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Because it's ubiquitous. In many cases they've literally seen it, because it was done in their presence. And yes, cops talk -- look at the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, every cop in the department knew what a "rough ride" was and that it happened.
There might be isolated instances of small departments which don't have brutal cops, or only have one who keeps his mouth shut about it. But any sizable department has significant brutality and essentially all the cops know about it.
I strongly dispute that. I don't know a ton about the Freddie Gray incident or the Baltimore department, but my understanding is that neither state nor federal prosecutors allege what you have about Freddie Gray.
More importantly, while I think isolated examples of brutality like you're alleging do occur, given the tens of millions of annual police encounters, I would fully expect that even an America full of the most perfect police forces our fallible world could ever muster would nonetheless still present an endless number of examples of egregious misdeeds across the country.
The point is that it's not a systemic problem (I argue). The conduct of these abusive officers is not tolerated by their fellow officers and superiors (why would it be? It makes their job that much harder and opens them up to criminal/civil liability). Further, these abusive officers are are regularly fired, as well charged and convicted, with the obvious caveat that it's not always easy to pass the bar of guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt (just look at non-cop criminals!)
However, I don't expect the vast gulf between our intuitions and experiences about this problem/nonproblem is going to be bridged within the limits of the intersection of our patience and free time in this already waning comment thread, I think you'll agree.
It's not so much a systemic problem as it is an intrinsic problem. Any group of enforcers will develop an us against them mentality. They have to, enforcement isn't possible if the enforcers give their opponent's arguments the same weight as their allies. The corrupt ones don't have to brag about their excesses, they just have to deny them and ask the clean ones if they are really going to believe this meth-head/loser/nazi over them.
And even if the loser convinces one clean cop of his innocence it doesn't matter, because the whole department needs to be convinced. A department which is a mix of corrupt and clean no less - the corrupt will never believe him, so the department will always be weighted heavily against him. A clean cop who took a stand would just get fired, so they reason they should tolerate a small amount of corruption so they can help the greatest number of people.
This happens at every level of society, at every level of enforcement.
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The point is exactly the opposite of this. Abusive officers do whatever they like. Everyone knows about it -- other cops who may not be so abusive themselves, defendants, defense lawyers, supervisors, prosecutors, even judges. But defendants aren't considered credible, and cops support each other unconditionally in the "blue wall of silence". Occasionally there's physical evidence and maybe a cop gets fired (and then later quietly re-instated with back pay when the union sues), but they nearly always get away with it.
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