This is anecdotal at best, so take it for what you will, but where I lived the cops used to be much much more violent. Beating up hippies with sticks for shits

This is anecdotal at best, so take it for what you will, but where I lived the cops used to be much much more violent. Beating up hippies with sticks for shits and giggles and the like. While far from perfect we've managed to get to a state where unprompted beatings like that basically don't happen. And if something like that does happen, it also tends to lead to police officers getting fired. For reference: it's a fireable offence for a police officer to gesture to their gun without cause. The way we got here was by, essentially, an uproar from the public. Action groups would go out and intentionally irritate cops, leading to large scale beatdowns. The public took notice and swayed opinion towards "wtf are these cops doing beating up innocent kids". Now like I said it's far from perfect, there's still a racism problem in our police force, but at least there aren't frequent shootings or beatings of unarmed civilians. Of course direct comparisons make very little sense here, but at least it's one case showing that a reversal of the trend with respect to police violence is a possibility. For more (quite amusing) reading, I can heartily recommend the wikipedia article on the Provo movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provo_(movement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provo_(movement)