It's not possible to have checks and balances with cops due to qualified immunity - there is no way to hold them accountable, and they certainly don't hold themselves accountable.

They can be fired, or at least put on unpaid leave.

And then get hired one county over. So not really any accountability.

In theory this is what the second amendment is for. Police raid you house, pump em with bullets. In practice this only works as deterrence -- you always hear of cops confronting drug dealers etc calmly in public places, where they are away from their trove of weapons, whereas no-knock raids and home invasions are for the poors.

It's comforting to imagine applying some justice to these gangs of violent home invaders, but as the second degree murder of Breonna Taylor demonstrated, adding self defense to the equation just makes the bastards feel that their shooting sprees are even more justified. Like sure I can imagine some kind of home defense product that uses a camera and robotic gun to dispense justice in the event of a home invasion, but really we just need to get back to having the rule of law in this country (where the violent home invaders go to jail with the other bad people) rather than thinking that becoming more adversarial creates a meaningful check.

I'm not saying this is a good example, and it's a rather disgusting one, but one vile creature held off almost 400 cops in Uvalde for over an hour. And there's not the excuse that they thought kids were going to be harmed as the chief said he thought they were already dead and his guys admitted on (only now recently released) video they wouldn't go in because they "weren't about to get clapped."

Always remember just how utterly silent the NRA is when a legal gun owner gets shot by a cop for having a completely legal gun that the current view of American law says they have every right to own.

I'll occasionally get paper spam from the NRA. When it contains a business reply envelope, I send back a note asking when they're going to stand up for Breonna Taylor - one of the most important second amendment cases of our time. I know they're a corrupt organization and it's futile, but their vacuous performative hypocrisy really fucking bothers me. "tHeYRE CoMInG tO tAkE yOUr gUnS!!1!"

> A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State

The second amendment protects organized armed resistance against state-level tyranny, whether external or internal.

Can't have a militia of one.

(IMO) Unfortunately the current supreme court (as in, the precedent set like a hundred years ago that still stands) decided that english doesn't work that way.

I especially dislike how people will point to the private writings of certain founding fathers to support their 2A opinions, even though what was ratified by the states was NOT those private writings, but rather the very very short amendment.

The supreme court's reading is actually the only plain English reading that makes sense without altering the words (see sibling comment) or comma placement

You're misreading: the existence of private, individual arms is what regulates (or if you wish, what necessitates regulation of) the militia (which includes police). There is no grammatical ambiguity.

There is. One of the best ways to do it is through your city, through Civilian Oversight Boards with the ability to suspend or fire officers that harm the public trust in the police force: https://www.nacole.org/community_oversight_paves_the_road_to...

Individual officers benefit from this, too. It keeps the relationship between citizens and police much healthier.

I haven't heard of this working very well in practice.

We need to end QI and make the police earn their keep. In general, they've cozied up too close with any potential oversight for a reasonable person to have faith in them being held accountable for misdeeds.

(I say this as someone who's been grateful for police presence before)

Lmao our city (Louisville, KY) got one of these a while ago and the police department just straight up refuses to cooperate. What are we gonna do arrest them?

Doesn’t work. Try again

It can make it more difficult, but I don't think you can say impossible or we'd never hear of people winning lawsuits for police misconduct. Here's a big one from a few days ago. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/21/us/philadelphia-police-miscon...

No police were disciplined as a result of this lawsuit. The city just payed the plaintiffs.

You mean the taxpayers just paid the plaintiffs. No matter how badly police screw up only innocent people seem to pay for it and the burden seems to always fall on the people who can least afford it.

One way to curb this is to make these fines come out of the pension plan for these officers instead of the general budget (ie. taxpayers). This would better align incentives.

Exactly

The concept of qualified immunity being a road block in this context is a bit weird to me. In my country, the local government is responsible for maintaining and operating a functional police force. While citizen can't sue the individual cops or the local police organization, they can sue the government for the actions of the police force. This also happens fairly regularly, and generally citizens do get compensation when the police makes mistakes. When a mistake is large enough (and costly), there will generally be a new regulation to address that in the future, and in some cases a local politician will have lost enough trust by voters and be forced to leave.

