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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

America desperately needs a national internal affairs department with an entirely separate reporting line whose boss answers directly to the president (or at least state governors).

They could purchase, maintain the body cameras, collect and handle the footage and be trusted.

If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.

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No. This is not a national government problem. This is a local government problem. The solution is for citizens of those cities and counties to hold their local governments accountable and vote them out of office if they don't fix the problem. The last thing we need is more big government, one-size-fits-none policies dictated from above. We need more local people solving their own local problems.

It would also help if police were not tasked with enforcing a litany of nanny state laws that shouldn't even be on the books to begin with. Any cop that wants to mess with a citizen can always find some excuse; with all the laws we have, all of us are violating some law every day.

I don't think it can be broken down so simply. It's clear that the constitution has provisions specifically covering this (ex: 4th amendment), so the Federal courts at least have an interest in seeing the cases. As the highest law in the land, it's also pretty clear the 14th gives SOME federal oversight of violations of citizen's rights.

This is absolutely a national problem.

Moreover corrupt cops thrive because of close knit relationships between local DAs, local law enforcement, local judges and local politicians. A national wrecking ball is needed to break these toxic corrupt relationships and a strong, national institution is needed to create the institutional inertia against systemic police corruption from arising again.

You can't vote corruption out of office. It has to be rooted out from outside. Even the cleanest politicians cannot operate from within a corrupt system.

It's a national problem in the sense that it happens all over the nation and isn't limited to a particular department. It's a state and local problem in the sense that legally, the states and local governments have jurisdiction over their police force.

The US is a union of states. Although we have a pretty massive and powerful federal government, many things are the responsibility of the states and the federal government has limited ability to intervene. Using the FBI is one of the avenues I believe though.

States in the union are bound by the U.S. Constitution; If a state's government exhibits a pattern of denying its citizens their constitutionally-guaranteed rights (often in the form of quite literally _ending those citizens' lives_), it is absolutely the Federal government's job to compel that problem into nonexistence.

Well they ain't doin' it.

> You can't vote corruption out of office. It has to be rooted out from outside

In other words, if the corruption is not just particular localities, but infects the national government as well, then we're all screwed?

There is at least more visibility at the higher levels but in general, yeah. Most 3rd world countries with serious endemic corruption get stuck with it.

> Most 3rd world countries with serious endemic corruption get stuck with it.

They get stuck with it because 1st world countries insist on continuing to send aid even though the corrupt governments take all of it and it never benefits the people. Not to mention 1st world countries giving legitimacy to those corrupt governments in many other ways.

In other words, on a global level, the idea that corruption in 3rd world countries is "a global problem" has made the corruption worse, not better.

There have been apparent cases of police departments targeting local activists trying to bring about change through the local political process. When the local system is that thoroughly compromised, I don't see much alternative to bringing in a higher outside power (e.g. the feds, or maybe the state police if they aren't the dirty cops in question.)

Buying instruments for public high school bands is a local problem. Cops killing citizens in broad daylight and not facing consequences is not a local problem, not any more than 9/11 was a local terrorism problem for residents of New York and Washington DC.

"Let local residents handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws.

When a locally elected prosecutor refuses to prosecute local cops, that seems at least somewhat like a local problem. Also, it seems strange to me that there is so little mention of the role prosecutors play in police misconduct. Mayors and city councils too, who are generally responsible for nominating police chiefs (opposed to sheriffs, who are elected.) Cynically, I think a lot of prosecutors and local politicians are glad the public is so hyper-focused on the crooked cops that they forget to address the elected officials who enable those cops.

Bad cops are a symptom

Bad officials unwilling to prosecute bad cops is a second symptom

Apathetic electorates electing bad officials unwilling to prosecute bad cops is a third symptom

Municipalities spread all around the country are suffering from the same combination of symptoms. Whether that suggests one national problem or the same local problem in replicate is a question of semantics.

> "Let local residents handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws.

No, "let Democratic State governments of the Southern states handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws. Localities would never have gotten away with it if the State governments had not supported them and helped them crack down on local citizens who pushed back.

"Let local residents handle it" is also how we have legal marijuana and gay marriage.

> "Let local residents handle it" is also how we have legal marijuana and gay marriage.

