well here's the thing. shut down the NYPD, fire all the cops, they all go back home to Suffolk County.
Now let's recreate the NYPD as something new! Let's hire all new cops. All 36000 of them.
Who's going to apply for those jobs? Seems likely most of that original 36000 would be in line.
that is, if you have cops, someone has to do that job. It seems like the job as practiced in the US naturally gravitates towards the kind of policing we seem to have. I think that all extends from the fact that guns are basically fully legal and ubiquitous throughout the US which puts it on police departments to be hyper aggressive, highly armed and dangerous, and generally mistrustful of the public; it also does not help that the educational background requirements for cops in the US are very low.
Georgia (the country) did this exact thing with their traffic police that was notoriously corrupt. After firing literally everyone, they recreated the force from scratch with much more stringent hiring standards and correspondingly higher pay. Most of those old cops didn't even try to get rehired. They ended up having no traffic police at all for about one month before the new force was staffed enough to start running things. Sky didn't fall.
As far as why US cops specifically are like that - it's because they're literally trained to be like that. Look up Dave Grossman and his "killology" nuttery (if you ever heard people talking about "sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs", that's from there). You'd think that would be some kind of fringe stuff, but no - there are police departments where the leadership paid for the entire force to attend one of his seminars.
Now let's recreate the NYPD as something new! Let's hire all new cops. All 36000 of them.
Who's going to apply for those jobs? Seems likely most of that original 36000 would be in line.
that is, if you have cops, someone has to do that job. It seems like the job as practiced in the US naturally gravitates towards the kind of policing we seem to have. I think that all extends from the fact that guns are basically fully legal and ubiquitous throughout the US which puts it on police departments to be hyper aggressive, highly armed and dangerous, and generally mistrustful of the public; it also does not help that the educational background requirements for cops in the US are very low.