I’m not sure that I’ve proposed a model of policing. If anything, prior to 1985 there was actually less of a check on police power in this sort of situation. The common law that went back to our founding and even earlier held that police could kill any fleeing felon. (OTOH, there were fewer offenses that were considered felonies, but assaulting a police officer and taking his weapon surely would have been one of them.)
Policing is inherently a slippery slope with limits that are difficult to formalize. The quality of policing is fundamentally a function of culture rather than of formal limits. A healthy culture can place few such limits on its police yet still have civilized policing that respects the citizenry.
I would submit that prior to 1985, there wasn't a cop under every rock, so it was less of an issue. Plus, police weren't trained to "confront at all costs", as they are today.
We're inundated with "law enforcement" people of every stripe these days.
They sure drive fancy rigs, too - wish I could maintain my vehicles and property like that. I guess when money is no object (you just seize it from malefactors like Robert Durst), you can operate like that...
The American legal tradition stems from a root that is all about putting limits on what the agents of government may do. From the Magna Carta onwards, the major developments in Western legal tradition are all about guaranteeing freedom from violent and arbitrary impositions of government.
The strict limits put on government power in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the explicit text of the Declaration of Independence all speak directly to that tradition. The enormous benefits of the innovations in human liberty such as freedom of conscience, the right to a trial of one’s peers, the right to be secure in one’s property, and others all exist for this purpose.
I will have to disagree with the assertion that a civilized society can co-exist with one that has limited checks on police power - the two don’t go together, and the idea that they do runs directly counter to these central legal concepts of Western civilization. Unchecked power is always abused; surely the Obama administration is evidence enough that the argument to limit the power of the government over citizens.
Gut feelings, discretion and perception together have another name, by which the founders called this type of law enforcement: “arbitrary” - the opposite of lawfulness.
A law enforcement officer must be bound by the law. By substituting other elements for explicit authorization in law, we depart from a system of law and justice and end up with something else, something in which you or I have no rights or liberties worth the name.