Time for a cultural reset The problems with U.S. policing date back to slave patrols. Others more versed in policing have pointed to the “warrior cop” ethic taught in some police training, to “warrior cop” culture, and the “officer survival” movement as a source of police violence. Police overreaction and the emphasis on dominating any interactions with civilians keep leading to deaths and more distrust of law enforcement. Are Americans seeking technical and training solutions to what is more a product of police culture? Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2020: Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people. How little that has changed. Even now, when the police officers involved are themselves Black, as Tyre Nichols was. What happened to Nichols in Memphis, and to others, feels like a lynching under color of law. One of the fired officers charged with second-degree murder in the case took cellphone photos of Nichols, bloodied and handcuffed, and shared it with friends like a trophy from a big game hunt.…