Absolutely: there are multiple publics that support that for different reasons. Some because of an imagined alignment between the police and themselves--either because they've essentially bought into the benevolent vision of policing that American popular culture has relentlessly offered for seventy years or because, frankly, they expect the police to suppress other racial and ethnic groups.
But there's another public too that simply doesn't care for a rights-based conception of human life and believes in force much more indiscriminately. That public is absolutely an enemy of any better future.
I think another obstacle to reforming the police is that a substantial part of the public *want* police to have impunity.
Absolutely: there are multiple publics that support that for different reasons. Some because of an imagined alignment between the police and themselves--either because they've essentially bought into the benevolent vision of policing that American popular culture has relentlessly offered for seventy years or because, frankly, they expect the police to suppress other racial and ethnic groups.
But there's another public too that simply doesn't care for a rights-based conception of human life and believes in force much more indiscriminately. That public is absolutely an enemy of any better future.