So I don't have a comprehensive view of the police discipline process but I have spent some time looking at it and it has an obvious, glaring flaw.

I can't find any point in the process where the police officer doesn't at least have a right to representation and I can't find anyone in the process whose role is to oppose the officer and their representatives.

If you have a one sided adversarial process where everyone else is supposed to be a neutral... you have a one sided process

At MINIMUM the process should have someone who is charged with representing the public's interest in being safe from police violance

The fact that we have so much process but at no point in the process do we have someone with this role, representing the public interest directly, is telling.

To use a sports analogy, it is like one team keeps winning because the other team isn't allowed on the field and when people said it was unfair they added more referees but didn't change anything else

They come up with a score by the player and the pitching staff arguing about how good a player each person is so it looks kind of like a game being played if you ignore that only one team is allowed on the field

And since no one is allowed in the stands either (the process isn't public) it isn't even obvious because they report out a score and the referee's report.