The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any western nation in the world, and it isn't even close, this would imply, would almost mandate, that the United States, unlike other western nations, must be a land of utter chaos, close to a civil uprising or revolution, and thank goodness, the police are here to protect the innocent and vulnerable. The thing is, that just isn't the truth, for the unfortunate truth is that because of our massive criminal justice system, which includes the courts, the prisons, the officers, the correctional personnel, the forensics, and everything and anything that is related to all of this, the United States has developed a huge criminal justice infrastructure that must be fed, and "criminals" are the necessary food that keeps the whole dirty business going.
That is to say, you know you are part of a sick system, when private prison compounds sign a binding contract with State or other authorized authorities, guaranteeing them a quota of criminals, in which the punishment for the state for not providing these institutions with the minimum percentage mandated of criminals to house and feed, is the payment of a monetary sum, that the state pays as its penalty for failure to provide enough incarcerated criminals. This fact, gives up the ghost completely, that the state has little or no interest in preventing crime, but has incentives and all the interest in their community of finding "crime" wherever that may be.
Not too surprisingly, criminals are always easier to find, when one's resources are concentrated on the very people that do not have the wherewithal to fight back, which would be: the poor, the indigent, the ill-educated, and the simple minded, all making for very easy targets for the policing authorities to prey upon, of which, for the most part, the general public, doesn't much care, just as long as the police doesn't bother them, or their family. This means, that as much as the authorities declaim that police don't have quotas that they must maintain on a consistent basis, they do, though internally, no doubt, the word "quota" is never used, substituted instead by being mandated to meet "performance standards" or "departmental performance goals" so as to demonstrate materially that the given police officer is performing per standard, which effectivelymeans arresting people and issuing tickets, for if a given officer is not doing that, than what is that officer actually doing on their respective shift.
This signifies that the entire criminal justice system apparatus rests of the men and women that make up modern police forces or their federal equivalencies, for without these men and women bringing in "product" there isn't much of anything for those in the criminal justice system to actually do. So that, for a certainty, the more officers hired, than the more arrests that will be made, the more criminals that will be manufactured, and more criminals that will be incarcerated, so that, those that complain about police brutality or police persecution, aren't ever going to reform the system by requesting more respectful officers, for the system needs product, so that in order to make fundamental change, the only protest worth making is the protest that demands the absolute reduction of police officers in a community, for less officers, means less manufactured crime, less manufactured criminals, and less manufactured incarceration, and it really is as straightforward as that.