What I don't understand is why the Houston and UCLA incidents cannot be prosecuted as criminal actions. Injuring an 83 year old with a horse and multiple tasering of a student would appear to be criminal acts to me.
DA's won't prosecute, and juries are loathe to convict cops on criminal charges. Remeber the guy in NYC that got sodomized with a toilet plunger? Or the guy Springsteen wrote "American Skin (41 Shots)" about. Neither of those resulted in criminal charges. The only recourse seems to be a civil suit. Even then it doesn't hurt the cops because it is the city that pays.
The failure to prosecute police for clearly criminal actions has a corrosive effect on the entire justice system. Images like this make it impossible to trust the police when one's time for jury duty comes around.
There are a few reforms I would like to see:
1) Mandatory termination of police officers for filing one false report. This would discourage officers from covering up misconduct of fellow officers.
2) Investigations of misconduct done by a separate body from the police or other law enforcement. Having the police department investigate it's own officers for misconduct is like having Enron check it own books.
3) Pay for police management tied hitting targets for lowering payouts in civil suits.
