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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

There a frightening lack of accountability all the way up the chain. The officer doesn’t care because their bosses don’t hold them accountable. The chief doesn’t hold the bosses accountable for that. The local government doesn’t hold the chief accountable. And ultimately the voters don’t hold the local government accountable.

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It’s worse than that. In every jurisdiction, the police department is a revenue generating organization. Overtime, beats, and promotions are rewarded to the officers who pull in the most revenue from tickets and citations. You can check this for yourself. Officer of the year in many jurisdictions are those who have the highest parking tickets written, the most DUI arrests and impounds, or the most traffic citations. In general are not those with the most convictions, public service records, or positive feedback from the community. The accountability the organization and their reporting chain has is to revenue, not to the law.

My belief is we should require all fines and fees be turned over to the social security administration.

A literal bozo explosion going on in some cities / law enforcement organizations, and the _lowest_ layer has been handed Big Brother tech and told, "Just do what the computer tells you to do".

So, voters have to ban this tech or get a bill passed that makes the company responsible financially for screw ups. Is there a third option?

You can continue that all the way up to the President, a 37-felony convict.

It feels like every new innovation in our society now is just a new way to diffuse responsibility.

Well, the US is the most litigious country on earth, so that tracks.

The US is the most litigious country on Earth if you go by the total number of lawsuits filed per year, but of you go my the more reasonable measure of lawsuits filed per year per capita the US is #5 [1]. Here are the top 5 by number of lawsuits per 1000 people per year:

  123.2 Germany
  112.2 Sweden
   96.8 Israel
   95.9 Austria
   74.5 United States

[1] https://eaccny.com/news/member-news/dont-let-these-10-legal-...

In theory, the highest and last level of accountability is the voters. The system isn't perfect, but it's still democratic enough that this sort of thing couldn't happen without the approval or at least indifference of a big chunk of voters.

I don't think you can call voters a level of accountability given how trivial it is for voters to be lied to. Like politicians lie constantly, not even in the weasely "well I said this, not this" sort of thing, I mean they just lie. They tell easily dis-proven lies, on camera, with no accountability from the media or any kind of overseeing entity.

It’s easy to detect their lies. The problem is that the voters don’t want to know they’re being lied to.

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