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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

I thought you meant the US in general. Because that checks out. It has a Bill of Rights. And the Police has another, better Bill of Rights. Some animals are more equal than others.

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See my above comment. We should have basically made the police equal to all other citizens (with the increase in self- and other- defense abilities that are required for the general public to make that possible), where the only difference is that the police are actively doing defense as a job. And police should be sued and arrested just like everyone else is.

Police are civilians and should be treated as such, it shouldn't be any more legal for them to do something any other civilian would face substantial legal penalties for without facing the same penalties.

Exactly. Making police a class above was a mistake from the beginning. Suddenly you have a class that can use violence arbitrarily against the other class with hardly any penalty unless the "lower" class makes a big protest about it. It's really horrible and is a perfect system for turning "sheepdogs" (people who want to protect others) into "wolves" (people who pray on others) through peer-pressure, secretiveness, and lack of accountability. And worse, it draws wolves in the first place.

So normal citizens should be able to put cuffs on other citizens? Put them into a car and drive off?

In many states, they already can for felonies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_arrest#United_Stat...

What they lack is qualified immunity, so it's pretty rare because the risk of being wrong is too great. Which seems to be a valuable take away.

You know that's perfectly legal in California right? You can make a citizens arrest for a misdemeanor in progress or a felony you have knowledge of.

And suffer the penalties of kidnapping if they do it for the wrong reasons, yes. This would do two things: one, people would have a huge incentive not to do that, and two, maybe we'd raise the threshold for jail and raise the penalty for wrongful imprisonments, meaning cops don't jail people for victemless crimes and we don't have such a massive prison population.

Also, we could make laws saying that prisoners are only allowed to be kept at approved prisons; a law that could be applied equally to police and citizens, while ensuring the government gets to approve who gets imprisoned.

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