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...