Well, no, we nationally have gay marriage because of federal court decisions voiding state actions prohibiting same-sex marriage as violations of the federal Constitution.

And we don't have legal marijuana anywhere in the United States (we have states which have chosen not to layer state prohibition on top of federal prohibition for some acts involving marijuana, an federal law mandating deferring prosecution for certain acts involving medical marijuana that are consistent with state law. Anyone who actually makes significant money in marijuana would still be subject to the federal drug kingpin laws were the policy deferring prosecution ever to be lifted, and technically without that if any part of their business involved any acts not entirely within the required deferral of prosecution.)

Leaving it up to local voters makes it sound like it's ok for a police dept to misbehave, eg harass minorities or evade accountability, as long as the majority voters in that city/county are ok with it. I think that's a problem and that going to a couple levels in governance (state or federal) makes total sense given the systematic nature of some of the problems.

Leaving it up to local voters makes it sound like it's ok for a police dept to misbehave, eg harass minorities or evade accountability

I apologize, but I don't quite get how you arrived at the conclusion you have, specifically this point. Help me out here?

The full sentence went

> Leaving it up to local voters makes it sound like it's ok for a police dept to misbehave, eg harass minorities or evade accountability, as long as the majority voters in that city/county are ok with it.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

The sheriff is elected, and there's enough communities in the South where shitting on blacks is a way of life. Do you remember the case of the kid who went to prison because he had birdshit on his hood that the drug quicktest identified as cocaine? Dude only got out quickly because he played football (for I think UGA) and the coach intervened. That stuff, friend, is government-approved reality for many.

Historically giving power to local politics in the United States has been (sometimes) used to discriminate against populations. This is effectively what the Jim Crow south was, legal but unequal.

This isn’t to say that federal policies don’t also have issues. If we think something is a right of all citizens (Such as to not be subject to abuse by the police), that only really takes hold if it is applied across the nation, which is federal.

I think the parent is suggesting akin to a Tyranny of the Majority with a locally elected police.

For example, if I live in a small town that where 80% of the people intent their C code with tabs and I use spaces, they could theoretically elect a police chief who espouses tabs-jingoism and treats spaces-programmers less fairly.

Police in small towns are staffed by the good ol' boys club that have no problem with Bob selling cocaine because most of the force has been friends with him since 2nd grade, but God help you if you drive down their highways with an out of state plate or the wrong skin color.

This

Here's a good example. Sheriff, under the influence, attempts to interfere with the arrest of a stabbing suspect, buddy of his. https://youtu.be/pKraZkl0-eA

We know about this one sheriff because his staff stood up to him and he got arrested but it tells you a lot about the quality of local law enforcement in small towns.

In the extremely unlikely event that a majority are ok with it, yes, that would be correct as far as local laws are concerned. That's what "freedom" means: it means people are free to make mistakes. Note, however, that if the corrupt local cops are violating state or federal law, they're still liable even if a majority of local voters are ok with it. I don't have a problem with, for example, local cops being prosecuted for violating a citizen's Constitutional rights.

However, I strongly doubt that a majority of voters in these localities are actually ok with police corruption. I think they either don't bother voting because they don't think it will make any difference, or don't know about the corruption because they haven't personally experienced the consequences. Even in a large city like, e.g., Chicago, the majority of voters will never have a personal encounter with a city cop.

> going to a couple levels in governance (state or federal) makes total sense given the systematic nature of some of the problems

You're assuming that the state and federal levels of government don't also have systematic problems that would prevent them from fixing corruption. That strikes me as a highly unlikely assumption.

The 14th amendment to the constitution would seem to disagree with your assertion.

If the 14th amendment by itself had fixed the problem, we wouldn't still have it 152 years later.

It's unlikely that voters would be ok with all-around corruption of the police, but not unlikely at all that they'd be ok with, for example, harassment or overuse of force against minorities. Historically the Jim Crow south is a direct product of local policies, so I think the historical record supports this view in fact.

While state and federal government aren't devoid of corruption either, at least more homogeneity can be achieved at these levels. Local jurisdictions are more prone to extreme population disparities just by virtue of being smaller.

If state and local law enforcement were subject to this level of federal oversight and control, we would not have legal marijuana anywhere.

We have quasi-legal marijuana in some jurisdictions right now. It's still federally illegal everywhere and that's just not being enforced (I think because the Feds know that if they squeeze that particular watermelon seed that it will fly out of their fingers everywhere).

