Police culture in the United States is brutal and intentionally so.

Just the other day a group of seven officers pepper sprayed a nine-year-old Black girl whom they had already handcuffed, accusing her of acting like a child because she would not comply with their orders.

Then they stuffed her in the back of a cruiser without doing anything to help relieve the pain in her eyes.

This is not unusual. It’s how cops behave routinely, and it’s how they are trained to behave. This creates a feedback loop whereby police departments train their employees to be brutal bullies, and attract more candidates who like being brutal bullies.

The public are outraged at this latest incident, but it’s really instructive that the police union involved, and an assistant commissioner of the police department, immediately made statements that pepper spraying a small child who was already handcuffed was “required” by police procedures.

They are so inured to brutality that they seem unable to comprehend that brutalizing a small child who is already handcuffed is wrong.

The people of Rochester, New York, where this happened, are demanding reform. But it seems very unlikely that the police are going to change anything, because they seem completely unable to comprehend that they did anything wrong.

The public are going to have to become much more outraged and use much more political force. And I think that a huge bulk of police are going to have to be fired and replaced with decent people before anything changes.

Until something changes, disabled people and people of color are going to remain at the tip of the spear of police brutality, which is not a bug in the system but how the system is designed to work.