I agree with the points BBI expressed, the downside is:
The Christopher Commission’s report (commissioned after Rodney King) repeatedly comes back to what it describes as the extreme concentration of problematic officers.
A hundred and eighty-three officers (out of over 8,000) had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints.
One officer had been the subject of thirteen allegations of excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight “use of force reports” (that is, documented, internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one shooting.
Another had six excessive-force complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten use-of-force reports, and three shootings.
A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth had thirty-five.
Another had a file full of complaints for doing things like “striking an arrestee on the back of the neck with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee was kneeling and handcuffed,” beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile, and throwing an arrestee from his chair and kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed and lying on his stomach.
The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department.
So why do you think those officers were still working?
BTW, I've read what is publicly available of Officer Chauvin's record, and I'm not drawing a comparison, saying that absent a union he would have been gone before this incident. FRom what I've read, he'd probably still been working at most non-political agencies I'm familiar with.