When massive protests against police brutality broke out across the US in May 2020, Charles Billups wasn't in the least surprised.
A black policeman in NY for many years before his retirement, the previous officer, 60, tells the BBC: "It's the chickens coming home to roost".
"These are some things that are been mustering for a short time," says Mr. Billups.
Not for the primary time has anger against enforcement in America spilled out into demands for change - national attempts to reform the country's patchwork of nearly 18,000 police departments have periodically cropped up since the first 20th Century.
But outrage over a spate of deaths of black Americans at the hands of police, especially the death of George Floyd, a former club bouncer asphyxiated during an arrest, has spurred a transparent bout of soul searching within police departments themselves.
Officers are divided over if and the way reforms should happen.
For Mr. Billups, now chairman of the Grand Council of Guardians, an organization for African-American enforcement officers in my state, the issues lie at the highest.
'Old-school thinking'
A policy of tough policing suggests within the 1980s, the so-called 'broken windows' theory, has long been destructive for relations between minorities and enforcement, Mr. Billups says.
Only recently have authorities begun to step faraway from more draconian policing principles, but Mr. Billups thinks that a belief within the efficacy of tough tactics persists among the mostly white, and long-entrenched, leadership of the many police departments.
"The head is that the thinker. The body's getting to conform to the top. If the top isn't healthy, the body's not getting to gain weight," he says.
"You gotta change the highest," says Mr Billups. "It's an outsized number of [people who believe in] old-school policing that's still running tons of those agencies, and therefore the old-school way of thinking just doesn't work no more."
Black officers have always known and felt differently, says Terence Hopkins of the Dallas local department.
"We happen to be African-American people before we were enforcement," he says, "so that provides us a special deem against our white counterparts
WHAT IS CHANGED SINCE GEORGE DEATH?
Surveys bear this out. A 2016 poll of nearly 8,000 US policemen by the Pew Research think factory found that 69% of black officers believed that the country needed to "continue making changes to offer blacks equal rights with whites", compared to only 6% of white officers.The survey, taken within the aftermath of another spate of fatal encounters between police and African Americans, found that a majority of white and Latino officers believed such events were isolated incidents.
By contrast, 57% of black officers said they were signs of a broader problem with policing.
Polls of police within the wake of the recent fatal encounters have yet to emerge, but anecdotally, more officers today seem to agree that the matter goes beyond individuals and wishes a scientific approach.
White also as black officers have supported the protests and have publicly involved reforms.
Change v established order
"What's happening now's a movement for police reform in our country," says Mr. Hopkins, who has been a policeman for 30 yearsSome of the ideas that became popular within the larger cultural conversation, like diverting money and duties to fund psychological state and welfare work, he agrees with wholeheartedly, he says.
More must be done to recruit minority officers. In Dallas, there's a conscious policy to form the force that reflects the demographics of the town it serves.
But Mr. Hopkins says he also understands why there's resistance to vary.
"You tend to be protective of your industry. When individuals say 'you're doing something wrong,' we tend to travel the opposite direction, or not admit our fault in it."
Mr. Billups agrees that "it's an enormous split. you've got one faction that's saying there is a need for change, then you've got another faction in these departments that want to stay it as the established order
."
Some officers have expressed anger over the backlash on policing and calls to defund or disband departments (though these aren't always called to abolish the police, as some have taken them to mean).
A viral video circulated in recent weeks of members of the NY Benevolent Association, seen as a historically more conservative union for rank-and-file officers, venting at perceived mistreatment of police amid the protests.
"Stop treating us like 'animals' and 'thugs'," Mike O'Meara, head of the union, tells reporters. "I am not Derek Chauvin. they're not him," he said about the policeman who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
"Everybody's trying to shame us. The legislators. The press. Everybody's trying to shame us into being embarrassed of our profession," he says. "We've been overlooked by the conversation. We've been vilified. It's disgusting."
On Facebook, Blue Lives Matter - a counter group to Black Lives Matter that advocates for police interest - has over 2.2m endorsers.
Supporters say police deserve sympathy for doing a difficult job, which "radical" proposals to disband departments would cause anarchy and lawlessness.
Indeed, such reforms can have mixed results. Camden, a labor town in New Jersey, has been hailed as a model for fulfillment after disbanding its troubled police in 2012, redirecting energies to neighborhood patrolling.
However, within the years after it disbanded its police in 2008, fatal encounters with police rose dramatically in Vallejo, California, a town outside San Francisco.
"It's just really tough," says Robert McCormick, a retired policeman, and parole officer. "Everybody wants an easy answer, but there's not one."
There are many complexities even with reforms that sound reasonable, he points out.
For example, getting psychological state specialists to affect issues police aren't equipped to affect - an outsized chunk of calls Mr. McCormick, 72, saw in his decades on the work within the Midwest and Colorado - would appear prudent.
But officers would haven't any way of knowing once they answer an emergency "911" call that mental disease is that the issue at hand.
Police kill Canadian man during psychological state check
With nearly one in three Americans owning a gun, risks for officers are often high.
Rather than reducing funds for police, Mr. McCormick thinks, there should be supplemental funds for training and alternative resources for police.
He thinks protections for police do get to remain in situ, like preserving "qualified immunity" - another concept that has come struggling amid the recent protests.
The doctrine shields officers from being held personally responsible for violating the constitutional rights of individuals they arrest.
Critics argue that this thwarts attempts to carry officers accountable, but Mr. McCormick says it's necessary to guard police who try to try to their jobs. "It says you cannot sue me only for arresting you, only for doing my job," he says.
"[The police] are being attacked," he says. "But [on the opposite hand], it is so damned hard to urge obviate a cop who's bad or not doing his job… it's pretty damn near impossible to convict a cop. That's ridiculous."
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