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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

The craziest part is the police defending this action as a “cut and dry” case. Meanwhile the lawsuit this woman just filed will hurt taxpayers and not the corrupt city officials and police that caused this. We need to ban all forms of immunity - none for cops, politicians, or judges. They need to be personally liable for their actions.

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It's absolutely not the slightest bit crazy if you've paid attention to how cops behave at any point in the last history of the country. 100% agree about personal responsibility. You must understand that when the cops says that oversight means they can't do their job, that means they view their job as bullying, harassing and killing citizens, so yea, we should put a stop to that. 1312

> It's absolutely not the slightest bit crazy

Imo, speaking like this normalizes their behavior - it was crazy then and it's crazy now.

GP isn’t entirely wrong, our governing apparatus has made this something to be expected.

I will not put the blame on the bobbies, that's too convenient. Someone had to order them to do this. That's who needs to be permanently ousted from all levels of government and their voting rights rescinded.

Nobody has to order people to do anything if it's in their self interest. Yes corruption flows downhill, but until they flip, just following orders isn't a defense.

Just following orders of course does not excuse anyone but I would rather not play whack-a-mole. That is how they expect us to play "The Game" by throwing one of their tools under the bus.

I prefer to work my way up the chain of command first and find the head(s) of the snake. Sure, punish the cops but don't let their corrupt chain of command play The Game otherwise we all just lost and the problem just repeats with new tools.

Sure, I definitely agree that the highest impact work would be to shine the light on the corruption among the leadership and hold them to account, in all cases. However in the institution of American police the corruption is endemic.

Lmao no this is just American police chiefs doing what they love to do, guarantee this whole thing starts and ends in that PD

From the PDF looks like Trinidad City Councilwoman Marie Bannister and Trinidad Police Chief Charles W. Gregory, may have started this. The Texas governor [1] needs to start pruning both up and down from there. Actually the governor should take full control of that county, oust everyone and fix the water problems.

[1] - https://gov.texas.gov/

[redacted] all police but don't pretend it isn't crazy. Not every country is like this.

I hear you, but there has to be some balance between full immunity and no immunity at all. The one thing that comes to mind is rich and powerful people, because they have unlimited resources to sue and ruin the lives of cops, judges and politicians, which would lead to these officials avoiding to hold rich and powerful individuals accountable even when they have committed crimes.

I'm not a lawyer, but what you're describing sounds to me like an example of strategic lawsuits against public participation, just where the targeted "public" isn't a member of the general public but a public servant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

These lawsuits need to be charged against the police pension funds, not the city coffers

I agree with you

"would"? There is currently a disparity in how rich and poor people are policed.

I get the point that there should be some limited immunity so they can do their jobs. Debatable, but worth the debate.

The argument about the repercussions of eliminating immunity is logical. It just seems like one of those things where there are multiple factors contributing to undesirable outcomes, and that makes it necessary to talk to experts.

You're so close! Instead of patching the issue maybe let's solve the root problem of spiky power distribution among humans. We don't need to make sure cops have immunity to prosecute powerful people. We need to not have powerful people.

(though realistically speaking yes there's probably some level of procedural immunity that probably makes sense, similarly with business bankruptcies not ruining the people who start the business)

I agree with you, but most people aren’t ready to engage with basic anarchist arguments

I don't know if anarchy helps in this situation, I actually think you need robust social systems with buy in from citizens to prevent the natural accumulation of power. The fundamental problem is that there's a diminishing cost to acquiring power as you acquire power, this relationship should be inverted. The more powerful you are the harder it should be to get more powerful.

This is basic engineering, you don't want runaway feedback loops, the underlying system is unstable so we need a control system.

Weird that you're getting downvoted for this. You're spot on.

We need to not have powerful people

What does this even mean?

It's very easy to get started on this, you tax the shit out of people who have a lot of money because the old adage is true.

Even if you could achieve that, there would still be rich people. Musk would still be a billionaire even if he had to pay 90% tax.

Plus, many powerful people in government are not that rich.

His ability to use his wealth to influence the government and the populous would be significantly reduced. There's a big difference between "rich" and "rich enough circumvent democracy."

Don’t you think a far bigger threat to democracy is that government allows this influence? And voters seem to be perfectly OK with both 250M campaign contributions and widespread lobbying?

Whataboutism. Which is funny because it's literally the same problem.

It's somewhat intractable at this point unless or until we can figure out how to structure society in a way that can actually prevent it. Not sure we have the organizational knowledge at this point.

The government used to have better guards in place, but then what happened? They got weakened because of the monied interests already existed were successful at largely capturing the government. Guess what else happened during much the same time period; The government largely stopped breaking up monopolies, and many unions were busted or otherwise weakened or eliminated.

Make currently powerful people less powerful and currently powerless people more powerful.

C'mon, HN users forgot how to think? Forgot to ask Claude?

To do that you first need to become more powerful than those powerful people, right?

Well, no, you just a need a coalition that collectively is more powerful.

We already have two such coalitions within Congress: Republicans and Democrats.

How is that working out?

Those are coalitions of politicians, which to an increasing extent are part of the "powerful" group that needs to be overridden. By coalitions I mean coalitions of the actual citizenry.

I struggle to imagine how would something like that form, function, or become powerful enough to matter. Do you have any examples of such coalitions?

Unfortunately most of them are bad. The Tea Party is maybe one, for instance. Note that I'm not describing any type of "structure" here. I just mean a group of people who are willing to vote for the same things.

They got captured

Exactly which types of politicians, judges etc would be targeted by liability do you think? The unrighteous politicians? The judges in favour of those in power?

I mean that when someone files a lawsuit to defend their civil/constitutional rights and wins, the penalty must be paid by the offenders and not taxpayers. For example the police who made the arrest and their supervisors.

In my experience (I sued my town for violating my first amendment rights), the city will have insurance that will cover any damages or settlement they have to pay. Their premiums will likely go up, but the impact to taxpayers is probably minimal.

Perhaps in the first order, but when premiums go up and go up across all policies due to the acceptability of litigation... Everyone pays eventually.

Its a bit like saying driving dangerously is OK because you have insurance. Until everyone drives dangerously and insurance is sky high for all.

That said, they should be sued.

This entire debacle weirds me out. Surely the police is aware of the water issues. They drink from the same tap as the locals do. What would a sane person call arresting people that publicly call out that your water supply is obviously contaminated?

That would not necessarily be the case in my town. We have police who don't live in the county and fireman who don't live in the state. (Los Angeles)

Even making them pay their own lawsuit insurance premiums would be enough to stop 90% of abuse.

No change will happen until cities stop using police revenue for discretionary spending.

Nazi Germany wasn't chaos, just a lot of people following "cut-and-dry" protocol.

Just more actions from free speech loving Republicans. Exactly like that guy in Tennessee who got $800k.

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