The FBI is often involved in some of the most serious crimes (serial murderers, sex trafficking, organized crime), so getting rid of them sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Without a doubt we should be wanting police reform, including better ways to discover criminal wrongdoing and more effective ways to deter it from happening and/or punish those who commit it.
And, I admit this statement may be controversial, but you need police for a functioning society. People need someone to call if they get threatened or to deal with the aftermath of a murder. Without police, people would demand something that looks very similar to a cop.
You don't need the FBI. It's creation was linked to prohibition which we didn't need either. It's modern form came to be under Edgar Hoover who used it to facilitate Japanese internment, to "purge alleged homosexuals from any position in the federal government" (quote from Wikipedia) and domestic surveillance against civil rights leaders.
They were the agency that should've been responsible for stopping 9/11. Stealing again from Wikipedia, "government documents showed that both the CIA and the FBI had missed 23 potential chances to disrupt the terrorist attacks".
They do help convict murderers though. "Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000... the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death". [0]
Either way it shouldn't need to be the only evil left in the world before it's dealt with.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...
They are also largely the ones called in to investigate serial murderers, child sex rings, drug trafficking, organized crime, etc. I think deferring to state level agencies to handle these crimes would produce worse outcomes.
I’m not saying the FBI is great. They’ve done a lot of awful things and had a lot of failures. But the current bad system isn’t automatically improved by getting rid of it if the alternative is worse.
[edit] it’s a bit like hitting a local maxima. Is there a better system out there for catching interstate and large scale crime? Most definitely. But it seems foolhardy to not have that plan in place when deciding to “dismantle” the FBI when doing so means more terror attacks happen, more children get trafficked, serial murderers kill more victims, drug lords grow bigger operations, etc.
In particular, they often use 18 USC 1001 to manufacture crimes and the only evidence supporting a charge may be a written report (an FD-302) that could have been written months after the fact. Their current policy is not to record interviews. I think that needs to be reversed and there should be some materiality requirement to the 18 USC 1001 charges, rather than trying to get someone to slip up. They should also have bodycams when involved in raids or similar activities, same as cops do.
I'm also disturbed at how often they "lose" things like Woods files. I think their case files should be externally managed and backed up and audited by a separate agency who can present "missing" evidence in court from backup, along with records of who tried to delete it, regularly audit case files for things like the missing Woods files that shouldn't be, etc.
I'd do the same for cops, too. Body cameras should send the video to a separate organization that doesn't answer to the cops, so they can't "lose" it. And if they "forget" to turn it on, well, that should be subject to regular audits and should get someone in trouble long before it becomes an issue in a big case.
It's weird, we spend lots of time designing computer systems to support accountability, but there seem to be a lot of things we could do better on that front in law enforcement.