Imagining a society that isn't dominated by police

I think the better way would be that such fines are sent straight to a national/federal agency, which in turn disburses the fund across the entire country as needed. That would prevent any corrupt small-town police force from simply fining people to raise money because they may never see any of it themselves.

Those revenues aren't going to an agency that is removed from the situation.

The revenues should be going to the state, or the federal level. Or simply removed from circulation

My family came from Switzerland about 200 years ago, and our name is recognizably Swiss. I actually got my passport temporarily confiscated and went through an interrogation about 20 years ago (before 9/11/2001) because they didn't believe I was an American. The fact that I was speaking to them in German was used as evidence against me - because how on earth would an American know German? I giggle at the idea that my ancestral home interrogated me, but the border guards when I went to scary communist China or muslim Turkey barely opened the cover of my passport before they passed me through. But really the worst I've ever been treated was coming back into the US from Canada...

On the other hand, the police in Italy openly carry submachine guns.

I think there's a lot of post-hoc fallacy in comparisons between US and EU policing. There's certainly a problem in the US, but it's probably nowhere near as simple as "US police carry guns".

Qualified immunity protects the state against out of control claims. Bonding these employees up front means there can be no surprises about liability.

Not that I know of, though it seems like such a simple idea that someone must have thought of it.

The idea is to protect governments from settlement costs while creating pricing signals for over-aggressive cops, prosecutors, etc. AND enabling victims to get compensation.

There seem to be too many cases of bad prosecutions, and, as it is now, the victims usually get screwed.

> ...the majority of police victims are probably not "innocent" civilians, but armed, violent criminals.

Citation needed.

I don't know why this is always posed as some sort of hypothetical or thought experiment, as if we don't have ample empirical evidence. Before modern nation-states emerged, we had feudal war lords in charge. When you overthrow nation-states, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, the feudal war lords return to power. Those are the two options.

It's two sided -- officers behave better because they're on camera, and people make up fewer false accusations because they know they were on camera.

My city (Denver) passed a law mandating body cameras for police during the last election. It'll probably be a year or two before we get data on how well it's worked.

Also the person the officer is speaking with knows their behavior is being recorded.

One concern I have about cameras is if the police get the opportunity to review the footage before testifying, and others don't. I think that would be a significant shift of power toward the police, though it may still curtail some of the most extreme abuses.

The police seem to treat protestors much worse than anybody else, which makes me think such heavy-handed tactics are a response to pressure from above.

The government(s) have shown a consistent disregard for freedom of assembly.

This is really at the heart of the problem I have with the American approach to policing - everything becomes a police issue. Your tail light is out. Does the cop: a) tell you your tail light is out and to have a nice day and drive safe or b) demand license and registration, take 10 minutes to run a complete background check, insult you for having the tail light out, threaten to search the rest of your vehicle, and finally get around to giving you a ticket so that they can meet their quotas and fill their coffers.

Drugs: we treat it like a policing issue, other countries treat it as a social and health issue.

Immigration: we turn it into a policing deal when really its an economic and social system matter.

Gangs: our cops talk tough on the nightly news and the newspaper, but really this is directly tied to the drug and immigration problem and is again, and economic problem of when you have disfranchised young men.

Even a lot of the speeding and traffic problems are really cases of poor civil engineering and traffic management, but we "fix" them through a convenient policing trick that also generated revenue without raising anyone's taxes visibly.

Homelessness, especially due to mental illness? Let's make laying on the sidewalk illegal so we can turn a social problem into a police issue.

So in short, our US system turns things into policing issues because you know, fixing the real problems would be tough.

>the solution is to get people to question their media

That's contrary to human nature. The solution is to make the media independent of outside interests. The simplest would be to ban all media employees from outside commercial activity, ban investment in media from non-media companies and ban advertisement. Alternatively advertisement could be allowed as long as the money is paid equally to all media, and the ads are randomly allocated.

Third alternative is to have a responsible government channel that competes with the commercial ones, funded by tax money and independent like a central bank. That, however, would require a reasonably decent government to begin with. This model actually works pretty well in many countries.

But how tall a hurdle is jumping your Facebook or Twitter feed, really? IMHO these (NYT, Economist) outlets are lukewarm at best.

If you'll allow a digression, even if you do think the new media is working reasonably well, let's work together to enumerate what some of the problems are with big media that, if they were addressed, would make them better:

1.) News readership (consumer) not the source of funding, sponsors and advertisers are

2.) Most large media outlets have been bought by other corporate interests

3.) Changing technology and culture has created a void of long format messaging (and the death of usual distribution channels - which maybe is a good thing?)

4.) Government drastically improved symbiotic working relationship with media, challenging its role as an effective Fourth Estate

5.) News media outlets routinely surveilled and journalists legally challenged on big stories, chilling knowledgeable informants and would be whistleblowers

6.) Political and legal barriers and costs of investigative journalism high, demand and compensation low

7.) Fundamental lack of reporting and self-reporting on media organizations themselves

8.) Lack of competition due to 'enshrined' reputations and primetime due to trust relationships with content services - plus girth of production in long tail (and in major suppliers) of low quality, uncorrected, inaccurate, misleading, politicized, propogandized, or unprofessional work due to lowered costs of production

9.) 'Gamification' of the consumer for views (thus dollars) - including the short media attention span, use of talking heads, scare media, infotainment, eccentric coverage of irrelevancies, invention of false controversies

(More welcome)

Certainly Facebook and Twitter aren't editorialized and are subject to and gamed by social media optimization. (They also don't address any of the problems listed above.) Facebook and Twitter are essentially the same as relying on rumor and heresay (nearly by definition). And we know they are heavily propagandized.

Yes, but it starts with the premise that these are alternatives. If anything, I think these are things that are good in _addition_ to our current system, but as a replacement I think it's a bit of a pipe dream.

Further, I take issue with the whole notion of the United States being a society "dominated by the police." It looks like we have just the right amount[1], so it seems to me that the issue is lack of training, accountability and open reporting combined with effective police review that are likely to be our problems.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't police start as community patrols, then were legitimized when they had to start employing deadly force in order to keep other more organized and dangerous groups at bay? (mobs, gangs, etc)

Have I? I live there. ColOmbia

Are you talking about Colombia?