Another week, another story about police misconduct. The accumulating incidents beg the question of whether the problem is bad apples among a well-trained and trustworthy profession, or, more troubling, a broken culture behind the thin blue line.

The real change has been technological. We see today what we would have seen decades earlier if video recording had been as ubiquitous. Even if encounters between police and citizens occur overwhelmingly "by the book" and more professionally than ever, the problem with increased transparency is that it feeds the media and the public a steady diet of bad apples. We read, hear and see a drip-drip of the unseemly side of any profession, slowly eroding the collective trust in that institution.

Since Vietnam and Watergate, trust in virtually every institution has declined — the presidency, Congress, Supreme Court, corporations and churches. Law enforcement now faces its own crisis of trust, brought about in significant part by the transparency created by citizens themselves. For police forces, the consequences will take many forms, most visibly protests.

But distrust may also emerge more quietly, through one of our most democratic institutions — the jury. The venerable jury process puts criminal conviction in the hands of the accused's peers. Although jurors promise to evaluate only the evidence presented in court, they necessarily do so through the lens of their experience. Race unquestionably shapes that.

Social scientists have amply demonstrated that all-white juries are much more likely to convict black defendants, for example. Put another way, African-American jurors are more skeptical of the cases put forward by prosecutors.

White Americans are starting to understand why. Decades after millions struggled to understand why O.J. Simpson's jury decided to acquit, stories of police misconduct have mounted to a critical level. The story that Officer Michael Slager concocted around the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina — before the video evidence refuted his account — is perhaps the most egregious but only the latest incident. It will undermine the testimony of police everywhere. Validly or not, the drumbeat of incidents will push mainstream America from the assumption that there are a few "bad apples" among the police, to the assumption that police can and will lie.

What happens in the secrecy of the deliberation room can never receive the same exposure as Black Lives Matter protests, but in courtrooms across the country, criminal prosecutors will closely monitor the jury box for skepticism. Criminal prosecutors hate to lose cases, and many cases depend on the testimony of what police say they observed. But prosecutors may also be part of the solution. As the ones who put cases before juries, prosecutors can also send an effective message to local police departments: We need you to rebuild trust at the street level.

For that, real work must be done. We now appear, ironically, to be headed in the direction of more video transparency, in the form of body cameras for police officers. It is too soon to tell whether this is the answer, though from the early experiences there appear to be some positive effects. Still, we should heed the voices of caution about the unintended consequences of body cameras, such as the loss of the healthy discretion that allows police officers to overlook minor infractions.

With officers fearful of the oversight of supervisors, we may end up with greater professionalism but less generosity. That would be unfortunate.

The police officers I know appreciate deeply the consequences that their split-second decisions have on people's lives, and that sometimes what's needed is understanding and restraint rather than the letter and force of the law. What we all should want are police officers who can be trusted to be fair, working within a legal system that is racially neutral in operation and effect.

Let's hope, then, that the video spotlight now focused on the police will produce both top-down reforms but also ground-up efforts to strengthen the culture among America's finest.

Patrick D. Schmidt is a political science professor at Macalester College.