Social shame is a blunt instrument, like a sledgehammer, that harms people it would be better not to harm. It would be better to fix these problems by individually punishing the offenders and their departments, but it seems that we are well beyond the point where departments can police themselves or executives/legislatures can police them on our behalf. And courts are increasingly ineffective at reigning in this sort of behavior because the offenders just keep doing it and make half-hearted apologies in the few cases where someone goes to the effort to have them slapped down in court. So we're left to the people having to directly administer justice, which is inevitably a crude sledgehammer approach.

Social shame is probably the most civilized and palatable form of mob justice. But what else are we left with? Given the choice between deterring abuse by shaming a couple of families out of town (Houston in this case) or putting up with endless abuse by police, I'll take the lesser of the two evils. Particularly since I think it would work pretty quickly at making cops think twice before doing this sort of BS.