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Notes -
Is it separable? Ideally, obviously, but in practical terms?
If the Mayor of Random City, Guatemala needs to crack down on violent crime, I'd bet his first options are "hire some scary-looking cops" and "tell the existing cops to be more aggressive". From a bureaucratic perspective I'm not sure if there's a silver bullet that lets you beef up your police force, without also accidentally empowering some thugs.
Sure, "hire better and more competent people", if it were that easy everyone would be doing it already. I don't mean to say that violent extralegal police gangs are acceptable, just that it will take some inventiveness to remove them.
This is a hard problem. I can think of a bunch of attempts at solutions, but all of them have costs, tradeoffs, or exploits that can occur if bad faith actors abuse them.
A. Increase salaries which incentivizes more competent people to want to become police officers.
B. Increase training so people know what to do, and make it possible for new recruits to fail their training if they aren't good enough.
C. Make it easier to fire police officers who are misbehaving. It shouldn't take an event that involves national headlines and legal prosecution to fire a police officer. People being sketchy and aggressive is usually discernible by their coworkers and boss, pretty much none of these big scandals involve the people who knew the bad cops say "oh my, I'm so surprised, I never would have seen this coming, he's always been so professional before this instance." It's almost always a pattern of behavior and escalation. Fire them sooner along the path.
All of these have the issue that they cost money, which is politically hard, and wasteful if they end up not being effective enough per cost. They also potentially have issues if the higher up police themselves are bad and corrupt. More money to line their pockets and hire people they like, and more opportunities for them to fire honest cops with less justification while letting their corrupt underlings go free. But from the perspective of a non-corrupt higher up person, these would likely be effective if costly.
D. Weaken qualified immunity. It serves a legitimate purpose that allows cops to do their jobs without worrying about getting sued for normal policework, but my understanding is that it is too strong and has too many loopholes where stuff that was obviously wrong gets dropped anyway and bad cops go free. Making it marginally weaker would likely have a negligible impact on good policemen, while making it harder for bad cops to get away with crimes, and thus disincentivizing them from committing them in the first place, which is the whole point of having laws at all.
E. Make it easier to prosecute/punish higher ranking officers for the crimes of their underlings. Specifically if the underling was ordered or pressured to do the wrong thing, or if the higher ups knew about it and didn't stop it. Although this might create some incentive for higher ups to cover up misdeeds rather than report them, if you combine this with massive penalties for covering up misdeeds and leniency for reporting them (maybe the higher ranking officer gets in trouble if and only if they knew about and failed to punish an underling's crime) you can combat this incentive.
The downside here is that these create incentives for cops to be less aggressive and less effective, just sitting around all day instead of stopping crimes and interacting with the public, which creates risk. If done carefully, it would be set up to only punish actual crimes which are not done accidentally, such that good police officers could do their jobs with no increased risk, and only bad police get in trouble, but that's easier said than done. However, as in Scott's post on tradeoffs and failures: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653 there's a dimension where you tradeoff aggressiveness versus mercy, and there's a dimension where you just get more competent at both, and I think there are enough flaws that there's plenty of room to move up on the latter without messing with the balance on the former.
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