Not killing people who aren't a threat is about the best one-size-fits-all policy I can imagine.

Sure, if you handwave away the real problem, which is how cops make the "aren't a threat" judgment in the heat of a situation, knowing that if they judge wrong they could end up dead. Making that judgment is highly situational, and how cops should judge individual situations is highly dependent on the locality; there simply is no one-size-fits-all set of rules you can give cops that will work.

Police officer isn’t even top 10 dangerous job in this country. I hate when people use that excuse for them flagrantly shooting somebody or their pet. Police training is the first place we can improve. Changing their mentality from a warrior to a guardian also does wonders in lowering use of force. There are real world solutions to this problem but almost half the country think those who got shot by police probably deserved it. Almost the same crowd protests wearing masks as stepping on their liberties. Absolutely illogical.

> Police officer isn’t even top 10 dangerous job in this country.

Overall, no. But the overall averages conceal a huge variation in risk by locality. I agree that "it's a dangerous job" doesn't excuse shooting innocent people or their pets. But the danger of the job in particular localities should not be underestimated.

> Changing their mentality from a warrior to a guardian also does wonders in lowering use of force.

Can you give specific examples? I agree with the general idea but I have not seen much actual data on specific localities where this is done or what effect it has.

> almost half the country think those who got shot by police probably deserved it

Citation needed.

> Almost the same crowd protests wearing masks as stepping on their liberties.

The protest is not against wearing masks where it makes sense to do so; it's against being ordered to wear masks whether it makes sense or not, and subjecting people to criminal penalties for non-compliance. For example, according to some orders (fortunately for me, not the one currently in effect where I live), you are subject to arrest for simply walking out your front door without a mask on, even if you remain on your own property and nobody else comes anywhere near you.

And don't forget that the same cops whose corruption and lack of judgment you and I both deplore will be the ones to enforce these orders. Frankly, it strikes me as illogical for people to be talking about defunding the police on the grounds of corruption on the one hand, and talking about issuing draconian orders that would have to be enforced by those same police on the other.

If I drive across the county line, don't I (still) deserve a decent police force?

If you know that the next county over has corrupt cops, you shouldn't do business there.

I wish more people understood that the reason the USA was set up the way it was was to allow individual States and localities to compete. Corruption doesn't stand up well to competitive pressure: if all the productive people leave your town because the cops and the local government shake everybody down, your town won't survive. So where you see corruption, the first question you should ask is: what barriers are being put in the way of people just leaving?

How much do you think those people in the corrupt area that everyone is trying to get out of and avoid are going to be able to sell their homes for?

This "solution" is exactly what created the troubles of inner cities to begin with.

> How much do you think those people in the corrupt area that everyone is trying to get out of and avoid are going to be able to sell their homes for?

How much did they buy them for in the first place if the place is corrupt and everyone is trying to get out?

If the place became corrupt after all those people moved there, well, whose fault is that? If your answer is "corrupt politicians and corporations who took advantage of the people", well, there's your barrier to free and open competition between localities.

> This "solution" is exactly what created the troubles of inner cities to begin with.

No, what created the troubles of inner cities was completely unrealistic political expectations. People thought that using the government to fix social problems was a wonderful idea. Inner cities today are tragic evidence of how wrong they were.

I would agree with State level IA body operating under the AG of the state.

I reject the idea that all problems have a national solutions, which this seems to be a part of.

Federalism is good, and we should not continue the path of destruction of our federalist society

Most police departments have internal affairs departments, but these are largely toothless. I would not expect a national organization to perform much better. The incentives simply are not aligned: it is easy to see a politician leaning on the department saying "this will make me look bad, make it go away."

I think what would be more powerful would be to empower citizens to bring criminal cases against police offers acting in their official capacity. Then at least we could be assured that the prosecutors are motivated to win the case for their clients.

Local internal affairs departments don't work because your career is dependent upon this corrupt judge, DA, cop in your area with whom you will work again. You're incentivized not to look too closely because your career is on the line. Plenty of good cops who have uncovered corruption have been personally targeted this way.

In a national department? You get to the top by putting dirty cops in jail. Your boss's boss does not need to maintain an good relationship with a judge in Georgia. They win in their career by putting more dirty cops in jail.

