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Comment by bdisraeli | Hacker News Reader

There is no national body that oversees police, but Chicago has the Independent Police Review Authority. However IPRA rarely upholds complaints against police (it's staffed by ex-cops and other people connected to the police), and recently an investigator was fired after finding a shooting unjustified[1].

[1] http://www.wbez.org/news/city-fires-investigator-who-found-c...

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"Since its 2007 creation, IPRA has investigated nearly 400 civilian shootings by police and found one to be unjustified."

Alrighty, then...

If you're interested in other things IPRA 'investigates', some people have FOIA'ed Chicago police misconduct complaints and created visualizations based on the data[1].

[1] http://invisible.institute/police-data/

Devils advocate but wouldn't they investigate every shooting incident, so you'd expect the vast majority to be clean.

I know every discharged weapon in the UK is followed by immediate officer suspension and investigation, and I suspect very few are actually ruled as bad and rightly so.

> There is no national body that oversees police

We have a national body. It's called the citizenry. But, sadly, few people are rising up because it isn't happening in their back yard, or to their children.

Sure there will be comment threads on HN or some Facebook liking, but these are weak responses, and without more, change will come very slowly, and in the meantime thousands more will be trampled on, abused, violated or murdered.

The majority of people who are rising up are only the marginalized people who are the primary victims of police abuse and injustice. All you have to do is look on Twitter and look at the color of people who do the most tweeting about police injustice.

There is no way this would or could continue if a significant amount of the privileged population rose up.

Marginalized people can still vote. The problem is they tend to vote for the people who are causing the problem, or at least not solving the problem.

Has this been proposed at all? Is there anything weird about american policing/law that would mean a national, federal agency wouldn't be able to take on this role?

The US Department of Justice does some of this. They sue for civil rights violations, often resulting in a "consent decree" where they either take over the police department or place them under a variety of restrictions.

Ferguson just agreed to one: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/27/464610005/...

"The reality is that we do not wash our own laundry - it just gets dirtier. "

- Serpico

This would be much easier to implement at the state level. Aside from a few specific instances with the DOJ such as the consent decree mentioned elsewhere, the federal government does not have any authority over local police departments such that it can do much of anything.

It would be difficult (maybe impossible?) to do given the US's Federal system of dividing powers between State governments and the National government. The Federal Department of Justice investigates, but the only power they have is to sue local police departments in court and make them agree to stop their unlawful behaviour.

Local police are not immune to federal law. They do have some protections, but many local cops are in federal prison.

It can be done. The DOJ does this on a case-by-case basis. And FBI has jurisdiction to investigate some of these things. Bernie Sanders has suggested requiring all police killings to be investigated.

Most Constitutional rights extend to people against the states. So if your civil rights (due process, etc) have been violated, it's against federal law.

It's problematic to expect relief for any but the worst abuses from FBI or indeed from any part of DoJ. They're all cops, and they're not going to be eager to police other cops. A more effective organization would be completely separate, and probably staffed by attorneys who had never served as prosecutors.

It would be unconstitutional for the Congress to pass laws taking full oversight of state and local police (it's not one of the Congress's enumerated powers, and per the Tenth Amendment 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.').

Sometimes police are found to have violated federal civil-rights law, but that is a bit of a sketchy backdoor.

The Right Thing would be for each state to create such a commission, and for the Congress to create one for federal law-enforcement agencies.

Actually, ensuring that states provide equal protection of the laws to all persons, that states do not deprive persons of life, liberty, or property without due process, and that states do not abridge the privileges and immunities of US citizens is an enumerated power of Congress; see the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly sections 1 and 5.

You make a good point. I suppose one might be able to justify such a commission on that basis (although that itself indicates the problem with the post-Civil War order).

I think it is clear we need a national body to oversee police.

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