Of course, they still have to get caught, but it won't be the DA that has to do something about it, it's the defendant's lawyer who will do it.
Your lawyer maybe sues the department for use of excessive force, and maybe gets a settlement from the taxpayers. Again, with exactly zero effect on the crooked cop.
Maybe lawyers should be suing the police union, too.
But unfortunately, this means that anybody who can't afford a good lawyer, will be an easy target for trampling on their rights
I might have some reservations with this, but proving that cops committed crimes is actually extremely commonplace. It happens in criminal courtrooms on a daily basis, as the primary vector to get evidence thrown out against a defendant. When cops commit crimes while gathering evidence, those criminal actions taint the evidence.
The problem is that nobody ever prosecutes the cops for the crime. The evidence gets thrown out, criminals walk free, and then nothing happens after that. It would be nice if the same defense attorney that proved the cop acted unlawfully could follow up by putting the cop in prison.
There should be nothing that the executive branch does in terms of investigation and prosecution, that the average citizen should be legally barred from doing.
This includes prosecuting crimes in criminal court, requesting and enforcing warrants, and so on.
The only difference between an average citizen and the government employees doing these things should be that the government employes are being paid to do these things as a full time job.
Texas also recently took the concept you've described but implemented the inverse with SB-8[2] which allows citizens to do precisely what the government itself is legally barred from doing.
[1]https://www.pacodeandbulletin.gov/Display/pacode?file=/secur...
Simply add a cost to prosecutions that fail, with it going towards the winner.
The cops will abuse the shit out of that. That gives them a monetary incentive to botch investigations when their buddies are involved.
>There should be nothing that the executive branch does in terms of investigation and prosecution, that the average citizen should be legally barred from doing.
>This includes prosecuting crimes in criminal court, requesting and enforcing warrants, and so on.
>The only difference between an average citizen and the government employees doing these things should be that the government employes are being paid to do these things as a full time job.
If the cops botch their investigations... Well there's nothing stopping anyone else from conducting their own. Might as well conduct one into the cops botching of the investigation too.
Ok, so you consider the state to be equivalent to sovereign citizens?
Also, how about investigations that never go to a prosecution? It’s pretty simple to harass someone that way.
I dont see why the state should be considered special. Ultimately it is supposed to work for the people, is it not? It's powers are delegated to it by the people.
I dont see "only the state should have the right to harass people" as a legitimate argument.
If it's simple to harass someone that way, then making it available to everyone will increase the need to fix a broken system where people can be arbitrarily harassed.
> If it's simple to harass someone that way, then making it available to everyone will increase the need to fix a broken system where people can be arbitrarily harassed.
Making a broken system worse does increase the need to fix it, but it doesn’t mean it gets fixed, it just means we have a worse need.
And on the contrary, it is by making the situation unbearable for everyone that popular and political will to change a broken system is created.
The worst thing that can happen is for an injustice to be prolonged just because it only affects a select group of people that those in power dislike.
No they don’t.
> And on the contrary, it is by making the situation unbearable for everyone that popular and political will to change a broken system is created.
When has that ever worked?
So the best that can happen after years of court time (with the government agents being paid the whole time), is a court judgement to stop doing something. There is no personal liability for the offending agents, no liquidated damages for the victims, no conspiracy charges for management's illegal policies, etc.
In general, the state has a massive blindspot towards damages that it itself inflicts. As we can expect from any natural system, it has settled into creating ever more externalities. Cops have been abusing "you might beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride" for forever. Now that moral hazard is everywhere.
In a just society, much of the state's activities would be viewed as just another actor on a level playing field, and would therefore be directly liable the damages it itself causes to innocent parties.
The biggest problem is our chickenshit prosecutors, not a lack of criminal laws that apply to the police. We could have more, certainly, but we don't even apply the ones we have.
However, referencing a completely different law kind of makes my point. Straight "kidnapping" and "false imprisonment" would be the appropriate charges. Yet the corrupt cop is still allowed to hide behind their nominal position, despite deliberately acting outside its authority.
When I wrote my comment I was thinking of the TSA, which has done many things that were later slapped down by the court, but with no punishment for having violated the law for so long. Because despite being illegal, their actions were "policy" and thus apparently every crime they already committed is let slide.
If the problem were just corrupt prosecutors, then we would expect to still see plenty of civil suits - individuals can still sue on their own. Yet if you ask an attorney about doing so, they'll just laugh. And even when the situation is serious enough to warrant a civil suit, it's still the city getting sued rather than the person who happens to be employed as an officer. The equivalent in the tech world would be cracking as a hobby, and when caught passing the responsibility off to your employer because you were using your work-provided laptop. But obviously that doesn't fly in the private sector.
The police generally consider laws to be for little people. In the US, any law that is supposed to apply to police has to not depend on the District Attorney ever filing charges, because they won't, except for certain high-visibility murders, and usually not even then.
Something that has worked sometimes is a state or federal law affecting city police. The law should have provisions to allow citizens to initiate enforcement, and, for egregious offenses, provisions to restrict the convicted officer from working in other police departments.
Too often, departments appear to respond to public pressure by firing the officer. But that actually achieves very little; the officer just goes to work for another city, with a fresh, clean record. There are a lot of cities.
It would be helpful to establish a national registry of police behavior, so that offenses at one department follow them to the next.