“I don’t think it is a morph so much as we now get to hear of police misconduct”
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No, I observed it in small town police prior to my leaving the US.
Little bedroom towns were beefing up their police departments, hiring young bucks who thought they were going to police a big city like Detroit. They had all the swat gear and loved practicing with it. They wanted to emulate the latest TV show cops. I doubt that even the town fathers realized what they were getting into.
By contrast, we had a police department here in Maywood mostly composed of officers from other jurisdictions. They took the cut in pay to get away from problems they had in their original job. Some worked out, because they tried to get away from political problems. Others were the problem officers from other jurisdictions and brought their problems here.
Happy ending! We eventually fired our local police department. We don’t have one. We pay the Sheriff for patrols. Our tiny (one sq mile) bedroom community fairly ethnically homogeneous (95% hispanic) doesn’t have to generate blotter traffic for some officer’s quota, and yet has access to the resources of the LA county sheriff in the event of anything big.
I wish I could say we did it because our politicians were smart, but no, we did it because the city ran out of money.