Police do stuff like this (and get away with it) because the public, generally speaking, assumes that anyone who is abused or treated unfairly by police must have done something to deserve it.
The individuals involved should certainly be punished (though they rarely ever are), but the taxpayers have some culpability as well.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." -Edmund Burke
The problem with the system is that we've made voters the ultimate arbiters of what happens but then diluted their individual responsibility for the outcomes to such a degree by federalizing and centralizing everything that you don't want to own the consequences of the power you hold.
If you had voted for a sheriff who perpetrated this injustice, would you be so quick to absolve yourself of your responsibility? Would you vote for him again? How is it any different when it comes time to vote for his bosses?
So yes, the taxpayers should pay. They, as a group, are responsible. (The individual LEOs involved in this case should be harshly penalized, too.)
What if the Democrats and Republicans are both too beholden to the status quo to make changes, and a rational voter figures that their vote means something if they vote for one of the two main parties as the lesser of two evils, whereas voting for a third party is basically throwing their vote away?
It's easy to sell me on the idea that most people aren't rational voters, but saying that the situation will automatically be fixed if everyone votes rationally is a much more difficult sell. It would be a good start, but you'd need some other things to happen.
But to get there, there'd need to be less than what, 30%? of voters being extremely anti-drug?
The politicians pretty accurately represent their constituents. The voters demand more tough on crime pols and that's exactly what they get.
This way police officers who keep screwing up and abusing their power would get higher and higher premiums until they reach a point where they can't be a cop anymore because it would be to expensive for them. It would weed out the assholes and taxpayer would not have to pay directly.
- Some of the pro-camera advocates are in favor of gun cameras, which turn on when a gun is drawn. The fairly reasonable argument against those is that they fail to capture what happened immediately prior to the gun being drawn, lacking context
- The always-on cameras are unpleasant to consider, simply because who wants to be recorded all the time? There's a concern that a casual conversation before a police incident might be taken out of context or used to embarass the officer
- There are also cameras that are designed to activate either manually or automatically when you leave your squad car. These are better, but apparently there are reliability issues, or what happens when a camera accidentally does not turn on? Is the officer automatically going to be judged as negligent?
- Beyond these things, police departments have generally terrible IT. Who's going to maintain the cameras? Who's going to manage the retention of the video? What about the privacy of the officers? And so on.
Note, I'm not saying these are universally valid complaints, or that the reality would be as bad as officers fear. But I think that in the same way people in general chafe against oversight that they worry could be used against them, police officers worry about being monitored and tracked moreso than they already are.
When I asked them what they thought should be done to curb police abuses, one of them who is a senior police official pointed out that study after study shows that the vast majority of police abuses are committed by a very small number of officers. That the better way to handle police officers who abuse their power is to make it easier to get rid of police officers who are bad instead of spending lots of money and effort to try to watch all officers.
They did all agree though that in a perfect world cameras would be awesome, because it would remove a lot of the worry they have around someone lying about their behavior. Their concerns were around real-world implementation.
I'm personally in favor of cameras for police, but I wanted to present the other side of the argument I've heard.
If the cameras are easy to use and reliable and such, the officers should be demanding that they be available, it will only make their testimony more credible.
(to the extent they are going to abuse their power, they can just go set the stage for the camera when they are off duty or whatever, so I don't think that is the right case to optimize for)
Making an example of these fucks would do nothing, because every citizen of the US that supports war on drugs is creating these fucks. Until US citizens wake up and demand the government to stop the war on US citizens, that and worse is going to happen. In war, that's what happens. This war - longest and most harmful war in American history - has to be ended. And US citizens have the power to end it, if only they has the will and reason to stop believing in lies that WOD proponents feed them.
Many police unions have clause that make the cops be personally liable of criminal acts. They should be criminally tried, convicted, dismissed, jailed, and then have this 1.6 million collected against their future earning till its paid back, with interest. Unless the doctors who preformed the procedures were somehow threatened by the cops, they should pay as well. This is just inexcusable.
I do agree, the war on drugs is at the core of this problem. It's no longer the war on drugs, it's the war on drug users, the people.
The cops, of course, could be punished, and in this case even the blue wall probably won't save them. But punishing single individuals would not prevent next time from happening, it would keep happening like clockwork.
More pragmatically, a lack of serious consequences is part of why cops have learned to behave this way. Get rid of the war on drugs, and you haven't fully solved the problem. Nothing about this situation would be any more acceptable if instead of drugs, they had been searching for child pornography, a bomb, or an abused animal.
The difference is that the other things you've listed are far less common and far less lucrative than illegal drugs. If you took away the war on drugs then you could give law enforcement significantly less than their current budget and still have them allocate more officers to each case, have them each spend more time on it, train them each better, etc. etc.
The war on drugs is the primary impetus for the militarization of the police force. Police should be investigators, not soldiers. The war on drugs encourages them to behave like soldiers which is the root cause of their unacceptable behavior.
The bleeding doesn't stop just because you pull the knife out of the wound.
It might. Making an example of these fucks might make the next group of fucks think twice.
Simply because the police unions put it into the city contract and the politicians signed it.
Now the cleanup, there's a problem. The usual and proven way to deal with corrupt police is to fire everyone and bring in new people from the other side of the country with no local obligations. But how do you do this in an impoverished county in New Mexico where no one wants to go?
There may not be a law against criminal stupidity, but there is certainly (by definition) a law against criminal negligence (if there weren't a law against it, it wouldn't be criminal). If, for example, the officers' supervisors established a work culture that condoned framing people that could easily rise to the legal standard of criminal negligence.
Also, even a first year law student would be able to easily throw out any and all evidence they have obtained this way. So the entire procedure was worthless, even if they had succeeded. Makes their conduct even worse. Evil and stupid!