It happens every day, and in almost every case, there's literally zero recourse no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
1. make a policeman's professional licensing body and require all police to join it. (Take the police unions and turn them into that.)
2. Have the licensing body introduce the concept of professional malfeasance.
3. Make a simple regulatory statute where professional malfeasance as decided by that licensing body, creates civil/criminal liability.
Y'know — just like engineers!
The challenge is you're seeking to overturn the systems of violence with peaceful legislative action. This is a lofty goal with historically rare outcome.
They’re just bad at their jobs. There are no incentives really to be good at their jobs, and very few people are motivated to get them to do high quality work. Nobody wants to understand the complexity of a police force, people are either mildly annoyed or can only grasp a message that fits on a protest sign.
“Systems” should be a dirty word when it comes to discussing social issues, it’s just a catchall boogeyman for people who don’t want to understand complexity and often (as is done subtly here) an prelude to suggesting violence.
Police are as good as society forces them to be, marching in the street to abolish them doesn’t put any pressure on them to be better.
This is incredibly naive. In Los Angeles County, for example, there are deputy gangs[0]. That is, the police have their own gang within the department. Often they come from less fortunate backgrounds, but they’re still out to use their power for their own gain. It’s not just being bad at their jobs.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County_Sheriff's...
Likewise, "complexity," as a reason that someone is wrong, yet completely unqualified by a less vague description of an actual error is a cop-out that should have no place in such discussions.
> The police aren’t the arm of a ruling class abusing the less fortunate (much though some want to believe this).
While I can't say for sure that there's a causal relationship between pay-to-win courts, rich people given an express lane to lawmakers and in general a society fundamentally built on the notion that wealth affords power, and the police bias against poor people, I believe that this is the level you have to consider the question at.
That is, the problem can't fully be explained by looking at the police force only but is the result of the police interacting with other authorities and reacting to policy. Normally you would call these interacting bodies "systems" and say that the problem is "systemic" but I guess that's a foul word.
What is this even supposed to mean? A prelude to suggesting violence? Is that when you don't actually suggest violence but the word 'prelude' is used to make someone fill in the blanks to reinterpret it that way?
It's quite rich that pointing out state violence results in factually incorrect accusations (not to mention personal insult implying I'm not going to "understand complexity") as an attempt to turn the tables and make me sound the violent one instead of the systems that cause innocents to be maimed and killed by police actions.
Yeah, police gangs in LA exist (including those showing police officers glorifying killing) 'but they're not representative' of the problem. No the real problem must be 'preludes' to non-existent suggestions of violence.
>They’re just bad at their jobs.
And it is ever so convenient that they are bad in their jobs in ways that result in the disfavor of the disadvantaged, poor, and certain minorities. I'm sure that does not result in relatively better treatment for those in elevated positions of power (such as high level elected officials, who we don't dare call the 'ruling class'). No these are just happy accidents that are not at all guided by those in elevated positions of power (but not the 'ruling class'!).
This kind of thing works better with skilled professionals which police are not. Plus, nobody wants engineers to build bridges that fall down, plenty of people want police to be abusive and belligerent… to groups of people they don’t identify with.
This, 110%.
It will be useless for the same reason Internal Affairs is useless. The line of "We investigated ourselves and found no wrong-doing" will continue.
Police are buddies with the District Attorneys which are buddies with the judges. The result is nobody wants to prosecute police officers.
I believe unions already tend to kick out union members who don’t accept union-appointed lawyers and instead attempt to litigate their own cases. This wouldn’t be much of a stretch from that.
Whereas a professional licensing body is a separate legal entity from the people the body licenses; and the government can regulate (control, manipulate, coerce) the licensing body without getting tangled up in laws about what the government can or cannot do to protected classes of people.
(The FBI, in its role of being external federal auditors for police corruption/malfeasance — but with no power over police departments, only the power to charge individual officers with federal criminal acts if that applies — is essentially the best the federal government can do.)
But if there just happened to be a private-corporation licensing body operating in multiple states (and thus performing “interstate commerce”), which police officers in those states were already members of… well, then the federal government would be perfectly within its rights to regulate that corporation! As long as they kept it at arm’s length, and didn’t attempt to nationalize it.
The result is cops who feel like they have the freedom to do what is necessary, and a licensing body that will only select quality cops.
The NSW state government appoints the Chief Commissioner of the LECC – but by law, they must appoint a (serving or retired) senior judge. The other Commissioner is also appointed by the government, but the Chief Commissioner has a veto over the government's appointment of the Commissioner, and by law cannot be a serving or retired police officer – http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/nsw/cons...
It seems to be actually effective – at least sometimes – in going after police misbehaviour, for example: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/are-you-going-to-attack-...
Although in other cases maybe it has not done as good a job: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-20/nsw-police-watchdog-k...
And some view it as overly lenient: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/06/nsw-p...
Still, I wonder what would have been the outcome in those kinds of cases if they had happened in the US?
Whenever an officer or public official exceeds his lawful authority, he should have liability same as any random Joe on the street for the same offense.
This sort of thing happens to thousands of people in the US every day, routinely.
If I had a magic wand, the DA's offices across America would review cases promptly, prosecute justifiable cases, and preemptively drop unjustified cases as soon as possible — and report truly questionable policing to a real oversight board, while actually charging and prosecuting police officers for genuinely bad policing.
In reality, in most jurisdictions, the DA's office often doesn't even look at most cases until the day of arraignment, months after someone's life has already been run through a ringer and they've spent tens of thousands on retaining a defense attorney (if they're lucky enough to afford one), not to mention therapy (again, if they're lucky enough to afford that). All too often they'll try to coerce a plea deal for a bad case, rather than simply dropping it — and people accept the offered deal, because the alternative is incredibly expensive, and incredibly risky.
As for holding police accountable for bad policing? Unless it's a case that garners the political will to prosecute (usually due to massive negative media attention), a ski holiday in hell is more likely.
However, Chesa Boudin's office swung way too far in the opposite direction, failing to even prosecute strong cases for real crimes that resulted in real harm. Eventually, the police gave up — why bother going through the effort of policing if the DA is just going to drop the case anyway? It's like writing code only to have `git` erase your entire branch when you `git push`.
I'm not a police apologist ("fuck the police" would find a spot on my top-100 playlist!) but Chesa Boudin absolutely deserved to be recalled.
Seems like they already hesitate to act.
They already hesitate to do protecting at their own peril, as evidenced by that recent school shooting.
In true life-or-death situations, instinct and training still kicks in.
But maybe cops should be hesitating before deciding to escalate a situation just because someone challenged them when they overstepped their legal authority.
I'd recommend this argument against, which does provide significant context:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publicat...
I'm OK with this; Blackstone's ratio applies here, too ("It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.")