alt Hacker NewsI wonder why we aren't addressing the real problem which seems to be cops behaving completely unethically. Their job is about enforcing the system that codifies our societies agreed up and codified rules of ethics. They should be obsessed with this the same way people here obsess over system performance, correctness, etc! If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
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The problem is simple: qualified immunity has become a blank check. The officer can simply claim they didn't know the law. They somehow can't be expected to understand basic constitutional protections.
If you hold police accountable, they respond by refusing to work. That's a problem that, at this time, has no solution.
There is so much rot in law enforcement. LASD still has deputy gangs.
Police actually exist to protect capital. At least in the USA.
Cameras do address that problem. We live in a country where people go to jail for life because two witnesses they swear they saw pookie shoot dee dee. Where cops beat the hell out of citizens and say they were resisting arrest.
That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
It seems that making government union members accountable is an intractable problem in the current political landscape.
Because finding people that are 100% ethical is extremely difficult. Even if we are wildly optimistic and say 20% of the population is 100% ethical. You aren't likely to weed out unethical people, so you are hiring people, training them, and then firing them 4 out of 5 of them. There are many cases where an experienced but occasionally unethical worker is better than an unexperienced but ethical worker. When faced with this dilemma it is likely that more police debts would simply cheat or cover up police abuses to retain valuable staff or staff at all.
The solution is not making humans more virtuous but reducing the capability and the harm done that unethical humans can do.
> If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Police should not be trusted because they are police. There should be audits and controls that prevent abuse and unethical behavior. Small unethical behaviors should result in corrective measures but not termination, since when the punishment becomes too great you create incentives for cover ups or scapegoats. A small number of minor punishments, that catch people as soon as they step over the line, functions better as a deterrent than a large scale punishments that are unlikely to be actually enforced. Granted if a police officer does a major crime, they should face serious consequences, but the goal should be to creating a system that makes major crimes by police less likely. If they know they will get caught for minor crimes, they are less likely to commit bigger crimes.