I have actually. I admitted the so-called "Ferguson effect" is likely real a few months ago. I'm not clear on how that's supposed to change my position, because the framing appears to be that people should accept or at least tolerate police misconduct in exchange for baseline law & order.
I reject that framing. I think it's presented that way as a coping mechanism for law enforcement either unwilling or unable to accept they should change their ways. The two issues also synergize together. It makes sense for people to be averse in cooperating with police (either with reporting crime when it happens, or assisting in the prosecution) when their trust in the institution craters. It's pretty hard to be an effective police force when a significant portion of the population hates you, and I believe the hate is based at least partly on reasonable grounds. To wit: it really shouldn't take hard-fought legislative changes for cops to be advised to "make sure you protect people's rights!".
There is, manifestly, a trade-off between limiting vs empowering police and commensurate rates of crime. The implicit value statement "1 death of a (overwhelmingly armed, and overwhelmingly violent or resisting) criminal at the hands of police is worth reducing at a cost of 11.67 excess criminal homicides" is, frankly, hard for me to wrap my head around. It seems markedly, unavoidably (given good faith discourse and honest engagement) clear to me that the modern police reform movement has led to grievous social harms that far, far outstrip any purported gains from any perspective save for the aforementioned. If that's the case, the movement should be regarded accordingly - a dangerous and destructive trend with overwhelming institutional, corporate, and media support masking its gruesome consequences to the uninformed masses who are largely not aware, as you and I are, of the actual stakes
Your idea that the hatred of police by large swaths of the populations comes from experiential reality and not hugely misrepresentative media portrayals seems facially ridiculous to me given basic composition of the protests and social media activism vs numbers re: significant police interactions. Over 2010-2020, the number of people killed by police marginally declined or at worst plateaued, yet perceptions re: policing drastically changed due to concerted, obsessive focus on bad outcomes by an activist media establishment. As it stands, perceptions are insanely out of whack due to literal years of effective propaganda: a majority of Very Liberal-identifying respondents estimated that >1,000 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019, with almost a quarter believing it was around 10,000 or higher. In reality, the best estimate is 27 - and if you take the time to read the cases, strikingly few are sympathetic
Lastly, with regard to the rationality of not cooperating with police, the movement you have aligned yourself with has led to politicians making statements like "If you put your hands up, they shoot. If you put your hands down, they shoot. If you walk, you run, you hide, you sleep, you do exactly as they say, they still shoot," building off of the odious false Ferguson narrative that Michael Brown was peaceably cooperating. Why would you think that elevating this narrative - that police will shoot you even if you have your hands up and are cooperating - to national prominence and centering it in the public discourse based on misrepresentations, selective emphasis on very rare events, and, to a very large extent, outright lies, would make anyone more willing to cooperate and not, you know, more likely to attempt to flee or violently resist? Serious question
The average person this narrative is reaching is not you or I, both seasoned attorneys with 130+ IQs who are operating off of a wealth of data and elaborately developed principles. The average person this narrative is reaching is an utterly innumerate simpleton who believes something along the line of this Chelsea Handler tweet:
Why would any person of color ever comply with a police officer when there is a 50/50 shot of getting “accidentally” shot?
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Obviously, this insane narrative will lead to less cooperation and, hence, more violent altercations with police, which leads to more incidents that the media can inflate as part of their both fiscally and ideologically motivated Chinese Robber gambit in an ongoing vicious cycle with exceedingly deleterious consequences, borne most heavily by the very people these clueless activists claim to advocate for
That's not even going into all the racial aspects - which, to your credit, you studiously avoid in my experience - but those are inextricably intertwined in the most inflammatory (literally) possible way. The whole movement is just so manifestly negative in consequence that I am honestly baffled that you can look blithely past the destruction, havoc, and carnage - both metaphorical and very, very real - to focus on some utterly anodyne statement by a police union that boils down to "make sure you are clearly and unequivocally on the side of the law" and act as if we should be scandalized by the implications you derive. My takeaway was not that police officers were previously cavalierly operating with no regard for the law, but rather that they are being advised to, moving forward, take on far less personal risk given the noxious current climate. The consequences for that will be, sadly, as predictable as all the rest of this