when they died. If they didn't buy the land, they were considered vagrants and could be arrested, at which point it was legal to enslave them again under the rule that prisoners don't actually have rights.

Meanwhile, white people continued to build wealth that they could pass down to their children and put themselves into communities nearby other wealthy white people so their two kids can meet and make babies from two wealthy families. Black children were not given those same opportunities. Then segregation pushed many of the black communities and other minorities into high-population low-income neighborhoods because white people didn't want them in their neighborhoods. Still to this day many of the schools are segregated, in which schools with mostly people of color pay less money for shittier teachers and a lower quality education than predominantly white schools. People of color need to be given the same educational, networking, employment opportunities that many white kids are receiving.

The thing nobody will admittedly fess up to is just the fact that all humans are inherently tribal. It's the reason why in middle/high school jocks hung out with jocks, goth kids hung out with goth kids, cheerleaders hung out with cheerleaders. Evolutionarily, it was beneficial for us to form our own communities, and outsiders to that community were often considered a threat to your resources. People will always find some identifier for themselves and pit themselves against an opposing identifier, whether that be as a democrat that thinks they're better than a republican or christian that thinks they're better than a muslim. They form stereotypes and create a charicature around their opposing identifier, such as "republicans are dumb". Racism is just one form of tribalism.

There was a time when people in the U.S. were racist toward irish immigrants and italian immigrants. Italians and irish people were also all in high-population low-income areas which bred gang activity and violence. But that kind of racism never stuck because it's incredibly difficult for a white person to look at an irish or italian person and know for a fact that they're irish italian. So all of the italian and irish people who were not associated the gang violence could easily continue living their lives without having to carry those incoming stereotypes from police officers and society as a whole. And it's those stereotypes that lead to cops who view having to go in and arrest a black male as more of a threat than arresting a white one.

unfortunately, there are many more factors. Media is a massive one.. but actually solving it takes work that most of us don't want to put in