Civilian police oversight in Florida crumbles after new law kicks in | Hacker News Reader

Civilian police oversight in Florida crumbles after new law kicks in

tampabay.com

31 pointshoward94121 comments

The United States is a country where we only pretend to have the rule of law and equal application of it.

In practice, most laws simply don’t apply to the police.

The ownership class makes this concession to them in exchange for their unwavering fealty in service of the protection of capital’s fixed assets.

The illusion of democratic and legal process governing their behavior paints the whole scheme as legitimate, but there is large scale graft and corruption in the law enforcement apparatus of every major city in the US.

I remember explaining to a visiting Russian friend who had just won a poker tournament in Las Vegas that we couldn’t drive around with his $70k in cash my car because if we get pulled over the cops might steal it. He was astounded that this is how the USA works.

> where we only pretend to have the rule of law and equal application of it.

We have definitely stopped pretending.

USA lacks vigilante assasinations. In some countries in the east communities can dispatch assassins to get officers who are corrupted. The punishments extend to family members as well. This usually able to regulate a lot of corruptions and misconduct in the west. In essence the rule of law in the east are enforced by "social contract" or in American sense "by the people". In the west, these has been severely suppressed in place of laws that dont apply to them. Take China for example with their triads. There were few legendary cases where clans tracked down former corrupted leos and exterminated their grandchildren (water margin is one such "documented folklore). In the west you see this as "family feud like ninjas" but it occurs quite frequently if lived long enough there. The west is very fixated on a single possible tyrant but forgot day-to-day mini-tyrants. In the east the reverse is true. This is also one reason where most eastern asian countries adopted informally dictactorial system and perform way way better than American system.

Florida is the worst of the police states in the nation. Besides seizing money, the police there are well known to routinely seize cars for no good reason. To fix such issues, to truly represent and serve the people, each state must be no bigger than ten million people. By this logic, it should make sense for Florida to split into Northern, Central, and Southern states. The same idea also applies to all the other states exceeding this threshold of population. States in some other countries routinely have such splits or aggregations to better represent the people, and it works. It is also the means of democratic experimentation. I understand that such restructuring will likely never transpire in the US where people don't even think beyond two political parties.

I am not sure why you were being downloaded. The same applies to California - - split the coast from the inland portions and more people will have better representation.

Plus, with the growth of the members of congress, bribing officials will be extraordinarily more expensive.

In terms of stats, Chicago+NYC+LA are up there in legendary tiers. Florida probably negligible if you use those cities instead. Forfeiture is bad though sjould have been banned.

The only people opposed to "civilian" oversight (Are cops the military now?) are corrupt cops.

Some of the legislature seems to also be opposed to "civilian" oversight. See Ohio Puts Police Bodycam Footage Behind a Paywall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42597977

Good. I don’t support security theater.

What about this is security theater? This is about accountability for misbehaving cops.

How is civilian oversight security theater? Also, I dislike the use of civilian here. Cops aren't troops.

Imagine if you had antivirus for your server.

The antivirus is only updated once every 12 months, using discounted old licenses bought from eBay.

Am I hating antivirus? Are we better for saying the servers are secured?

No. The “civilian oversight” is a security blanket that has not demonstrated effectiveness.

What on earth are you talking about? This doesn't make any sense.

You’re assuming that the community oversight is automatically effective. I answer that it needs to demonstrate effectiveness, or otherwise, police can use the claim of being overseen to get away with even more nonsense. At least with police overseeing themselves, the flaw is well understood.

It’s better to have a flawed system but with well understood flaws; than a new theoretically good one with unknown flaws.

> You’re assuming that the community oversight is automatically effective.

This is the assumption people are making on this thread but no one has demonstrated how or if they are effective.

I am not necessarily against civilian oversight but unless a civilian oversight board has the power to strip qualified immunity from an officer , it seems to me that it would be a pointless exercise.

I think a more effective oversight would be eliminating automatic qualified immunity in favor of qualified immunity being earned after an incident. A cop that has to justify their action creates a level of self oversight. Also I feel like it might help curb what I believe is the real problem we see in policing today…it attracts way too many people who have a “bully” personality type.

Literally every person/kid I knew growing up who I would have characterized as a bully at some point looked to law enforcement as a career.

No, but they are paramilitary forces.

What could go wrong? Qualified immunity plus zero oversight and military style equipment- no way that the police officers wouldn’t feel emboldened to overstep.

https://www.tspd.us/swat

The nominal oversight is being rolled into the police organizations. More theater, not less.

Better that police overseeing themselves is well understood and a claim that could be made in court; than an ineffective community oversight system providing cover.

Nothing is more potentially dangerous than an organization which claims that they have a 3rd party oversight system, so they can be trusted, with this claim then being taken at face value.

self-oversight is always the best one ;)

It works well in finance, and any of the professions susceptible to pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, or sloth.

It's why referees in pro sports are on their way out.

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