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Charges reduced for police officer who secretly taped colleagues’ racist remarks
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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Now that I think about it, maybe you just aren't understanding how broad of a category "fix the police" is.
"Execute all existing cops and start again with a completely different set of people with a completely different set of rules" is an idea that would fall under the umbrella of "fix the police".
The reason that laws truely exist is because there's someone to enforce them. "Police" is just the term used for whoever is doing that enforcement, whatever form it takes.
Don't get too hung up on the rape part. I just used that as an example of a law that we can all agree needs to exist. If I said "theft", there would be the added complication of whether or not that law should even exist in the first place.
Is there any reason to believe that doing any of that would actually fix the problems in policing? It's like saying the problem with the American colonies was that they didn't have the right king ruling over them. The problem is that people given power over other people are eventually going to abuse it.
Historically, some societies dealt with this by not having police at all (and I'm not talking tribes of 20 people, I'm talking tens of thousands of people) and having strong social networks to protect each other. That along with freedom of movement allowed people to seek out new communities or spend time away from the source of the conflict. Others had 'police' that could only use force on others during specific periods of time and rotated between different groups so that no one group held too much power. But this is closer to jury duty than anything that people would recognize as modern policing, and just like today there isn't a guy who's a professional juror who makes his living off voting on peoples' innocence or guilt (and occasionally gets caught taking bribes), in these societies there wasn't a type of guy that was a cop because the idea of it being your job to hurt people and force them to obey someone was considered abhorrent. If you want to read more about this it's not directly about policing, but I recommend 'The Dawn of Everything' by Matt Graeber and David Wengrow.
In the modern world, I really don't think you are going to be able to get away from having a professional police force, at least in the major cities. There's simply far too many people. Maybe a better situation looks somewhat like how firefighters are. Part time officers who just respond as needed in small communities, and you only have the full time forces in major cities. Even that gets hard, based solely on how much easier mobility has become relevant to the past.
At the end of the day, I don't think there's any one set of things to can do to make it perfect. There's a whole lot of smaller things to do to improve it, but I think the most important part will have to be much stronger oversight, and actual punishments for when one inevitably steps out of line.