If you can't hold police officers responsible for bad actions, it doesn't matter what their predispositions are. Plus, having a few black cops on 8th Street doe

If you can't hold police officers responsible for bad actions, it doesn't matter what their predispositions are. Plus, having a few black cops on 8th Street does no good if a white cop on 9th Street is happy to bash a suspect's head against the sidewalk after getting the handcuffs on. More generally, there may be some groups of potential victims of brutality (eg the mentally ill, or children) that you could never reasonably represent on a police force, but you must still ensure that those people can have safe interactions with police. Extrajudicial violence by police (beyond what is appropriate to carry out the job) is more a function of the way the police force operates and maintains discipline, than a function of the predisposition of any individual officer. I contend that you could structure a police force with the appropriate training and disciplinary practices, such that it would operate fairly even if all of its officers were white supremacists. Conversely, you could put a group of good people into a police force with bad institutional structure with poor oversight and no checks on bad behavior, and they would end up doing bad things. Instead of asking ourselves about individual predispositions, which are neither observable nor predictable, we should talk about how to build institutional culture and practices that safeguard against bad behavior.