I watched a TVO documentary years and years ago (sometime in the '90s, I think?) that followed a woman who joined the police and her journey over the first few years in whatever force she was in. The details are obviously very fuzzy, but one thing that stuck with me was something she said while at a barbecue where everyone in attendance was either a cop or family of a cop.
Essentially it was that she spent most of her job dealing with people who were lying to her face relentlessly. And as a consequence, her perception of the public became warped over time to assume that every single person she met had something to hide and couldn't be trusted. The only people in her life who she could trust, in her mind, were other police officers. This meant that she eventually lived a life where her entire world revolved around being a cop, as everyone she interacted with who she wasn't arresting or questioning was another cop.
This then led to both a sense of 'us vs them', but also a sense of mutual protection, where those in the club needed to be helped at all costs because they represent your whole world. We can all be guilty of that tribalism in some sense. When a Canadian is charged with a crime abroad, my instinct is to assume they are innocent. If someone who is a fellow fan of a team I love behaves badly in public, I'm much more likely to assume the best of them.
The problem, of course, is that I don't have special power over the outcome of those situations. There's clearly a problem in North America with how we fund, manage, and hold accountable our various police forces, and it's not going to be an easy fix. The worrying part of the next step is how you effect change without major consequences. San Francisco has already seen examples of police essentially stopping doing parts of their jobs as an informal protest against some moves to hold them more accountable (among a myriad of other issues) and I don't think any group that has ensconced itself into such a consequence-free situation would give it up without a fight.
