This is a good article and I'm going to recommend you read it. That being said, I'm not sure how much of the change in Sonic's attitudes toward cops should be pinned on Sonic 06 specifically. https://uppercutcrit.com/sonics-ever-changing-police-report/

I'm mostly thinking about at Shadow the Hedgehog, the big Sonic game immediately preceding Sonic 06. Here the cops are represented not only as a force for good (rather than the lesser of two evils) against the greater evil that is...Black Arms (yes, I had to look that up)...

...but enough of a force for good that Sonic doesn't question joining forces with them from the first level.

And because Shadow as a concept's trying to affect this disinterested-but-also-somehow-moody nihilistic persona, he comes across as too amoral to respond to that logic, much less refute it. As far as the game is concerned, the idea of cops as a force for good is allowed to stand.

Granted, none of this changes what comes after Shadow the Hedgehog, but it does reframe our understanding of Sonic 06's influence: less directly causal, more accelerating trends that were already present within the Sonic franchise.

Now that I think about it, you might be able to juxtapose Forces against the movie and question just how committed Sonic ever was to the rebellious ideals that he preaches (assuming you ignore how very unsteady this argument is).

And then I remembered the history of first person shooters; the competing power fantasies of protagonists who were located outside and against a bellicose military establishment, and those who derived power and charisma from being comfortably located within it...

...and that while these fantasies coexisted for a while, the latter ultimately won out at the expense of the former following Modern Warfare.

Fucking hell. How much damage did the militarization of American culture wreck that it affected things that were only tangentially related to that culture like Sonic?