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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

If it's not prosecuted, it's defacto legal.

What we really need in this country is a way to prosecute which bypasses the DA since this type of thing seems to be becoming more common.

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> prosecute which bypasses the DA

This is precisely why DAs are elected officials. It's supposed to work this way, in theory. The people vote in the officials who enforce the laws in the manner they wish. In practice, DA elections seem totally ignored.

The problem is lack of voting and civic engagement.

The only candidates are those steeped in the systematic corruption. I have never seen an outsider even run.

Usually that's because the local PDs exercise their union coffers to ensure that candidates are a minimum level of friendly. If not, there are multiple cases where the police have either directly threatened a candidate or simply did a work stoppage in order to craft a narrative.

You can see this in clear view in the recent cases of Boudin and Price in the SF bay area.

There is a way - file a civil suit. That won't have the possibility of sending people to jail, but does have the possibility of financial damages being awarded that are higher than you'd see in a criminal case.

Which is what qualified immunity stands in the way of.

Just spitballing here... report it, and file a class action against the DA if they don't prosecute?

That has not just qualified immunity, but also straight up standard sovereign immunity. On top of that, the courts are very much against messing with prosecutorial discretion. They view it as a separation of powers issue.

IANAL, but doesn't that require good faith? Shakedowns carried out by off-duty cops don't seem to be acting in good faith.

Sort of, but not in a way you'd expect. It presupposes that they don't know what's good faith or not without explicit cases on the subject in that jurisdiction. So qualified immunity squashes new cases that haven't been exactly covered, but also typically doesn't create new case law on that subject meaning that police can continue doing that 'possibly' bad behavior.

Oh, man... That is a disappointing way for things to work. So how would one go about pursuing a complaint in a way that would get case law to exist for a specific scenario?

Start by getting 5 supreme court justices willing to overturn old precedents on board.

The last time this was discussed was in 1982, with an 8-1 decision that strengthened qualified immunity.

Your term for today is Selective Enforcement.

They want you to think like that because it’s good for business…and since our prison population exceeds that of Russia or any other country (per capita), it appears that business is good…

Business is definitely good as the private prisons market makes a killing anywhere they’re allowed to operate. It’s as if there was a vested interest in having a huge carceral population for some reason.

We have a way. In most states the Attorney General can assign a prosecutor to pursue local corruption cases. The AG is an elected office accountable to voters.

However, the prosecutor often is beholden to local police departments to prosecute other unrelated crime. Most DAs don't have the ability to bite the hand that feeds them.

If a DA comes out and says "hey, I'm investigating a racket that is put on by local cops" those local cops (and their union) will fight tooth and nail to remove that DA, no matter how effective their other investigations are. If that AG or DA is out of a job, and try to spill the beans, they can be threatened, or ignored outright by local media or other prosecutors who have legitimate reasons to not rock the boat.

Organized corruption begets more organized corruption.

Local police departments seldom have any real influence over a state AG.

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