Is this impossible to do in the US?

Yes, civil suits against government are common and cost cities and other local jurisdictions millions of dollars a year:

https://www.findlaw.com/injury/torts-and-personal-injuries/w...

It's generally not expensive enough to create enough economic pain to break through the 2 party (or 1 party in many locales) political system.

It cannot be expensive enough because it only ever costs taxpayers. Nobody responsible pays or loses anything.

That is how it will always be when someone sue the government or a government branch. Since goverments are funded by tax money, government mistakes, mismanagement and violation of the law will be paid through the same budget as everything else.

When people sue a public company, the people who in the end must hold the people responsible will be the share holders. When government are sued, it is the voters that must hold the people responsible. If a local government is found guilty in a court of law and forced to pay millions in damages, the money need to be either from raised taxes or reduced services. Both of those should be strong points for the opposition to gain votes and kick out the people who are responsible.

Where I live, when the government is found guilty and forced to pay out it usually also result in the current local leader responsible for the situation being forced out. Mismanagement is not a effective way to gain votes, so if the leader don't step down volunteerly the party may just want to replace them anyway for someone without such baggage during next election. Maybe US politics and the system around political donations makes such results less common?

Maybe someone can sue them, and maybe win, but that isn't the issue. The issue is corrupt cops, or cops that did something bad, never being held accountable and often being rewarded instead.

> It's not possible to have checks and balances with cops due to qualified immunity.

This is a red herring. Qualified immunity only protects individual cops from civil liability, not from criminal liability. And above all, proper check for police is neither civil nor criminal liability, but independent institution for investigation of criminal and professional misconduct (like police IA division, but independent and ideally under different level of government - e.g. state or federal for checking municipal police).

>Qualified immunity only protects individual cops from civil liability, not from criminal liability.

Then why is literal theft protected by qualified immunity? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibill...

You guys have an insanely large territory but I always found it very confusing with all the complaints about police conduct why is no one there pushing for a federal level single training institution and increased academy training.

Most other places in the world cops have to train for +24 months and most of it is focused on physical conditioning, descalation/conflict psychology, and Law.

I mean knowing my local government incompetence I would be pretty nervous in having people with guns being trained by a local institution. It needs to be federal, standardized, and just longer than the few months training US cops have.

They get trained by state institutions usually but the program in my state is sixteen weeks. For reference, a lot of work in Afghanistan is more policing than war fighting and we trained for a year plus. The issues around policing are somewhat complex city to city. For instance, my city is fairly large and has ~300 cops and calls that aren't actively violent typically go unanswered and crimes go unprosecuted for a litany of reasons. No matter what city you go to, it's near ubiquitous that there is some kind of major problem with policing. I say policing in the context of the DA + police.

It's also important that we care about what kind of training. Our state requires standardized police academy training for 18 weeks but you still get pumped full of garbage like killology. My friend's husband became a cop and within a month of his training he picked up bullshit like "always sit facing the exit in public places" and literally playing with his service M4 like a damn nerf gun, sweeping their living room and "clearing" the other rooms in their apartment. Even my actual gun nut brother knows that's bad.

Yeah, if he's practicing sweeps and draws in his house that's not good gun culture. From everything I've read and heard, cops are being taught the violent parts of what we're taught in the military but they're not being trained on warrior culture and ethos, which involves a lot of restraint and regulation alongside situational awareness. Pair that with not learning basic weapon safety rules and it's a recipe for disaster.

They are trained to be aggressive and escalate. More of such training won't make them better.

I doubt that if you put someone from National Guard or FBI in charge of national training that they would not focus on descalation.

You are militarizing incompetent institutions (with military grade hand me downs) which have far less trigger discipline than actual military.

The issue is not that these cops are undisciplined. It is that they are doing what they were trained to do.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/02/14/...

Issue is not that they are incompetent. Issue is that they know fully well they can get away with it. And real world proves them right almost every time.

