Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

A sort of police police, if you will. But then who polices the police police? The obvious answer is that police police police police police police.

View on HN

you don't need recursion, you just need a closed loop.

Police A and Police B who police each other besides the ordinary citizens. Add incentives so that they look extra closely at the other side.

Seems like this would produce some naturally bad incentives. My guess is you would see both sides work the system in concert in a way that protects the 'core' members of both. If there are incentives to 'bust' members of the other team, they could always just hire patsies specifically to be groomed and sacrificed as an exchange with the other side.

The alternative is two sides fighting a war of escalation which would likely encourage scary corrupt behavior. "Those guys busted Johnny for some minor offense, so lets go get some dirt on one of their guys, or plant it. Can't let them think they can just mess with us"

This is going by the current us vs them mentality of the police forces.

> This is going by the current us vs them mentality of the police forces.

If that is so, then at least if both "us" and "them" are heavily armed cops with warrior mentalities, they'd focus less of their aggression on the general public.

To prevent regulatory capture/tit-for-tat/spontaneous alliances, I would think that we need a loop at least three agencies long; Police A watches Police B who watches Police C who watches Police A. We also need proper incentives for all of them to act appropriately. Otherwise they will be either overzealous or lackadaisical.

And, you know, you'd only really need one of them to actually police civilians; in fact it's probably better that way. And then you could split up rulemaking and dispute resolution responsibilities between the other two since they will suddenly have more free time. This is a really good idea; why have we never tried this before?!

If one of the agencies has an effective monopoly, it would be almost meaningless to police them since they can't be replaced since they have no competition. (Yes, yes, I know what you meant.)

Ordinary citizens.

Yes, but only if they organize pronto. Recall that direct interference in a nominally lawful police activity is obstruction of justice and itself a prosecutable crime.

Recording the activity isn't a crime.

Don't physically try to stop the police. That's going to cause trouble. But if they're doing something out of line, record it if you can. If they tell you to stop, you can claim that you have the legal right to do so. If they continue to tell you to stop, stop. But still watch if you can.

Note well: IANAL. This is not legal advice. In particular, if anyone with real knowledge wants to correct the "If they tell you to stop, you can claim that you have the legal right to do so" part, feel free.

> Recall that direct interference in a nominally lawful police activity is obstruction of justice and itself a prosecutable crime.

This is the metapolice we're talking about, not the police. The metapolice have no jurisdiction over ordinary citizens. Now, if police were to interfere in lawful metapolice activity, that would be one hell of a crime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com