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Comment by StanislavPetrov | Hacker News Reader

The real problem here is that these cops were not immediately arrested for home invasion and the abuse of his Constitutional rights. Why is this limited to a civil suit? These cops acted unlawfully and unconstitutionally and should be criminally charged.

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Prosecutors work closely with police, and the chief prosecutor in a jurisdiction has to stand for re-election on a regular basis. A prosecutor who cracks down on police abuses is often committing career suicide.

So what is the path to disentangling those misaligned incentives?

I'm uncertain of the full route, but it will likely involve refounding the Republic.

Since judges and police are both part of the state apparatus, the long-term trend will be toward cooperation at the expense of liberty for the citizenry. The path for correcting the incentives is removing one or both from the state through privatization. See the discussion on libertarianism in a sibling comment.

No hope for the idea that judges and police are citizens, too?

That sounds to me like a conflict of interest

It absolutely is, I'm opposed to the election of prosecutos and judges because the electorate is really not competent to make such decisions and reversing ones that turn out badly is next to impossible.

Yup, and it's the DNA how corrupt institutions have always worked, throughout the ages.

I think it would be a good idea to have a separate, independent group of prosecutors and law enforcement officers whose sole job was to police the police.

Obviously funding and regulatory-capture would be a problem, but maybe that can be mitigated somehow.

That would require a widespread acceptance of libertarian ideals of justice, which is not present in society.

People respond to incentives. Giving any individual any sort of immunity against laws that apply to everyone else will ultimately lead to the worst abuses. How many will we never hear about?

This sort of story will continue to appear until there is a systemic change.

I honestly don't see what libertarianism has got to do with this. Could you elaborate? What are these ideals, and what is the idelogy that lacks them?

Libertarianism deals with the rights of the individual over those of the state. This is authoritarianism in action, which is essentially what people advocate when they argue against libertarianism.

It's not about the rights of the individuals OVER those of the state. It's about the fundamental belief of liberty which our Founders made a core tenet. Everyone is entitled to personal liberty and freedom so long as they don't infringe on the liberty of others.

So you can't compel a doctor to provide healthcare, whether you think it's a good thing or not.

Libertarians are for state's rights. You can be for both individual rights & liberty AND state's rights. That's perfectly inline with the Constitution.

And votes may go against individual liberty at the state level, but at least that's the proper domain for most decisions and it's local.

Note that I'm using the term "state" in the abstract sense, not as shorthand for states' rights in the US-specific sense.

It would have been better if I'd referred to "the rights of the individual over the powers of the state," since the original intent behind the Constitution and its amendments was to enumerate the latter but not the former. Once again, though, this has nothing to do with the dichotomy between federal powers and those reserved to the individual US states.

Libertarian ideology is based on the classical liberal tradition that each person has the a priori right to life, liberty, and property. Since you have these rights, you may dispose of your person and property as you see fit as long as you do not infringe upon these rights of another. This leads to the non-aggression principle, which in bumper sticker form is "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff." Basically, the initiation of violence is prohibited unless it is in defense of property or as punishment for a crime.

All individuals in society should be treated equally under the law, including members of law enforcement and others within the government. If I am not allowed to commit violence against you until you have been convicted of a crime, neither should anyone else, whether or not they wear a police uniform. Indeed, libertarianism advocates for private, rather than public, police forces.

> what is the ideology that lacks them

Statism in all forms grants special privilege to members of the government, including the power to tax and hold monopoly on the use of force. The US criminal code is full of exceptions for on-duty police officers, judges, and others, especially regarding firearms laws. Police officers can carry firearms into school buildings where others are guilty of a felony if they do, for instance. Thus you have inequality under the law. Such police immunity is what leads to the abuses we see every day.

I'm not arguing against your point, but most western countries manage to have a more or less competent police without such adherence to libertarianism. Maybe is easiest to implement, they have done so.

Thanks for the elaboration. I don't entirely agree with you though. On on one hand you are right, libertarinism does strongly oppose the existence of a state force with rights that common citizens don't have. On the other, many other political mindsets have different sets of checks and balances to avoid this kind of situations. They are all fallible in different ways, and I doubt libertarianism is the exception. At the end of the day a system will follow the morals of those with de facto power, and power will arise even in the face of non-existent power structures.

