And yet I know far more about their scandals and failings than I do of the keystone cops running my local police. And activists in my city have been in the streets for months, and there has been very little reform of the local police.
In both cases, we don't know how much we don't know. The abuses of both that we aren't aware of are hard to account for, so I don't see there being a clear answer to this matter.
Activists struggling to reform a local police department doesn't seem like great evidence that it's easier to reform something like the FBI.
Consider the possibility that if you know way more about the malfeasance of federal agencies, that it is because they commit more malfeasance. And if you don't believe that's true, then perhaps you know more about your local police than you think.
It's already pretty hard to compare them, but really, does the FBI shoot/kill more innocent folks than local police?
The recent protests were not against the FBI, but against local police. The FBI has some checks and balances built in (Office of Inspector, Congressional oversight), whereas it turns out mayors can't even fire the police chief (without cause), and the police unions are pretty damn powerful.
You're definitely right that it's hard to compare them, but it seems likely to me that the FBI would shoot/kill all sorts of innocent people if there were like 700,000 FBI agents instead of 35,000 and they did all the stuff that local police do...
Could be, I mean sure, it all depends on training, the institutional culture, etc. I'm simply not sufficiently familiar with the FBI to try to guess what would happen.
But as many [ex-]police chiefs said, they already do too much, and unsurprisingly the budget for training and hiring qualified personnel is too small. (Though it seems that some manage to pay for "Warrior Training".) Basically every locally rendered service is suffering from the dreaded cost disease[0] in the US, and of course to make matters worse the labor share of income is down (and inequality is up), and so on.
