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It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and then choose the optimal one. That's assuming a jurisdiction where the position is elected and there

It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and then choose the optimal one. That's assuming a jurisdiction where the position is elected and there are any worthwhile candidates in the first place. If the position is appointed then you have yet another layer of indirection and competing factors for the voter to evaluate. Even for presidential elections it's hard to feel great about your vote... Democracy kinda sucks.

bell-cot 3y ago
> It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and... True. But in a world where the elderly Secretary of the Methodist Ladies Gardening Society has no problem keeping track of donated funds and flower bulb locations and volunteer weeding in her 3-ring binder... it would be incredibly easy for a few people who actually cared to keep track of DA behavior, year after year, as a side hobby. Bottom-end web hosting is ~free, to make that information available to the public. Yet ~nobody seems to be doing that. Are the police and DA's quietly shutting them down? Perhaps...but 10000X the quantity of hot-headed political attack material is freely available on the web. And it's hard to assert that those police and DA's are every-so-quietly and -competently doing that by night, while regularly bungling similar work by day. Or...is the problem that the modern version of "caring" about such such police and Prosecutor incompetence and misconduct is 100% performative activism, and 0% interest in taking any action which might lead to "positive" change? It's not like that behavior isn't seen on other issues. Lots of well-to-do liberal neighborhoods will poll as being very strongly in favor of (say) affordable housing for less-well-off people. But if there's any hint that such housing might appear near their precious neighborhood ...yeah. Don't expect them to behave the way that poll suggested they would.

bell-cot 3y ago

> It's very hard for a layperson to research DA candidates and... True. But in a world where the elderly Secretary of the Methodist Ladies Gardening Society has no problem keeping track of donated funds and flower bulb locations and volunteer weeding in her 3-ring binder... it would be incredibly easy for a few people who actually cared to keep track of DA behavior, year after year, as a side hobby. Bottom-end web hosting is ~free, to make that information available to the public. Yet ~nobody seems to be doing that. Are the police and DA's quietly shutting them down? Perhaps...but 10000X the quantity of hot-headed political attack material is freely available on the web. And it's hard to assert that those police and DA's are every-so-quietly and -competently doing that by night, while regularly bungling similar work by day. Or...is the problem that the modern version of "caring" about such such police and Prosecutor incompetence and misconduct is 100% performative activism, and 0% interest in taking any action which might lead to "positive" change? It's not like that behavior isn't seen on other issues. Lots of well-to-do liberal neighborhoods will poll as being very strongly in favor of (say) affordable housing for less-well-off people. But if there's any hint that such housing might appear near their precious neighborhood ...yeah. Don't expect them to behave the way that poll suggested they would.