It's not because you're afraid of the police, it's because the courts have made it clear that accountability is impossible and cases are pointless. The standard is that you can't convict an officer for constitutional violations unless there was clearly established precedent before the violation occurred. It's an obvious catch 22: to establish precedent you must convict an officer, but you can't convict them unless there was already precedent.

Maybe some court cases will help explain. Here's Mattos v. Agarano, where officers tased a defenseless, completely non-threatening pregnant woman for fun: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/10/17/0...

A clear framing of the catch 22:

> In determining whether an officer is entitled to qualified immunity, we employ a two-step test: first, we decide whether the officer violated a plaintiff’s constitutional right; if the answer to that inquiry is “yes,” we proceed to determine whether the constitutional right was “clearly established in light of the specific context of the case” at the time of the events in question.

Even a general precedent isn't enough, you must find a previous incident relevant to the specific context of the case, which again is impossible because any officers in the past ~50 years would also have been protected by qualified immunity.

> In sum, Brooks’s alleged offenses were minor. She did not pose an immediate threat to safety of the officers or others. She actively resisted arrest insofar as she refused to get out of her car when instructed to do so and stiffened her body and clutched her steering wheel to frustrate the officers’ efforts to remove her from her car. Brooks did not evade arrest by flight, and no other exigent circumstances existed at the time. She was seven months pregnant, which the officers knew, and they tased her three times within less than one minute, inflicting extreme pain on Brooks.[10] A reasonable fact-finder could conclude, taking the evidence in the light most favorable to Brooks, that the officers’ use of force was unreasonable and therefore constitutionally excessive.

Of course, qualified immunity applied, there was no reason to further investigate the constitutional violation, case dismissed.

You can look at Kaufman County v. Winzer, where officers shot (17 times) and killed a mentally impaired man 6 seconds after seeing him, because a completely different man had shot at them and they were scared. https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kaufman-county-t...

If you like, you can also read about how qualified immunity doesn't even achieve its alleged purpose, to shield officers from wasting time with discovery and other trial-related obligations. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/Schwartz_1ki1sac4.pdf

You can read a much better researched article on this topic from an actual legal scholar, rather than a random internet commenter: http://ndlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2-Schwartz...

You can read Jessop v. City of Fresno, where officers who literally stole $200,000+ could not be sued, because no officer before the advent of qualified immunity had been convicted of that particular crime, and the legislature hadn't thought to pass a law saying "police officers can't steal": https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/04/1...

> At the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers are entitled to qualified immunity.

Let me know how many more cases it will take to convince you, and I'll be happy to list them.