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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that there is no organization that is incentivized to uncover or investigate police crimes.

All other portions of government have cross-checks to stop people breaking the law. The police don't, and cover for one another.

There needs to be an organization that has clear and direct incentive to prosecute abuses by the police, that doesn't have a century+ long tradition of violence, selective enforcement, racism, and murder.

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But it would seem far more feasible to build an organization like that to oversee one unified police force than to have n tiny organizations to oversee n small local police forces. If you'd try to mix levels (one central org cross-checking n small forces) everybody involved would inevitably confuse their role with a central coordination hierarchy and the original intent would get lost.

For the FBI, there is such an organization. The FBI Inspector General investigates malpractice committed by FBI officers. However, the scope of their ability to fix problems in the FBI is limited because prosecutors rarely take up cases against law enforcement. They also hold FBI officers accountable by writing reports for congress. Again, the usefulness of this is limited by the unwillingness of Congress to act on this information.

(Inspectors General exist for for every federal agency)

It has to be an organization separate from any specific police agency, with prosecutors solely devoted to prosecuting police crimes, complete with their bonuses and careers linked to convictions complete with scummy plea bargaining behavior.

There also has to be new crimes of negligence for things like 'body cam turned off' or 'records suddenly missing' and so on.

The state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia has a Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) [1], which is a body legally separate from NSW's law enforcement agencies–NSW Police Force, which is the main state police force; NSW Crime Commission, which specialises in organised crime and other serious crime–and which is tasked with investigating law enforcement misconduct. (In Australia, there is no local law enforcement, only state/territorial/federal.) The LECC doesn't prosecute itself, but can investigate cases and refer them to state prosecutors for prosecution. It isn't perfect, but it is better than nothing. Maybe the US could copy the same idea?

(Also, separately from the LECC, there is also an Inspector of the LECC, whose job is to investigate misconduct by the LECC themselves.)

[1] https://www.lecc.nsw.gov.au

Part of me wants to ask “but who investigates the Inspector of the LECC?” But I’ve dealt with Elixir and I know that supervision trees rarely need to be very deep in practice

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