I subscribe to a couple YouTube channels that specialize in airing video of police interactions in the US. Most of the videos come from Freedom of Information requests for police body-cam footage.
The videos reveal a brutal, violent, deeply disrespectful culture on the part of most cops. But short of hospitalization or death, mainstream news media rarely air the videos.
If you're proactive about it, you can daily watch cops daily escalate innocuous situations into violence. You can watch them make unreasonable demands, drag people out of automobiles, knock them to the ground, painfully handcuff them – all over trivial matters. You can watch them joke and snicker about it among themselves.
You can watch them demand to identify people when they don't have the legal right to, and you can watch them retaliate with violence when people rightfully refuse.
Police culture in the United States is absolutely out of control. Disrespect and violence are par for the course, not exceptions to the rule. Police departments aggressively defend their officers' violent, disrespectful, unprofessional behavior. Police unions defend it even more aggressively.
If not for Freedom of Information request and body cams, most of this violence would go unwitnessed and unreported. But even with it, few people are talking about it, and even fewer are outraged or demanding change.
And I guess this goes without saying, but I should mention that in most of these videos the victims of routine police brutality are Black.
I thought after the summer of 2020 that we as a nation were going to do something about the brutal people whose staff our police departments. But apparently, we're just fine with them terrorizing American streets.
The thugs are in charge, and that's just the way it's going to be for now. Until the American people stand up and refuse to take it anymore.