Well, explain to me what licensing is required to do law enforcement.
There is a variety of licensing and certification that applies to law enforcement. Different roles, states, and localities have different requirements and probably use different names, but there is typically academy certification, peace officer basic training certification, regularly renewed formal certification to operate various pieces of equipment (EVO for operating the vehicles, PBT, qualification and tactics for firearms/less lethal, etc) or perform certain duties (K9, training, DRE, SWAT, etc) to say nothing of regular training in defensive tactics, law changes, etc.
Just asked a friend what his yearly training looked like. His
minimum annual formal training requirement is over 200 hours. In 2018 he logged well in excess of 300 hours, but in reality had much more than that because he can only count half of his K9 training for pay. He's a bit of an outlier because K9 has more training time than your average cop, but it's not what you claim.
Not saying there is not room for improvement, but pretending that it is - as you say - "more like a summer job" is either ignorant or intentional prevarication.
We need a higher level of accountability for police misdeeds than we have now.
Police need to be held to an extremely high standard, and when they screw up severely (as in that Utah incident) they need to be dealt with severely. When that doesn't happen it damages public trust. I see the public sector unions and the protections they offer as a significant portion of that problem.
The flip side is that not all complaints against police are legitimate and police need to be protected both from false accusations and political grandstanding. When that doesn't happen, it forces the best, most capable officers out.
