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Notes -
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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