Oh boy. There are so many reasons why the military and police have lost public trust and are no longer given unquestioned faith in their actions and motives. You’ve certainly highlighted many of the issues that contribute to that decline.

However, the lack of regard for authority figures is spread across the social spectrum. As someone who has worked in mental health and in the school setting, I’ve seen kids (and parents) act with entitlement and receive no consequence for behaviors or actions. I point to ever increasing permissiveness for this. I could sum this up by saying I believe in the aims of many progressive social policy ideals, but old-school parenting. Kids are untethered because the adults are lost between providing empathy and structure.

The commonality I see across a range of social issues that leads to a lack of trust in authority figures, is the lack of accountability. What’s the difference between 50 years ago and now? Marginalized populations knew firsthand that systems were unjust, and authority figures weren’t always accountable. They experienced personal abuse while the rest of us were generally unaware of the depth of misuse of positions of power.

But now we are so much more aware of the abuses and inequity. And this makes the lack of consequence (both individual and organizational) all the more glaring. We’re at a real crossroads between making or changing policy that fixes the unfairness of social systems, while really struggling with how we respond to the social behaviors of individuals, whether they’re leaders or average citizens.