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There are several challenges with this: first, courts have adopted the concept of “sovereign immunity” that shields government personnel in most situations. Ne

by efitz 3y ago

There are several challenges with this: first, courts have adopted the concept of “sovereign immunity” that shields government personnel in most situations. Next, prosecutors usually have a very close relationship with law enforcement and are generally reluctant to prosecute (although there are some that seem to delight in it, different problem). Finally, we have a judiciary that in general is very deferential to law enforcement (again there are some exceptions but the rule holds). I think that there are two cultural aspects to the whole law enforcement apparatus that are undesirable- first, that they are a closed brotherhood and have to always take care of each other, and second, that it’s “us against them”, eg that LE is adversarial to the general populace. For most of US history the armed forces have tried to stamp out these ideas in our officer corps, trying to walk the fine line of encouraging obedience to superiors while emphasizing personal responsibility and ethics. Not always successful but a serious attempt to establish and maintain a culture that avoids the toxic aspects that we see in LE culture. This is all my own opinion.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
So you need to reform that. "It's always been this way" means that it'll never change.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  It's really not reformable in the way people normally mean by that word. The incentives and constraints that create this environment are core to the history, identity, and civil-political mechanics of the systems themselves. The individual people acting within these systems are actively opposed to reform, and there isn't a mechanism to force it without their cooperation. The solution really is to scrap the whole thing and try something else entirely.
  - Asooka 3y ago
    > scrap the whole thing and try something else entirely. Ah, made anew, or re-formed.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      Reform and re-form are different words in contemporary usage. Destroying an object to use its resources to make a new one with a different purpose would be re-forming and yes that is what I'm advocating here. I was careful to indicate which meaning I intended in my originally comment, but of course you can never be so careful as to avoid a bad faith nitpicking here on hacker news can you.
morkalork 3y ago
There's practical solutions. If a cop did something bad, it shouldn't be a prosecutor from the same city who they may have to work with one day on a case, it should be one from out of town. And if you say a cop won't cooperate with any prosecutor, then well too bad, that's part of the job and if they don't like it, they should find another career.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Cops and prosecutors are coworkers whose jobs fundamentally depend on cooperation from the other. They aren't and won't ever be adversaries. A given prosecutor having a personal working relationship with a given cop certainly makes this worse but it isn't the core constraint. An out of town prosecutor will still consider police generally to be allied peers. They still have to go home afterwards and have a working relationship with the local police, who certainly consider the cops a few towns over to be part of the same family and will consider prosecution of one of them an affront to all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- landemva 3y ago
  Prosecutors can ask a grand jury of citizens to investigate and indict. Then the prosecutor is the attorney for the State doing the attorney stuff in court. Grand juries are powerful, and thus can also go off the rails led by prosecutor manipulation.
sambull 3y ago
Let the 'free market' figure it out. Require a private insurance policy to hold a LEO permit; and have the private market decide that specific officers - whole types of policing are too expensive. If a officer has to pay 10,000% of their wages to hold a insurance policy abuse/derliction would have consequences, and department hopping would also be mitigated.
- greesil 3y ago
  To a certain extent this happens with various municipal police forces but not at and individual officer's level. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/712606977/how-the-insurance-industry-is-helping-police-departments-tackle-bad-behavior https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/712606977/how-the-insurance-i...

by efitz 3y ago

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

So you need to reform that. "It's always been this way" means that it'll never change.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
It's really not reformable in the way people normally mean by that word. The incentives and constraints that create this environment are core to the history, identity, and civil-political mechanics of the systems themselves. The individual people acting within these systems are actively opposed to reform, and there isn't a mechanism to force it without their cooperation. The solution really is to scrap the whole thing and try something else entirely.
- Asooka 3y ago
  > scrap the whole thing and try something else entirely. Ah, made anew, or re-formed.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Reform and re-form are different words in contemporary usage. Destroying an object to use its resources to make a new one with a different purpose would be re-forming and yes that is what I'm advocating here. I was careful to indicate which meaning I intended in my originally comment, but of course you can never be so careful as to avoid a bad faith nitpicking here on hacker news can you.

morkalork 3y ago

There's practical solutions. If a cop did something bad, it shouldn't be a prosecutor from the same city who they may have to work with one day on a case, it should be one from out of town. And if you say a cop won't cooperate with any prosecutor, then well too bad, that's part of the job and if they don't like it, they should find another career.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
Cops and prosecutors are coworkers whose jobs fundamentally depend on cooperation from the other. They aren't and won't ever be adversaries. A given prosecutor having a personal working relationship with a given cop certainly makes this worse but it isn't the core constraint. An out of town prosecutor will still consider police generally to be allied peers. They still have to go home afterwards and have a working relationship with the local police, who certainly consider the cops a few towns over to be part of the same family and will consider prosecution of one of them an affront to all.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
landemva 3y ago
Prosecutors can ask a grand jury of citizens to investigate and indict. Then the prosecutor is the attorney for the State doing the attorney stuff in court. Grand juries are powerful, and thus can also go off the rails led by prosecutor manipulation.

sambull 3y ago

Let the 'free market' figure it out. Require a private insurance policy to hold a LEO permit; and have the private market decide that specific officers - whole types of policing are too expensive. If a officer has to pay 10,000% of their wages to hold a insurance policy abuse/derliction would have consequences, and department hopping would also be mitigated.

greesil 3y ago
To a certain extent this happens with various municipal police forces but not at and individual officer's level. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/712606977/how-the-insurance-industry-is-helping-police-departments-tackle-bad-behavior https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/712606977/how-the-insurance-i...