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Comment by Sylamore | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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