The more national and centralized and separate from the rest of the police a department like this is the more ruthless it can be.

Isn't that one of the roles the FBI has?

As far as i know it's more or less handled by police forces themselves with predictable results.

It's my understanding that the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption, which I would think includes police departments that circle their wagons and protecting criminal cops. Probably they need to be doing a better job of it, but I believe they're meant to be (among other things) the organization you describe above.

I'm not really familiar with the details, but it's my understanding the Seattle PD are under some sort of probation system with the DOJ, which I'm guessing the FBI was involved with. So I think this sort of thing does happen, though I guess not enough.

> the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption

They have a certain amount of ability to do that if the state or local government is violating Federal law. But they do not have general oversight or police powers, since the Federal government as a whole does not. Nor is it supposed to.

Wouldn't local cops violating people's constitutional rights put them at odds with federal law?

Yes, and as a general rule when cases are brought they are under the auspices of a federal civil rights violation. These are very difficult cases to prosecute though, so I think the FBI overfocuses on lower hanging fruit unless there's a political motivation from the top to drive this.

Yes, but that just means prosecuting individual cases. That is very different from trying to make systemic changes in the way local cops operate; those kinds of changes must be made by local governments, and are the kind of changes local citizens should be demanding, and should be voting local governments out of office for not making.

I'm pretty sure trying to pass something like that would very quickly devolve into an argument about states rights. Probably rightly so, as even though oversight would be good, a Federal agency to do so might be problematic for many reasons.

Pretty much every state has their own, state-level investigation bureau [0]. Automatically transferring footage to an internal affairs department there would distance it from the actual department, while preserving state control.

Aside from activating / deactivating the camera (with clear guidelines and penalties for doing / not doing so), and connecting it to a network at the end of a shift, it should be a black box. None of the IT functions should run out of the same police force.

Consequently, this also protects officers in the case of equipment failure: timestamp the activation / deactivation signals in a separate log file. If the footage isn't there, but they activated, then it's no longer their reputation on the line, because they had no involvement in the chain of custody.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_bureau_of_investigation

Yeah, a state department side-steps a lot of those problems (but also possibly lets states ignore it). A federal law requiring police interactions to be recorded and submitted to a state entity and requiring it be stored for a certain period would probably suffice. Then the FBI or whoever investigated an issue Federally (if it got to that) could subpoena it, since it's supposed to exist, and be handled by the state.

I agree it should be a black box. Rule #1 for accountability is that you don't rely on the entity that's being examined to give absolutely correct info. Whether that's debugging a process or reviewing an organization, outside instrumentation is essential.

> America desperately needs a national internal affairs department ith an entirely separate reporting line whose boss answers directly to the president (or at least state governors).

The closest thing (and its fairly close, though it doesn't answer to the states or the President directly) is the US Department of Justice, particularly the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, which addresses "1) the rights of people in state or local institutions, including: jails, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, and health care facilities for persons with disabilities; 2) the rights of individuals with disabilities to receive services in their communities, rather than in institutions; 3) the rights of people who interact with state or local police or sheriffs' departments; 4) the rights of youth involved in the juvenile justice system; 5) the rights of people to have safe access to reproductive health care clinics; and 6) the rights of people to practice their religion while confined to state and local institutions." [0]

But weakening oversight of local law enforcement by DoJ was a major early priority of the current Administration, so it hasn't been particularly active in the particular role you are concerned with for the last few years.

> If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.

I can't really imagine a Biden Administration not ramping activity regarding law enforcement oversight back up.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/crt/special-litigation-section

> If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.

If only a significant % of america didn't refuse to acknowledge police abuse of power was a big deal (or even happening)

That would be contrary to the whole spirit of Federalism. It would be like every EU country having a separate department of internal affairs which reports directly to Brussels, except, perhaps, even more politically inflammatory. I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with you, just noting that there's a big wall in the path of implementing the concept.

GP said internal affairs could report to state governors.

I think they edited their post.

The US is a single country with a single military.

> The US is a single country with a single military.

Not... entirely accurate.

Many states possess their own military forces [0], and state National Guard units are dual-chained to both state and national military leadership [1] (in different scenarios).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force#Active_sta...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Guard#N...

That big wall being the tenth amendment to the Constitution.

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