4 ms·

It always mystifies me that it seems impossible to rein in police in the US.

svachalek 5y ago
What some consider bugs, others consider features.
finiteseries 5y ago
There are 18,000 different police agencies at all levels of federal, state, county, and municipal government with the bulk of the force distributed at the municipal & county levels, and essentially zero agreement on how to, or whether or not to reform any given one, what the end state should like, etc. Very, very wicked problem.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Easy solution: Mandate federal standards for training, staffing and use of force. Congress could go and deal with this similarly to how the drinking age 21 was enforced - withhold federal funds for non-compliant states. Yes, this is messy as hell, but common standards for training are more important than to prevent of-age people of having a beer.
  - ansible 5y ago
    There should also be a national database for police officers to register with, maintained by the FBI (or somebody in the Justice Department). So you can't have cops that have been fired (for cause) in one jurisdiction just move somewhere else and easily get another police job.
  - finiteseries 5y ago
    In a sense, but that’s more a “how” than a what. As you’ve described re: drinking, tying it to funding is a clear, well trodden path for the feds but let’s not forget the even clearer message, motivation and inertia that was behind it in the MADD type stuff all of a few decades after the temperance movement. What policing is, and what its standards should be was the single most divisive topic in a year we were overrun by plague though. Nationwide protests. No resolution. Every particular reform (atm, under the current systems) takes years to see through and is shackled to locality, socioeconómics, different explanations, political warfare Very wicked problem, and that’s not even getting into anti federalism…
umvi 5y ago
Be mystified no more: The USA is huge, bigger than most people can really imagine, so it's quite common for the most egregious cases of police abuse to float to the top. What you won't read on HN is stories about the thousands of normal towns with normal nonabusive police in the USA.

What some consider bugs, others consider features.

There are 18,000 different police agencies at all levels of federal, state, county, and municipal government with the bulk of the force distributed at the municipal & county levels, and essentially zero agreement on how to, or whether or not to reform any given one, what the end state should like, etc. Very, very wicked problem.

mschuster91 5y ago
Easy solution: Mandate federal standards for training, staffing and use of force. Congress could go and deal with this similarly to how the drinking age 21 was enforced - withhold federal funds for non-compliant states. Yes, this is messy as hell, but common standards for training are more important than to prevent of-age people of having a beer.
- ansible 5y ago
  There should also be a national database for police officers to register with, maintained by the FBI (or somebody in the Justice Department). So you can't have cops that have been fired (for cause) in one jurisdiction just move somewhere else and easily get another police job.
- finiteseries 5y ago
  In a sense, but that’s more a “how” than a what. As you’ve described re: drinking, tying it to funding is a clear, well trodden path for the feds but let’s not forget the even clearer message, motivation and inertia that was behind it in the MADD type stuff all of a few decades after the temperance movement. What policing is, and what its standards should be was the single most divisive topic in a year we were overrun by plague though. Nationwide protests. No resolution. Every particular reform (atm, under the current systems) takes years to see through and is shackled to locality, socioeconómics, different explanations, political warfare Very wicked problem, and that’s not even getting into anti federalism…

umvi 5y ago

Be mystified no more: The USA is huge, bigger than most people can really imagine, so it's quite common for the most egregious cases of police abuse to float to the top. What you won't read on HN is stories about the thousands of normal towns with normal nonabusive police in the USA.