In my opinion, the two biggest contributing factors to public outrage over continued police abuses of force are the unwillingness of other police officers to call out obvious mistakes and the resistance to efforts that would hold police accountable for misconduct. Until these two things change, it will be very difficult to stop outrage over police use of force even when it is justified.
This is taken from a discussion I had on Facebook with a friend of mine who is a former dispatcher and is married to a police officer. I've tried to present the other person's viewpoint through inference to add context, but the point I'm trying to make is my own.
Calling the deaths of Tamir Rice, John Crawford, and Freddie Grey mistakes shouldn't be at all difficult. Supporting efforts to reduce these types of mistakes should be a given. Instead, attempts to create oversight committees and review boards are fought tooth and nail in almost every instance. Encouraging legal efforts to find the truth, even if that means a trial for one of their own, would help this argument. Instead, we get dishonesty in the face of video evidence. Instead, we get a police chief, a union president, the media, and people all over Facebook blaming the victims.
Hiding behind the blue wall of silence is not courage, it is cowardice.
Black lives matter. The lives of police matter. All lives matter!
That said, police choose to serve. I'd even argue that the majority of them choose to serve for good reasons, but not all of them do. The lack of oversight, the lack of prosecution, the lack of terminations for proven dishonesty, and the indifference to the deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of police, only serve to encourage people with other motives to join the police forces across the country. The rallying around of other police (or the unwillingness to say that someone else made a mistake) might exacerbate both the desire of people to join the force that aren’t doing so for good reasons and the likelihood that someone on the force will act carelessly. We have seen time and time again recently that police can act without consequences, so what reason is there to be more careful?
It also supports the idea that all police are the same. I understand that people who might find themselves in a similar situation should not jump to judgment quickly, but if you can't call such an obvious mistake what it is, then why would people think you would do anything different in the same situation? Why should people believe that some police are good when none of them are calling the bad police out?
The lack of oversight doesn’t benefit the police force; it doesn’t benefit police families like yours; it doesn’t benefit the citizenry. It only serves to escalate tensions. Trial juries judge people’s actions all the time, despite little knowledge of the situation or the applicable laws beforehand. You don’t need to be a banker to know when bankers do something egregious. You don’t need to be a QB to know Jay Cutler sucks at his job. Police should be advocating in favor of reasonable (a mix of civilian, former police, other legal professionals, etc.) review processes.
And since you mentioned the military previously, you'll notice that veterans frequently protest what they've—through their experiences—determined to be unjust use of military force. I've seen one very modest example of that from police, and it was a Richmond, CA, police chief (and he was openly criticized by several police unions). There should be more of this. There should be less victim blaming. There should be fewer show-trial grand juries and more real trials. The disparity in the prosecution rates from grand juries for police or other citizens is astronomical. Their unions provide the legal defense, so why is a real trial so difficult if the officer is innocent? After all, the people they kill don’t get the courtesy of hearing the facts, at least let their families understand why it was justified instead of a show-grand jury where the prosecutor defends the police.
I understand there are places that are different. I’m sure there are greater oversight, accountability, and responsibility in some police forces. The Bay Area seems—for the most part—to be more even-handed in their response to protesting than Ferguson or Baltimore. Perhaps the Bay Area is an exception to the rule, so forgive me for lumping everyone together. But I stand by my point that, in general, there should be greater oversight of the use of police force, there should be greater vocal condemnation for poor police practices by police, and there should be consequences for people who make mistakes that cost people their lives.
Finally, I understand your concerns for the safety of your family, but I think that more action on the part of good police officers— 1) to acknowledge the mistakes of others, 2) to support effort to reduce these types of incidents, and 3) to support consequences for people who cross the line—would help to de-escalate tensions, and would actually make police and their families safer.