3 ms·
Good reminder to vote your district attorney or equivalent out of office every single election unless they are relentless about prosecuting police who break the
by tehwebguy 5y ago
Good reminder to vote your district attorney or equivalent out of office every single election unless they are relentless about prosecuting police who break the law.
Weird examples that never go away, you can see instances of these every single day:
- Tons of LAPD drive with illegal tints & no tags on their personal vehicles
- Tons of NYPD park in the bike lane or on the actual sidewalk
There are twitter accounts that follow these easy to spot examples. Harder to track: abuses of power in small towns when no cameras are rolling.
DAs have even more leeway in some states than others, for instance in New York felonies can only be charged via grand jury unless waived by the defendant. This gives a DA unilateral power to sandbag any indictment they don’t feel like prosecuting without looking soft on bad cops (see the Buffalo shoving incident) with zero transparency.
- shakezula 5y agoThe Buffalo shoving incident was almost identical to an incident in my state, and had an almost identical outcome because of the same problem: DAs who want to take the easy route.
- ajb 5y agoIMO it would be a good idea to have a separate prosecuting authority for crimes by police. The regular prosecuting authority needs a good working relationship with police forces and will always find it hard to hold them to account.
- verve_rat 5y agoAre private prosecutions a thing in the States? Sounds like an ACLU style organisation but focused on private prosecution of cops doing illegal things is needed.
- ajb 5y agoDon't know about the States. In the UK, private prosecution (for crimes) can occur but the DPP has the right to take them over (and drop them), so it's not usually worth it.
- klyrs 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_S... It doesn't appear to be a thing in quite a few states, and where it is, it seems quite limited. Thus, the only legal remedy is lawsuits, which is why qualified immunity is such an injustice.
- ochoseis 5y agoI don’t disagree, but isn’t that the purpose of Inspectors General and Internal Affairs departments?
- jcrawfordor 5y agoIA departments (more commonly called Professional Standards or PS these days) usually suffer severely from too close of a relationship with the officers they supervise. It's common for PS detectives to be former field division or otherwise non-PS officers, and often for their promotion paths to be back out of PS, so they're often very much on the side of the officers by default. Consider also that, in most departments, the union is a massive driver of the department culture and attitude towards compliance, and PS is represented by (and beholden to) the same union. The most common attempt at a solution to this problem has been "civilian oversight," which typically takes the form of a new department of the city government that is responsible for auditing the police department and/or investigating department actions (in response to citizen complaints or on other triggers). The civilian oversight department is typically firewalled from the police department through means like a prohibition on staff moving from one to the other and an independent governance structure. Because of collective bargaining agreement constraints there's usually still a PS division and some confusing work breakdown, where one audits the others work or the two perform independent parallel investigations or similar. There are some good reasons for that (doesn't necessarily make sense to have an independent civilian oversight agency reviewing every minor policy violation), but it often feels like waste.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]