With qualified immunity the only people allowed to enforce that are prosecutors, but they often can't afford to jeopardize their relationship with police. Federal prosecutors are further removed from local cops and have better incentives on that front, but they often run into issues around jurisdiction.

The point of repealing qualified immunity is to let the victims sue as a means of enforcing checks on police.

That lets criminals use the legal system as a DDOS attack on the police. I'm not sure that's a desirable outcome.

Not really. The courts should toss any frivolous claims fairly quickly. If it is still an issue, then perhaps we need wider ranging changes to the legal system as any abuse that could happen with these cases surely happen in other areas of the law too.

Why couldn't the judge?'

Just do things the normal way...and the sentence is announced... oh, you're a cop, and were on duty. Multiply any sentence/fine/community service by 1.5.

The key, as I see it, is less about what the number is, or the details, but that's something very black and white. I'm normally really not a fan of "zero tolerance" type rules but I think this is a case where it makes sense.

In today's political climate (including the current Supreme Court which is pretty strongly political), the most likely answer is local jurisdictions who have been paying out millions in civil penalties for this behavior. They won't be able to enforce criminal liability, but they could start making changes to training, use of force policies, hiring, etc. If the jurisdictions start taking out insurance to pay these claims, then the insurance companies will probably start mandating changes as well.

I have no issue with your post, but what a ridiculous situation we find ourselves in. We can't get rid of bad apples because of police unions and the relationship between prosecutors and police. It's not politically viable for politicians to enforce standards for police. So, instead, we have to hire a for-profit intermediary to come up with profit-centered reasons to enforce these standards. Yikes.

> who is going to enforce that?

That's exactly why the penalties should be greater. The deterrence factor is a function of both the size of the penalty and the chance of being caught & prosecuted. If the chance of being caught and prosecuted is lower, then the penalty has to be higher for it to have a similar deterrence effect.

DA's office. Its separate from the police for a reason

It still works for a government controlled by the ruling class. The problem is not some malfunction with "police departments" as though a department with a new name could reform it.

"Checks and balances" is and always was a laughably naive and probably intentionally unserious response to overtly structural problems.

What is your serious response to these structural problems then? How do we improve?

Structural problems require structural solutions. A best first step would be reforming the brainwashed American conception of Marxist studies so we can someday conduct a serious discourse concerning the contradictions and consequences of capitalism, which belie the origins and effective purpose of our police departments as we know them.

If anything is for sure, defunding the police was never a remotely serious proposal and it's not lost on Marxists why working people found it such a laughable phrase. Calling it a "proposal" or "strategy" would be giving far too much credit.

In what ways are the existing police services "capitalist"?

All of the police services that I'm familiar with in places like the US, Canada, and Europe lack the fundamental traits of capitalism.

For example, they're the creations of centralized, monopolistic (and often quite socialist) governments, and funded with taxpayer money, rather than arising from the private sector.

As such, there's no competition. Residents and visitors don't get to individually choose which, if any, police service(s) they'll voluntarily receive services from, and what compensation they'll provide, if any. They can't just switch to some other police service if they're dissatisfied with one they've already been choosing to use. They can't unilaterally opt out of dealing with a particular police service.

Entry to the market is also extremely limited. An individual can't just declare himself to be a police officer, and then start offering policing services. An organization of such people can't declare themselves to be a police force.

Unionization of police officers is quite common, as well.

While private security may be available in some areas, it's typically very limited, with no real ability to intervene. They merely monitor an area for trouble, and alert the government's police service(s) if anything arises.

The problems with policing today seem to me to be due to its highly-socialist nature.

Many prisons have been bought up by private companies.

Judges have been convicted of taking bribes in exchange for convictions: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-ma...

The first business of the first modern police forces in the US were catching runaway slaves in the south and crushing strikes in the north.

Calling something a "union" doesn't make it socialist. Did you really need me to hold your hand with that?

On what planet are police so-called "socialist"? I suspect this is the brainwashing I was referring to. This kind of nonsense is extremely unique to the United States.

The issue with placing that in the DA's office is they work closely with police on basically all their other cases so they have an incentive to not antagonize the police by actually holding them accountable. The ideal situation is a separate body just charged with dealing with police misconduct so they don't have to worry about police torpedoing their day to day case load in retaliation.

That’s a feature not a bug. Just because they work with the DA doesn’t mean they should be all buddy-buddy.

Prosecutors, if they'd do their jobs.

The issue is prosecutors rely on police a lot for their normal criminal cases so whenever one does get the courage to seriously pursue things like this they can get sabotaged or slow walked by the rest of the department in retaliation.

Since we ( hopefully ) do not have an army of cops to arrest set up independent specialized task force just for that.

Classic "Who watches the watchmen?"

A few ideas I like:

- Make police get individual insurance, similarly to doctors. Malpractice should have a monetary impact that doesn't hurt the taxpayer.

- A mirror to the DA, exclusively for prosecuting crimes committed by police. Remove the conflict of interest with the current DA system.

- Make police have some form of practitioners license, and have a board that can revoke it, similarly to the BAR association.

- Mandatory N years of desk duty after being involved in a fatal shooting (regardless of justification)

Isn't this what Internal Affairs are for?