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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

By that theory you'd still expect some bad cop to occasionally end up at a good department. So if the other cops at the department are really good cops, they would charge the bad cop very quickly for doing something. I would imagine that to make at least local news (I mean we just read that cops saving ducks is making lots of news). Why do we not see any of those reports. One way to identify good departments should be police union membership. Considering the crucial role police unions play in protecting bad cops, good departments should have near zero membership, are there such departments?

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I'm guessing that in well-run departments, bad cops tend to get pushed out quickly, before they do something really bad that's worthy of news coverage (plus, they probably have better hiring practices to try to identify who's a good "cultural fit"). Plus, departments probably try to avoid media coverage of anything that makes them look bad, just like any organization.

Police unions nationwide are probably a net negative I'd agree, but claiming that good departments wouldn't have any union at all seems a big extreme. Public service employee unions are pretty normal in the US.

> Why do we not see any of those reports.

Because the bad cop goes to jail and now he's no longer in the department, so the department falls out of the news cycle. I'm not sure what else you'd expect...

Here's a possible example of a couple bad cops in what could be a good department: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/offi...

The "bad department" is the US when you compare it against the rest of the planet

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

https://thecrimereport.org/2020/06/18/the-plight-of-the-poli...

We do, sometimes. Instead of getting the presidential medal of freedom like they deserve they are forced to suffer.

The system is broken from the top, can only be fixed from the top and those on top are pretty content with the status quo.

Setting up the DHS after 9/11 was dumb but setting up a new department answerable only to the president to police the police would fix the problem.

>Setting up the DHS after 9/11 was dumb but setting up a new department answerable only to the president to police the police would fix the problem.

No, it wouldn't: what happens when someone like Trump gets elected? Now the police nationwide are basically just like the SA.

If the department was tasked solely with policing the police then Trump would likely just have tried to water it down and render it toothless exactly like he did with the EPA.

I dont see an intrinsic problem with its existence.

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