Strib, local reporting. As an example. Chemicals were deployed in Seattle during the recent George Floyd - Black Lives Matter protests.
Also down-fund and demilitarize police. Body armor, body cams, yes, as well as head and face protection. NEVER cover badge numbers. Anytime a cop leaves the squad car the body cam should be activated, video and audio. If it can be made automatic, just as auto key fobs lock a car when the fob is removed, it should be easy technology for squad car manufacturers and sellers and body cam manufacturers and sellers to coordinate compliance. Something similar can be done with dash cams.
The point is that no cop should be allowed to interact with any citizen without the interaction being preserved to show misconduct when it happens, each and every time.
But chemical irritants, in effect chemical warfare against citizens should simply cease, nationwide, as a federal mandate - it being a duty of Congress and the President to make it happen.
Cops are to be civil servants, not civil mayhem makers.
That goes for Bob Kroll, and all his union minions. Where the contracts need to make it easier for police leadership to fire bad cops, and where a cop's bad history is logged and kept in central databases where anyone can access and see the record of who did what, when, wrongly, to a citizen.
Without accountability there is mayhem. That has been proven time and again.
Fixing the problem only requires politicians to have the will to act. Prod the bastards into doing the job, folks. It is past due.
________UPDATE_______
Ending qualified immunity is obviously necessary. Also, any encounter where there is misconduct is, by its very nature, an unreasonable search or seizure, and should be grounds to suppress evidence. Making that reform will have prosecutors leaning on cops to behave. In effect, prosecutors having to lose a chance unless they take a proactive role in policing the police.
What was done to lawful protesters, or at least peaceful protesters during the Occupy put-down was unconscionable and should NEVER happen again when economic abuses against the public, the citizens, US, were the tool used to silence overdue protest.
Racial imbalances clearly need to be eliminated; but to see race-based sympathy, while those protesting economic abuses by the powerful against the rest of US get police mayhem, is wrong. Policy should be that fair conduct by police must apply with respect accorded equally, regardless of the abuse being protested. Respect from media and authorities for economic protesters should be no different than when racism is the heart of a protest. If people, US, are being abused aand denied First Amendment assembly and speech rights, by heavy badged thugs, where is freedom and where are rights, if in fact they are officially unprotected against thug cops?
Just as brutality in domestic relationships is recognized with an effort to quell the brutality, the same reasoning should apply when authorities brutally abuse citizens.
If you can be beaten and arrested and run through expensive court processes, you lack the freedoms you may believe you have. The notion that you can be hypothetically told some freedom is "in the Bill of Rights" but if you try to exercise it and are brutalized, then the Bill of Rights is a lie. Which should not be.
