Absolutely horrific. I don't know how we got here as a country but something has to change.
I think it's hard to nail down, and hard to fix, because we've got a lot of stuff all kind of combining into the perfect police storm. Like how police unions protect most police from any real consequences of their actions, and how an increasing amount of police are military veterans (no offense) , and how police are increasingly using military hardware, and how police are so glorified in american culture that in many peoples' eyes they can do no wrong, and the rise of gun obsession, and lack of mandated oversight (
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes,), and lack of education on the judicial system.
It's a sort of tangled knot of racism and corruption and bro culture that it's kind of hard to pick out any one issue and say "that's the cause". Worse, since most of their victims are minorities and people in poverty, it's hard to convince the majority of people that there
is a problem because your average white middle class person will probably never have a police encounter worse than a traffic ticket.
I think that the only way to fix it is to take an extreme about-face, disarm police, mandate
active oversight, mandate data collection, mandate mental health checkups for officers, and invest in training them in non-violent resolution. Some of this sounds extreme, I know, but we have an extreme problem. It doesn't really matter, though, because none of it will happen anytime soon.