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Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
This is a pretty shitty thing to be able to do, and this would absolutely be a cause worth fighting for...
...the problem is that the whole concept of police reform is now inextricably linked in the minds of at least half the populace with total police abolition, lighter sentences, less bail, decriminalising hard drugs, violent criminals out on the streets by lunchtime, rioting, arson, looting, violent takeover of city streets and public areas and anti-white ideology. The whole subject is fucking radioactive now. I wouldn't lend my name to any such cause, for fear that it would, like nearly all causes, massively expand its mandate beyond the very specific issue I want to correct. I don't want to empower any of the other garbage.
In the UK, we have different problems, in that our police don't spend any time investigating actual crimes like burglaries, but will happily waste days and weeks chasing down speech crimes on twitter or illegal football stream watchers, but there's the same obstacle to overcoming them. To even breach the subject would require, at least to me, some kind of cast-iron guarantee that whoever was overseeing the reform was 120% free of any sort of wokery whatsoever, and that's something I can say about almost nobody in our political class. Myself and a lot of other right-wing people I talk to sense the formalisation of the two-tier quasi-racialised justice system that we already suspect exists is pretty imminent.
The trust is completely gone, and there's very little I can think of that would bring it back.
I'm only tenuously familiar with policing in England but i think America has a pretty uniquely dysfunctional policing system. While it's probably true that police reform is a nonstarter for some conservatives for the reasons you mentioned, it also doesn't matter. When localized police reforms get passed the cops can straight up decide they don't wanna do things differently and there's nobody to tell them to do otherwise. Presumably there is some systematic machinery in place to wrangle openly rogue police chiefs but i don't know that i've ever seen it in action. I know a sheriff can be voted out but that's a pretty limited and late type of solution. Governors can try to cut their funding, but that's exactly the point we are at right now, and i think having a pressure valve that comes before "public struggle over funding for necessary utility" would be extremely useful.
Police and their unions are also extremely averse to being burdened with additional accountability and responsibility. Take bodycam legislation for instance, what stance should the union argue for? It's not always in the best interests of the officers to be required to have body cams on, but cameras provide valuable evidence that is hard to surreptitiously tamper with. The union is now at a crossroads between defending clearer justice or arguing for the benefit of its members. I don't fault cops for acting in their own interest, they are human after all, but when we're talking about Civil Forfeiture it's hard for me to separate "i should be able to take this as evidence and then keep it" with "i should be allowed to steal shit".
To your point about the wokeness of the justice system, it frustrates me that progressives have provided such an idiotic target to fight against. Wanting to perform restorative justice by underpolicing ethnic communities is such a bad idea that i have a hard time understanding how its supposed to work even in an intersectional feminist worldview. Luckily we are unlikely to find out because hardcore progressive police reform ideas get almost no traction in the voting booth.
With that out of the way
There never was trust between conservatives and police reform- the police have been in near perfect alignment with conservative political goals for as long as i can remember. Thinking some recent breach of trust is causing the tension between conservative voters and police reform seems extremely misguided to me.
In many cases the problem isn't chiefs (who can usually be fired and are often under political pressure) but union leaders (who can't and are incentivized to stand up for their members, even if that means defending questionable behavior or outright malfeasance).
As with many circumstances, moralizing about the people involve is not particularly useful. Whether or not all cops are bastards is less relevant than the kind of behavior is incentivized. A system needs to be able to stand up to some degree of bad faith participation and anti-social behavior; both in the sense that it can't crumble if people behave less than ideally, but also in that it needs to be able to prevent bad behaviors from entrenching themselves. Self-policing has a poor record for accountability for a reason - bad actors don't like whistleblowers, and if you don't have a culture of accountability on top of a decent system of accountability it's easy for whistleblowers to get tarred as traitors while bad behavior gets glossed over or rewarded. I would not be surprised if effective police reform in the US requires de facto purging of of problematic departments concurrently with creating separate oversight bodies. Not because everyone involved is particularly evil but because resistance to accountability has become entrenched.
Re: bodycams in particular, IIRC there is evidence that bodycams don't do much to reduce police misconduct, indicating that either perpetrators aren't concerned about being disciplined or that they're not the kind of person to take it into account.
Or the third option, where the police have succesfully gotten all their benefits of bodycams(exonerating them if they do wrong) without any of the costs(catching their abuses). This has been ongoing for a while.
That's what I meant with my first point: if the disciplinary process is dysfunctional (misconduct gets excused or soft pedaled, prosecutors don't want to bring charges against officers, "my camera malfunctioned", etc...) the supposed incentive to behave better is lost, even if you have video of the incident.
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