We are all grateful for the many ways police officers risk their lives keeping the peace but the small percentage of bad apples are tarnishing the entire organization.
In about 2004 there was a publication by the "October 22nd" group that publicized the details of victims of police brutality. It was compelling to read and quite disgusting. At the time I felt that perhaps we should pass out video cameras to people in high brutality areas so they could film the police in action. Well fast forward to 2018 and now everybody has a camera on their phone and we are now getting first hand documentation of the police crimes committed. Surely with all this factual evidence the prosecution of rogue cops would go up and the unjustified use of police force would go down. And yet it hasn't because time after time we see the cops getting off. Why is this happening?
1) Let's assume that 95% of the cops are great public servants who would never be brutal or murderers. There are 1.1 Million cops in the U.S. so that leaves us with 55,000 rouge cops on the beat. I think the upper levels of police management know who these hot heads are but they are powerless to get rid of them until they do something bad. Why, because the police union protects the bad apples and their cohorts are afraid to speak out.
And we have these ridiculous rules in some areas where the cop cannot even be questioned for 24 or 48 hours which leaves them plenty of time to cook up their story with cohorts. Plus they get Qualified Immunity which in many cases shields them from prosecution. In normal police investigations you interview all the potential witnesses quickly so people can’t try and coordinate their stories. In normal businesses you can get rid of poor performers quickly. The police unions should recognize that protecting bad apples is not in their best interest.
2) The second major problem is that the decision to prosecute and judge police brutality is in the hands of local district attorneys and judges and they are somewhat "in bed" with the police. A DA who is aggressive in prosecuting police will suffer the consequences of the police not cooperating with the DA for other activities. They can fail to show up to testify. They can in many ways make the DA's life miserable. DA's and Judges are elected in most states so getting reelected is one of their primary objectives and if the police are against them they will have a very difficult time with reelection. So the DA's are reluctant to aggressively go after the rouge cops. And the judges are in the same position. They don't want to piss off the police chiefs and the cops.
So the most important thing we could do is move all investigation and prosecution of police to independent state prosecutors and judges who are appointed by the Governor for a limited 5 or 10 year term. All police killings would automatically go the the state prosecutor for investigation. Other less dramatic events would be referred to the state prosecutor by local DA's. The obvious advantage is that the state prosecutors and judges would not care one wit about what the local police think. They would be totally independent. And I suspect the local DA's and judges would secretly love this change so they are don't have to deal with this tricky problem.
California list of criminal cops
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
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