el-pietro, you are absolutely correct.
On the one hand, there's little question that American police departments are riddled with authoritarian personalities, a lot of whom are racist bigots.
Further, American police are armed to the teeth, and are frequently ex-military people who have been trained to see "enemies," as opposed to even errant citizens.
But at the same time, American police daily face threats that the police forces of most other advanced nations, at least (I'm not considering the Somalias here!), do not. We have a population that is also armed to the teeth. We have a generations-long "war on drugs" that has criminalized entire sub-populations, even as it made many in that sub-population dependent on illegal activity and violence as one of only a few viable economic activities.
American police in many communities simply cannot function as British bobbies - patrolling a local community without firearms, etc. They wouldn't survive.
So, how to begin to fix all this? First, get serious about gun control... and I mean serious. You want a shotgun, for sport (small game, skeet) or varmint control (assuming you're a farmer). Fine; you need a permit, you need to register that firearm, you need to keep it locked up, you need to submit to inspection of your lockup. If it goes missing or is used in a crime, you are responsible and liable to prosecution.
You want a rifle, for hunting purposes? Again, fine - if you have a permit, if you register the weapon, if you have passed an appropriate safety instruction, and if you have the relevant storage/safety arrangements -again, subject to random inspection.
You want a handgun? Err... no, generally.
You want to "protect yourself" with a firearm? Nope. Statistically, that makes you and your close family more a threat, to yourselves and others, than if the firearm were not there. And no, there's nothing in the Constitution that gives you a "right" to such armed self-protections. The language of the Second Amendment is not ambiguous ("A well-regulated militia..."). Arguments to the contrary are just blatantly dishonest (so if anybody wants to forward such an argument, and self-identify as dishonest, be my guest).
Voluntary surrender. Buybacks. Elimination of sales of new prohibited classes of weapons. A requirement that non-prohibited weapons be properly permitted and registered within a fixed (and short) grace period. The prosecution, at felony level, of any person found to have a non-permitted and registered firearm after the grace period.
At the same time, and end to the "war on drugs." Treat addiction as the disease it is. Stop wasting public resources pursuing marijuana users, growers, distributors (while treating nicotine as... what? Harmless?).
And then, when the public gun menace is addressed, remove all the military and para-military hardware from local police forces. They don't need it; they cannot use it responsibly.
Did I mention drug testing of police? All of them, repeatedly - at a frequency that eliminates the ability to use a banned substance and even hope that it will be "out of the system" before the next test. Focus on anabolic steroids, not recreational drugs that don't affect personality. Identify the officers whose steroid use creates aggressive behavior, and make them ex-officers - with no hope of ever being a police officer again, in any jurisdiction. They can be letter carriers, or work at Amazon or some such.
schillingfan raises an important point, too. Too many Americans not only value individual rights over community, they deny that they have any obligations to others, to any community or society. They are, in political or economic terms, free riders. They want, they demand, they take. They don't give back. I don't know if we can really shame such behaviors (does shame exist any more, in these United States), but we can certainly identify these behaviors, and these people - and if necessary, ridicule them.
We have to do something, or our society will cease to function as what we used to call a "liberal democracy," as opposed to an authoritarian or fascist state (back when "liberalism" referred to the Enlightenment, and hadn't been redefined as a slur by authoritarians, religious fanatics and other antediluvians). We are, IMHO, literally at risk of abandoning the values and insights of the Enlightenment, and retreating to something more medieval - which would not bode well for the future of the United States.
/rant
