I honestly don't understand how this has been allowed to stand all these years.

There are two ways that the abuses which happen at the intersection of government force and private business typically wind up making headlines and then getting scrutinized.

First is someone dies. Either someone goes postal, an attractive woman kills herself, a sympathetic bystander who had nothing to do with it or perhaps an otherwise decent cop who's begrudgingly getting leveraged as muscle for the scam catches a bullet.

More common is the victims of the scam pile up until some enterprising lawyer sniffs out a class action.

I think threesebig issues are that it’s hard to draw the line and make a “one-size-fits-all” set of rules, that this is a state by state issue, and that it’s easy to hand wave away the corruption by saying “we’re the police!”