Ha, you must not be from around here. Don't get me wrong, I agree in principle, but an on-duty cop getting arrested AT THE SCENE of their misconduct? Sadly, it's impossible to imagine. Even when they kill someone in the most egregious circumstances, they're immediately given a celebratory cigarette, wrapped up in a blanket, passed off to union handlers, and coddled for at least 24 hours before even having to acknowledge that they might have done something wrong.

Unions are not the problem. Union can only work within the policies in place. The problem is with those policies.

Didn't say they were the problem, just pointing out that that's what happens. But I don't agree with your second statement. Unions heavily influence those policies during collective bargaining.

But who is going to arrest them? Well, the cops. Which cops? The cops on the scene, who saw it happen.

But they were the cops doing it, so...

The metacops, obviously. Sort of like a super-internal affairs services who have jurisdiction only over other cops.

A sort of police police, if you will. But then who polices the police police? The obvious answer is that police police police police police police.

Ordinary citizens.

Yes, but only if they organize pronto. Recall that direct interference in a nominally lawful police activity is obstruction of justice and itself a prosecutable crime.

Recording the activity isn't a crime.

Don't physically try to stop the police. That's going to cause trouble. But if they're doing something out of line, record it if you can. If they tell you to stop, you can claim that you have the legal right to do so. If they continue to tell you to stop, stop. But still watch if you can.

Note well: IANAL. This is not legal advice. In particular, if anyone with real knowledge wants to correct the "If they tell you to stop, you can claim that you have the legal right to do so" part, feel free.

> Recall that direct interference in a nominally lawful police activity is obstruction of justice and itself a prosecutable crime.

This is the metapolice we're talking about, not the police. The metapolice have no jurisdiction over ordinary citizens. Now, if police were to interfere in lawful metapolice activity, that would be one hell of a crime.

you don't need recursion, you just need a closed loop.

Police A and Police B who police each other besides the ordinary citizens. Add incentives so that they look extra closely at the other side.

Seems like this would produce some naturally bad incentives. My guess is you would see both sides work the system in concert in a way that protects the 'core' members of both. If there are incentives to 'bust' members of the other team, they could always just hire patsies specifically to be groomed and sacrificed as an exchange with the other side.

The alternative is two sides fighting a war of escalation which would likely encourage scary corrupt behavior. "Those guys busted Johnny for some minor offense, so lets go get some dirt on one of their guys, or plant it. Can't let them think they can just mess with us"

This is going by the current us vs them mentality of the police forces.

> This is going by the current us vs them mentality of the police forces.

If that is so, then at least if both "us" and "them" are heavily armed cops with warrior mentalities, they'd focus less of their aggression on the general public.

To prevent regulatory capture/tit-for-tat/spontaneous alliances, I would think that we need a loop at least three agencies long; Police A watches Police B who watches Police C who watches Police A. We also need proper incentives for all of them to act appropriately. Otherwise they will be either overzealous or lackadaisical.

And, you know, you'd only really need one of them to actually police civilians; in fact it's probably better that way. And then you could split up rulemaking and dispute resolution responsibilities between the other two since they will suddenly have more free time. This is a really good idea; why have we never tried this before?!

If one of the agencies has an effective monopoly, it would be almost meaningless to police them since they can't be replaced since they have no competition. (Yes, yes, I know what you meant.)

Well I think the FBI could do this.

Well most police departments of any size have an internal affairs bureau whose specific job is to police the rest of the police force. Naturally this is fraught with social risk, but it can be a fast track to leadership roles.

the other option is a higher jurisdiction, eg state police investigating sheriff's deputies or municipal police, or federal law enforcement like the FBI investigating bad actors at the state or major metro level.

That last option is about to get turned inside out, though.

Is violating the Constitution a criminal offense? These officers violated the law in service of the State, as agents of the State, not for personal gain or motive.

It's not at all clear that the officers are the criminals here, and not their chief, their mayor, their governor. Holding the system/state accountable is a complicated question. Civil suits are a relatively flexible tool.

When you look at police shootings, for example, we pursue criminal charges when the officers show personal malice or "hate crime", not when they shoot in accordance with their training and the department's overall use-of-force principles. It's hard to show that it's correct to throw individual officers in jail for following the will of "the People overall" and the local Executive.

Violating the Constitution is not a criminal offense but breaking down someone's door and entering their house without their permission is. Back in the early 19th century this would have meant that the law officers were criminally liable for what they did.

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