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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.
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Body cams can also really help cops accused of untoward behavior. In fact, some anti cop organizations have pushed eliminating body cams purportedly in the name of privacy but one wonders if it is because the footage can contradict the narrative (eg body cam in Ohio where girl was shot right before she stabbed another girl).
absolutely, and some anti police organizations are super insane. In a vacuum i can understand privacy concerns with some slice of police bodycam recordings (we can call these PBR's and make jokes about cracking open a cold one). Say you get a noise complaint, the cops show up and end up recording the inside of your home, this seems like a bit of a violation of your right to privacy, but not something that i think sours the whole idea of bodycams.
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