It's very much a spectrum but, in my personal experience, many cops are drawn to the job for the wrong reasons, like the power or being able to retire after 20 years with a pension (varies by municipality but very common in the northeast).
It would never happen and I'm not sure it should but I often think about what a community based approach might look like. For example, a requirement that police live in the community they're policing or some sort of conscription model.
Wanting to collect a pension is NOT a wrong reason. It is a very legitimate reason for any government worker. I'd even bet it's inversely correlated with wanting to abuse power.
Moreover, the abuse of power looks to develop over time, learning it from other abusive cops, and going further. It is a cycle of abuse taught from senior to junior. Even if the police represent the community or are conscripted, they still can learn such abusive behavior.
The solution can be for all teams to be new, to not pass bad cultural knowledge from the old team to the new team.
The reason I'm a fan of these (albeit they are far from perfect[0]) is because it both creates some humanization as well as some social accountability.
I think some of the problems are related to the fact that parts of society don't scale well (though some do). As population grows, so does anonymity. But a powerful tool to fight abuse of authority is by decreasing anonymity, as this creates a social pressure. There are disadvantages to cops being biased towards their communities, but I think this is better than the bias of indifference. We're dealing with humans, and the direction in which we should _error_ should *always* be on the side of compassion.
[0] Perfection does not exist and will not. So we have to be nuanced
It would never happen and I'm not sure it should but I often think about what a community based approach might look like. For example, a requirement that police live in the community they're policing or some sort of conscription model.