Hacker News Reader

Comment by kanox | Hacker News Reader

The core problem seems to be that police abuses are not being properly punished.

Whenever I tried to look into such incidence I see that prosecution gets stopped (or didn't even start) at a local level and the whole process stinks of conflict of interest. Asking local police and prosecutors to investigate misconduct just seems like a bad idea.

My solution would be to automatically throw every violent police incident to a special-purpose federal body which is not otherwise involved in enforcing laws. This would be filled with prosecutors focused on civil rights and those people would hopefully be highly motivated to prove their case in court.

The only problem I see is that this it ignores states rights but those are not particularly popular anyway.

View on HN

Why have a federal body?

Prosecutors on the State level should be able to handle this without conflicts of interest.

Historically the answer is parochial corruption and interests where they don't want the problem solved regardless of what the law says. The federal level has "fifty" eyes on it while a state has mostly its residents watching it. Which is why federal hate crimes were devised.

To me a federal organization is a single point of failure. Once it goes bad, it's all bad.

In my world, the residents of a state should be the ones to keep an eye on this. They'd have a chance to affect it. Changing anything in Washington is rarely humanly possible.

Prosecutors rely heavily on police testimony during trials and their conviction ratio is highly important for their careers especially for elected ones, so it can easily create a conflict of interest.

They go after the police and somehow police officers stop attending trials or claim they don’t remember during their testimony.

There needs to be either a completely separated body from the state/district attorneys or it needs to be federal.

I was thinking a specialized police prosecution unit, on the state level. The career prosecutors there would make their careers by convicting cops.

That’s what internal affairs does, it still isn’t enough usually because it pretty much means you are stuck there once you join since your other career prospects disappear.

I think there's more risk of corruption or favouritism with IA than if it was a federal body completely disconnected from the department

Yep, in general this is what the DoJ supposed to also be doing, it just doesn’t have a mandate that can be applied to all cases.

You don't get to ignore states rights just because they aren't particularly popular.

Also, look into "regulatory capture". Independent bodies tend toward becoming very cosy with those they're supposed to be monitoring.

Non American here. The only time I ever hear about "states rights" is in relation to racism or misogyny.

Are there actually valid useful reasons for the concept or is it time to ask what purpose they serve?

The last two times I heard about states rights were:

- Trump wanted to run the Covid response. The states told him to get lost. (Was that good or bad? True, the Covid response has been disjointed, even incoherent. Would it have been more coherent if Trump ran it? Or less?)

- Trump wanted to send federal law enforcement into cities to control rioting. The cities told him no. (There were some federal agents in Portland against the will of the city; the legal scope of their activity was protecting federal property.)

The deal is that we have a limited federal government. They don't get all the power. They get the power the constitution says they get. The states (or the people) get the rest. And they're pretty touchy about protecting that power.

Is it useful? It is if you want to keep having a limited federal government. Arguably, we need (and needed) far more than we have had.

Can you give me a citation about the Trump Covid response? That does not match the reality I experienced.

Not from the top of my head. But I seem to recall Trump saying that we're going to require shutting down, or require masks (don't recall the details), and various governors telling Trump that no, we're not going to, and you can't make us.

A bit the opposite. Trump has consistently downplayed the threat, and the (blue) states have taken it seriously and saved lives. Fortunately it's well within their rights to be more restrictive than the federal government, just like it's within California's rights to have more restrictive emissions laws than the fed. But that's a different argument.

Sanctuary cities are also a case of states rights. They're not called such, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a local authority telling the federal authority to get lost.

Decentralization.

There's no such thing as "states' rights". States, like all levels of government, have no rights.

Government has powers, not rights, and only those powers granted it by Federal/State constitutions.

People sometimes misstate the concept of limited Federal powers as "states' rights", but the term generally reflects ignorance.

> You don't get to ignore states rights just because they aren't particularly popular.

Wouldn't it be possible to define all police misconduct a federal crime?

> Also, look into "regulatory capture". Independent bodies tend toward becoming very cosy with those they're supposed to be monitoring.

This happens to regulations of commercial activity because industry has a lot of incentive to lobby the regulators. Local police departments don't have much resources to lobby government agencies.

At the very least investigations performed by a external party would be less partial than those performed locally.

> Wouldn't it be possible to define all police misconduct a federal crime?

IANAL. Maybe.

> Local police departments don't have much resources to lobby government agencies.

The problem isn't just police departments. I think the problem is more the police unions. Could they work together to have enough resources? I suspect so.

Regulatory capture is about a lot more than lobbying.

Then again, I don't know that thinking of prosecutors are regulators is a good framing.

States don't have rights - people do. A government having rights is nonsensical - they have powers instead and limitations for damn good reason.

That's arguing semantics - whether you call it rights or powers makes little difference.

When people elect a government, that government passes a law, and some above-government institution overrules that law, you don't think that affects the rights of people? You could argue that the people agreed to that when their state joined some union, but if that union exceeds the authorization that was initially agreed to, it violates states rights, and by proxy people's rights.

> Independent bodies tend toward becoming very cosy with those they're supposed to be monitoring.

More so than bodies which never pretended to be independent in the first place? IOW what we have now? Seems like you're making the perfect the enemy of the good here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com