I don't want to retread these debates that depend on alleged accounts one way or the other. What I'm most interested in is re-evaluating the police as an entity. Let's imagine for a moment that the police force operated like a private business. A publicly-funded private business. That is, the government says it wants an effective police force for a test jurisdiction, say a medium sized town, and security companies bid on this contract, and the contract is awarded in a fair way based upon the prices and the services and guarantees offered. The trick is though, that the contract isn't one contract, it's three and the town is split into three sub-jurisdictions, each of which fall under the purview of one company. Each company will then compete so that eventually one company can get the entire contract for this town.
So we have three security companies competing to provide police service over three districts with roughly equal population and demographic breakdowns. Their goal is to make money, they do this by 1) minimizing their costs, and their price to the state, so the state will more likely award them the rest of the contract, 2) make the constituents happy because even in a bad democracy the state represents the people at least on some level, and 3) avoiding liability fiascos like the Michael Brown situation, whether it's justifiable on the police's part or not.
Essentially, one of the major differences in the way these companies would act from the current state-based police is that ANY police shooting would be a profitability nightmare. They'd have to pay massive costs for lawyers, settlements, etc. The result is that they would do everything to de-escalate every problem. They may even go so far as to not allow police to draw their guns in any but the most dire of circumstances. It may become part of their business model and their employee contract that a police officer is expected to have a non-zero risk to life, in a similar way as a construction worker on a tall building is compensated for the risks he takes. Maybe policing should be slightly risky to bodily harm. Maybe not. It would all be figured into the business models of the police companies. All I know for sure is that a business wants nothing more than to avoid the potential economic consequences and reputation harm that comes with these media circuses. A state could give a fuck, so that's why the American police system is devolving.
The incentive structure simply is not in place for the state police to avoid making mistakes, hurting people, and killing people. We can see it from the fact that all these dumbasses protesting in the street for the officer who shot him to be prosecuted. Not the police precinct that employs the officer and is ostensibly responsible for his actions. Not the police academy that trained him in the protocols that say to escalate, escalate, and always escalate. And not the system that came up with the protocols. So even if you gave the protesters what they wanted it wouldn't mean a fucking thing. The true evil-doers are like 8 levels insulated from these incidents.
A business, on the other hand, would likely risk bankruptcy in the event that it possibly killed one of its customers unjustifiably. The risks would be so great that "crisis insurance" would exist specifically for these purposes. And it would be incredibly expensive, particularly for companies with a bad history of hurting a lot of people. The security agencies which have the best records of diffusing situations without loss of life or bodily harm would rise to the top, not only because they have the best reputations, but also because they're paying the lowest insurance premiums.
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