zlacker

That's horrifying. Why don't we change the law?

>>JSavag+(OP)
Courts are normally extremely deferential to law enforcement. Coupled with the fact that increasing oversight or increasing restrictions on law enforcement leads to a barrage of "soft on crime" political attack ads, and you get what we have today.

>>JSavag+(OP)
Because we have decades of it being political suicide to not be "tough on crime".

Obviously cops only act in good faith, so any restrictions on them are restrictions on getting criminals off the street. </s>

>>JSavag+(OP)
Consider how one goes about changing a law. Generally it starts with citizens making a fuss to inform their elected representatives that they think the existing laws need to be changed.

Recently, in Minnesota, hundreds of people gathered in a protest on precisely this topic. They gathered to say (for their elected representatives and everyone else to hear) that they wanted a change to the laws and the system that permits police officers to kill people by kneeling on their neck when attempting to arrest them.

It was during this very protest that the CNN reporters were arrested.

So, as you can see, people are trying to solve that problem. They have been protesting loudly about it for the past decade (much longer, in truth, but there has been a renewed focus by the media within the past decade). And so far... well, you tell me whether you think it's working.

>>JSavag+(OP)
Nobody has rioted hard enough so far and most of the victims of this law are not white.

>>JSavag+(OP)
Laws that give the police _less_ power are generally written in blood. Meaning, there has to be a pattern of clear and obvious abuse for any change to happen. For instance, the now near-ubiqitous police body cams are a result of multiple well-publicized unprovoked beatings and murders.

The reason for this is that no politician is going to willingly step up for more police oversight and restricted powers, for at least a couple of reasons:

1) They will be painted by their opponents as "weak on crime" or even "supporting criminals" at election time.

2) They risk losing votes from emergency services workers, which are quite a large demographic in local elections.

>>camgun+C
The "soft on crime thing" was a lot more effective in the 90s when there was a lot more actual crime and so people were more afraid of it.

At this point I'm basically waiting for a politician to adopt "soft on crime" as a campaign slogan and rebrand it as a rehabilitation program where you turn drug dealers into docile flower shop owners as opposed to opponents who "make crime tough" by sending people to "crime school" prisons and turning them into hardened career criminals with switchblades and facial tattoos.

The real problem is the same as it is in general -- special interest groups (in this case police and prison guard unions and private prison companies) are the ones who spend the most effort lobbying on the issue. It also doesn't help at all when we disenfranchise "convicts" because we're then disenfranchising the victims of the system whenever it makes a mistake (which is often).

>>mcherm+Wa
Seems like our political system is broken then.

If the public so adamantly wants laws that elected representatives refuse to pass, then it seems that enabling direct democracy would be one solution to getting these laws passed.