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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

This is a small government, conservative supreme court?

If you think of the police as the executive arm of the judiciary, then you can understand why they would want to give them immunity from accountability for their actions. The courts have ruled that the police are no responsibility to protect the public which only leaves their ability to enforce some laws as their responsibility.

Qualified immunity dates back about 60 years as far as I can tell and is a complete creation solely of the courts.

Qualified Immunity could be easily fixed by law. That congress has been unwilling to pass such a law tells you that both sides support.

The attempts to fix this has come from the left. That the defenders of this are center/right do not suggest "both sides support" this.

Even in CA the legislature has done nothing to eliminate QI. That suggests it’s hardly opposed by the left.

People should stop treating California as the bastion of the Democrats, since it really isn't. There are 49 other states, many of them blue, that have none of the problems california has. California has been a state that struggles to govern for it's people since it was first created. It was a conservative stronghold for decades, and was no better under republicans. It seems more like there's something in the water, or rather that californian corporate interests have always been above the people there.

Conservatives scream about california because it's a useful red herring. California's stupidity is not limited to democrats, but conservatives really like to push that california is bad BECAUSE of democrats, the classic correlation causation thing.

Democrats often try to play the same dumb game with Texas, and that should be similarly rejected.

Not when courts twist themselves to pretzels to overturn or ignore those laws when they occasionally pass.

Also, only one party activists are trying to overturn it. Other part supports it. It is wrong to blame both sides.

Roe v Wade was passed in 1973 and they just overturned it. Yes SCOTUS has a majority one way for now, but things change.

Thanks to the way SCOTUS works, and horrific games by the previous admin, things wont change for fifty years.

Yes. Small goverment refers to education and health care. It refers to public defenders or social programs.

Small goverment never meant less power to police.

Of course, if that be the case, then “small government” doesn’t mean “small government” either. :(

This issue doesn't really fall along conservative/liberal lines.

Also, why is devnulll's post that just says: "Qualified Immunity could be easily fixed by law. That congress has been unwilling to pass such a law tells you that both sides support." flagged?

That doesn't seem flag worthy.

Edit: Seems people either vouched it, or removed their flags. It no longer shows as flagged.

Probably because it is not both sides issue. And also, this particular issue falls very easily into conservative/liberal lines.

many QI critics seem to be libertarians.

Libertarians are neither conservatives nor liberals, so I don't see how that affects the conservative/liberal dichotomy.

Small government, applied to policing, bears the slogan "defund the police." "Small government," with a blind spot for policing, is also known as authoritarianism.

Dichotomizing it is clearly not intellectually honest. To imply that there is ideological motivation for either 'faction' that you so subtly mention is a red herring.

Edit: a red herring that people apparently find to be delicious. How the hell do you even downvote on this site?

You're right, that was a little glib. "Defund the police" is almost never a move towards small government; the proposal typically goes hand in hand with massive investment in social services that would be geared at reducing criminality.

I make no apologies for pointing at the Thin Blue Line movement and its supporters and calling that bald-faced authoritarianism.

edit: since you're new here, you might not know that complaining about downvotes is frowned upon. If you earn enough karma, you'll gain the ability to express your own disagreement through downvotes. One generally avoids collecting downvotes by making arguments in good faith.

It goes both ways. Better training would go very far as would more money and better oversight in social services.

The current state of social services are an even bigger dumpster fire than policing; it's just less photogenic and more for bureaucratic reasons.

Given history and current culture the former is more realistically attainable than the latter IMO.

Interesting that you think that social services need oversight but police need training.

It doesn't matter how good police oversight is if the training sucks. No department is gonna fire all their officers. See: Tyre Nichols officers, that police department lowered hiring standards to make even prior felonies wavierable a year or two prior to that incident (because no one wants to be a cop due to the bad pr).

Social services have gigantic waste, bureaucratic rule problems and for many social services jobs the real training is outside of the governments purview (degrees). So the issues with personnel quality aren't as easily correctible by better training like for police (though it still plays a part).

Give social workers guns and police a notepad for a week and you could create a utopia

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