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Yeah this is something I know and understand, I also appreciate this line of thought. What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law

Yeah this is something I know and understand, I also appreciate this line of thought. What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law enforcement”. I’d expect some laws to be national, then some laws to be state, then going down and down until we reach a single small town where something might be different from the next one but they should share many things… how is it that the enforcement part of those same laws is so subjective? IMHO the law has two sides: the normative one, what it actually is, and the enforcement one, how it is applied to society. If the enforcement part is highly subjective we are distorting the law. It should be desirable to minimize the differences of enforcing the same law. Is it something really appreciated by the population over there that the same law is applied very differently in the next town over simply because it decides to enforce it in a different manner?

alistairSH 5y ago
The actual laws are just as decentralized as the law enforcement. Speed limits are a state/local law. While many of them are similar, enforcement varies greatly, and there is a propensity for corruption, as we see in the article. I remember a few decades ago, AAA (large US auto club) recommended against using certain stretches of highway in Florida because the local town loved to ticket out-of-state drivers (heading from the northern border to Disney World in Orlando, IIRC). And because enforcement is decentralized, so is enforcement of police procedures. "Thin Blue Line" is the term used to describe cops backing cops, even when they do illegal things. Like planting evidence in Baltimore (a few news worthy cases over the past several years). Basically, policing in the US is completely broken. And the Supreme Court has decided (not recently) that police have zero obligation to actually help and protect citizens. So, if a crime is occurring, the police aren't obligated to help. They just wait until the beatings and rapes finish, then maybe arrest suspects, if they can be bothered (ie, did the crime make headlines and is a politician pressuring them to do so).
cardamomo 5y ago
These discrepancies in law enforcement practices don't just arise out of the subjectivity inherent in enforcing rules. In the US, Black people and Black communities have long been policed differently than White people and White communities. There is a culture of systemic anti-Blackness in many if not most police departments. It is seen by many on the left to be so entrenched in the US system of policing and police culture that reform is not possible, hence the defund the police movement.
sgjohnson 5y ago
> I’d expect some laws to be national The reality in the United States is that the only national law in situations where you don't explicitly deal with the federal government is the Consitution, and even then the Constitution is interpreted differently by different states. The states are more or less free to ignore (refuse to enforce) federal law. How do you think certain states legalised weed, illegal immigration and refuse to enforce the NFA in certain situations?
- 01acheru 5y ago
  > The states are more or less free to ignore (refuse to enforce) federal law. I guess this is what I’m missing, it is really peculiar from my point of view that a smaller entity can ignore a “higher” law. From what I’m used to the higher law always wins, so during disputes: national > state > county > town. What you are saying is that in the US a smaller entity is free to say “fuck you, come and get me” to a higher entity and get along with it, and the only way for a higher entity to step in is using force? (not literal force but force nonetheless) Maybe it’s a combination of: common law (instead of civil law), most towns are relatively recent, sheer size of the country, isolation of some communities and a strong sense of local autonomy.
  - sgjohnson 5y ago
    > What you are saying is that in the US a smaller entity is free to say “fuck you, come and get me” to a higher entity and get along with it, and the only way for a higher entity to step in is using force? (not literal force but force nonetheless) Yes. And the feds would have to use literal force to get someone for smoking weed in say, Colorado. Your friendly neighbourhood FBI or DEA agent can still arrest you for smoking weed in Colorado, it’s just that the local and state police don’t care and they won’t transfer you to federal custody. Obviously this is not how federal law enforcement works. They don’t do patrols, and they are extremely reliant on state law enforcement to transfer the cases that fall under their jurisdiction to them, except when they are doing the investigation themselves. Harbouring illegal aliens is illegal under federal law, but what are you going to do, if California doesn’t care and straight up refuses to cooperate with the ICE? ICE has the authority to enforce federal law within California, it’s just that they have to put the boots on the ground themselves now, for which no federal law enforcement agency has the resources. This was by design. States are sovereign entities.

alistairSH 5y ago

The actual laws are just as decentralized as the law enforcement. Speed limits are a state/local law. While many of them are similar, enforcement varies greatly, and there is a propensity for corruption, as we see in the article. I remember a few decades ago, AAA (large US auto club) recommended against using certain stretches of highway in Florida because the local town loved to ticket out-of-state drivers (heading from the northern border to Disney World in Orlando, IIRC). And because enforcement is decentralized, so is enforcement of police procedures. "Thin Blue Line" is the term used to describe cops backing cops, even when they do illegal things. Like planting evidence in Baltimore (a few news worthy cases over the past several years). Basically, policing in the US is completely broken. And the Supreme Court has decided (not recently) that police have zero obligation to actually help and protect citizens. So, if a crime is occurring, the police aren't obligated to help. They just wait until the beatings and rapes finish, then maybe arrest suspects, if they can be bothered (ie, did the crime make headlines and is a politician pressuring them to do so).

cardamomo 5y ago

These discrepancies in law enforcement practices don't just arise out of the subjectivity inherent in enforcing rules. In the US, Black people and Black communities have long been policed differently than White people and White communities. There is a culture of systemic anti-Blackness in many if not most police departments. It is seen by many on the left to be so entrenched in the US system of policing and police culture that reform is not possible, hence the defund the police movement.

sgjohnson 5y ago

> I’d expect some laws to be national The reality in the United States is that the only national law in situations where you don't explicitly deal with the federal government is the Consitution, and even then the Constitution is interpreted differently by different states. The states are more or less free to ignore (refuse to enforce) federal law. How do you think certain states legalised weed, illegal immigration and refuse to enforce the NFA in certain situations?

01acheru 5y ago
> The states are more or less free to ignore (refuse to enforce) federal law. I guess this is what I’m missing, it is really peculiar from my point of view that a smaller entity can ignore a “higher” law. From what I’m used to the higher law always wins, so during disputes: national > state > county > town. What you are saying is that in the US a smaller entity is free to say “fuck you, come and get me” to a higher entity and get along with it, and the only way for a higher entity to step in is using force? (not literal force but force nonetheless) Maybe it’s a combination of: common law (instead of civil law), most towns are relatively recent, sheer size of the country, isolation of some communities and a strong sense of local autonomy.
- sgjohnson 5y ago
  > What you are saying is that in the US a smaller entity is free to say “fuck you, come and get me” to a higher entity and get along with it, and the only way for a higher entity to step in is using force? (not literal force but force nonetheless) Yes. And the feds would have to use literal force to get someone for smoking weed in say, Colorado. Your friendly neighbourhood FBI or DEA agent can still arrest you for smoking weed in Colorado, it’s just that the local and state police don’t care and they won’t transfer you to federal custody. Obviously this is not how federal law enforcement works. They don’t do patrols, and they are extremely reliant on state law enforcement to transfer the cases that fall under their jurisdiction to them, except when they are doing the investigation themselves. Harbouring illegal aliens is illegal under federal law, but what are you going to do, if California doesn’t care and straight up refuses to cooperate with the ICE? ICE has the authority to enforce federal law within California, it’s just that they have to put the boots on the ground themselves now, for which no federal law enforcement agency has the resources. This was by design. States are sovereign entities.