Improving training might be a good idea, but why make it federal?

<< why is no one there pushing for a federal level single training institution and increased academy training.

Well at least here the answer is somewhat simple.

There is a deep ingrained level of distrust for federal government. It has been there since country's foundation and the past few decades have done nothing to lower it ( and one can reasonably argue it has only increased ). In a sense, the reason is structural.

<< It needs to be federal, standardized, and just longer than the few months training US cops have.

FWIW, FBI is effectively federal police. I think you will agree that they had their fair share of, uhm, not great behavior.

<< I mean knowing my local government incompetence I would be pretty nervous in having people with guns being trained by a local institution.

The whole point of cop that is local is that people will not, ehkm, revolt, because random guy from NY got plopped in AK and does not understand the basic environment they are in.

I personally prefer local. I think last year I went to our local quarterly neighbors/cops outreach and I was largely happy with what the sheriff had to say, because it dealt with MY local issues and not some pre-ordained stuff from the top.

Like I said, the issue is structural, because US is a massive country.

Why federal level? State level would more than suffice.

Because plenty of states would just enshrine the shitty status quo into law? States have freedom to enact police accountability right now and just don't. The only way to make it happen will be federal supremacy on the issue. Federal standards on government application of violence should not be contentious. I should be able to cross state lines and not deal with terrible police departments just because an independent state decided to not fix this issue.

Then the question is why is state government doing the "wrong" thing? Is it undemocratic? Or do people in different locations want different things?

Why have states at all rather than one federal government that decides all laws?

Some things are reasonable for different states to do differently, but having a minimum bar for police training should not be one of those things. Lot's of things should have minimum bars set federally that states are free to improve upon. Why should policing be so different across different states? Are humans innately different once you cross a state line? Why should justice work differently across state lines?

> Some things are reasonable for different states to do differently, but having a minimum bar for police training should not be one of those things

I disagree. Since having radically different roles and powers for police, rasically different organizational structures for poloce, or not even having anything that exactly fits the typical concept of “police" are also within the acceptable variation, and all of those factor in to minimim quals, minimum quals for police absolutely are legitimate.

"You ask for miracles, I give you the F.B.I."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

The country was founded by the largest landowner in the colonies. It's always been a farce in service of the landowning class.

The system is working as designed.

The entire endeavor was a power grab by wealthy people. Even if some of them had high ideals about democracy and such, that clearly did not make it into the ratified constitution, as only wealthy people could vote.

It was also founded on slavery..

Institutions change over time.

"Founded on slavery" is quite a stretch. That was not the main issue that led to the rebellion.

Which rebellion? The Civil War? Yes, that was THE main issue that led to the Civil War, fullstop.

>Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.

No, the rebellion against Britain.

We literally had to enshrine the RIGHT to slavery into law during the creation of the constitution just to get southern state support, and that was before the cotton gin made slavery significantly more profitable. Then we gave those same states extra voting power based on how many human beings they could afford to own. Then the very institution of policing itself in America started as a way to catch runaway slaves, often in OTHER STATES that had OUTLAWED SLAVERY.

But sure, this system that obviously had a huge impact on how the country developed, how power structures were purposely designed, and how freedom even worked, TECHNICALLY wasn't the primary reason for rebelling, maybe.

> But sure, this system that obviously had a huge impact on how the country developed, how power structures were purposely designed, and how freedom even worked, TECHNICALLY wasn't the primary reason for rebelling, maybe

No technically about it. Though you're right about the rest.

There are arguments to be made that the south saw slavery becoming less fashionable in Great Britain and were into rebellion for that reason. They knew staying in Britain meant slavery going away eventually, and might have thought they could delay that better as an independent nation. Remember that the original system after independence was that state governors largely had their own little fiefdoms, and the federal government had very little power.

And they would have been correct; Britain did ban slavery before the US. First for Britain itself in 1807, then broadly in it's remaining holdout colonies in 1833.

And they did so without a civil war.

Well, there's also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html

> His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president.

> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:

>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.