L.A. County sheriff’s unit accused of targeting political enemies, vocal critics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Car was stolen, I found it a few blocks away. Cop showed up to take a report 12 hours later and immediately accused me of driving drunk, forgetting where I parked, then smashing up the steering column to create a cover story. Was very aggressive about it (see my story would change) until I looked him in the eye and told him I'm leaving if he wasn't going to help.

Similar experience in the US. Victim of theft from my garage, cops show up and pretty much don't care but are more interested in poking around.

Latest experience in both countries is utter indifference unless it's a violent crime. Last time my car was broken into I don't even both making a report.

No way in hell 2 patrol cops are gonna do all the paperwork or are encouraged to go track down the various video footage to find out who hit you. They might refer it to a detective. Who wont action something that will likely result in a misdemeanor offense or very light straight to probation felony at best. Especially when you consider detectives workloads. It makes a certain degree of sense when considering prioritization. The detectives supervisor would probably lambast them for deciding to spend the half day to track all that down when more serious crime could have been pursued instead.

Meanwhile the detective has way more incentives in his social group to prioritize finding the person who hit the SFPD detective. The detectives supervisor might even tell them to drop everything and prioritize to help internal office politics!

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421073/

The only thing that does any good is independent civilian oversight, with teeth. Bodycams and dashcams required, with recordings held by the oversight board, and dismissal for turning them off.

Disarming them while on patrol would be a useful intermediate step toward defunding.

It's especially a problem in corrections which has laxer standards and background checks where gangs will send people to be the guards that are in charge of their people. "Gang infilitrator" has started becoming a serious concern and something they look out for at police and correctional academies.

Most importantly, is tying accreditation to funding. Officers will report corruption if that corruption could lead to de-crediting, which in turns means layoffs, pay cuts, and reduced equipment. It will even change the incentives for police unions. When police misconduct has the potential to cut into the bottom line of officers, it is in the best interests of unions to also help minimize misconduct. And collective bargaining agreements are with the police departments, not with the accrediting body, meaning unions would have limited influence over certification standards.

Absolutely these sorts of solutions are not a panacea, and there is still plenty of room for things to go wrong. Corruption at the higher echelons of state-wide authorities would have more impact due to this centralization of authority. The accrediting body has to walk a fine line: it needs to be seen as a body of peers by police officers (in the same way lawyers view the BAR association) while at the same time enforcing best practices and leading reforms. There's a balancing act there that has to be done right. And even with all of this corruption can still happen, but it might re-align incentives and work to reduce some of the serious issues we see with America's police forces.

Or we get that time that the Baltimore (I'm like 90% sure it was Baltimore) PD stopped enforcing everything that wasn't an obvious danger to the public. The only two groups who didn't like that were the government who was missing out on revenue and upper middle class types who were really pissed off that people were riding unregistered dirt bikes on the street. It was kind of a nice break for the common man.

The way to improve the police is to improve the set of laws they are called on to enforce, and to strengthen the limitations on their behavior (and to dress them like mailmen again rather than soldiers.) If the police aren't called on to act unethically/cruelly as a duty, better people will become police, and the ones who thrived on being bullies will quit.

But yes, I didn't flesh out some of the details on how to add civilian oversight. I think you could model it roughly around the federal Justice Department. You would have a head law enforcement official, appointed by the governor and approved by the state legislature, perhaps serving a longer term than the governor so that the position isn't nearly as tied to the administration. And then a head of a state "Justice department" of sorts (a broader agency covering the state law enforcement agency, the department of corrections, and some additional sub-organizations like state capitol security, a state-wide internal affairs office, etc.) which is also appointed by the governor and approved by the state legislature. This justice department head would then act as a buffer between the governor and day-to-day law enforcement activities. The idea would be to limit state-level control of law enforcement to regulatory changes (either advanced by the governor in a limited capacity, and the state legislature more broadly) and not individual investigations. But, as we saw in the Trump administration, this separation isn't exactly ironclad, and depends a lot on politicians and officials obeying certain cultural norms and standards. When you're creating a brand new organization and system from scratch at the state level, you won't have those ingrained cultural norms. Another options would be making law enforcement an independent agency headed up by a council. This would work in a similar way to the FEC, the FTC, the FCC, or the Federal Reserve. Leadership is made up by a group of board members who serve either for life or some long time period. Vacancies are filled by governor appointment, but subject to state legislature approval. Because the governor can't fire council members (excluding perhaps special circumstances, but that's beyond the scope of this post), and can only appoint new ones with the cooperation of the state legislature, this provides a significant degree of insulation from governor and legislative control.

The accrediting body also provides a significant degree of oversight in a different manner. This body would function like the state bar associations, meaning they would be completely independent from the government. This means the people have essentially no democratic control over them, except for the extreme step of repealing the law requiring state funds go only to departments accredited by that association. So you would have to be very careful going about setting up such an organization, and make sure it is organized internally to continue to function well. And of course, by definition this wouldn't really count as "civilian oversight", since the association would be completely independent and made up at least partially of law enforcement professionals, but would very much protect against the "governor using the police as a personal army" scenario.