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Comment by RecycledEle | Hacker News Reader

If cops only pay fines, their abuse of honest citizens gets worse.

There needs to be felony prison time for cops who pull this kind of thing.

The police unions spend too much time and effort protecting its worst members.

The US police force is rotten to the core. They like to pretend like they’re military adjacent but in reality they’re just local gangs with taxpayer funding. There’s no overarching command structure nationally that you could use to reform the police force at a broad scale. In my opinion all police officers should be in the military and subject to military court and prison if they break the rules. It’s a failure in planning on the US governments part, in my opinion.

You don't want the military policing you bro

I’ll explain by example: If police were military they could be “deployed” to areas of the country that they are not from. By shuffling officers periodically you could prevent the formation of cliques within the force at a local level. In Mississippi for example there is a lot of corruption and racism in the force, likely to a greater degree than what you would find in LA. And they answer to absolutely no one. Recently a mass grave of unnamed people was found behind a police station in Mississippi: https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/01/18/a-mass-grave-of-hundr...

For the reasons outlined above I would prefer police to be part of the military. Then maybe you would have some type of accountability. This southern cop behavior is the type of thing Blackwater got up to in Iraq. Non-military people who pretend like they’re the real deal without being beholden to a command structure are all but guaranteed to go rogue.

There will probably be different problems like cops not being familiar with the community they are policing but yeah I think it would be a huge improvement to have all cops come under a federal umbrella. Local corruption is absolutely insane with police in the US.

There is no "US police force". Every non-tiny municipality has its own police force. Countries have sheriff's departments, and state governments have their own police. These are all separate institutions with different policies, norms, and practices.

That’s exactly my point. The fact that there is no central chain of command is what makes the “US police force” rotten, vs branches of the US military that have extremely high and universal standards for conduct as well as a system of accountability. It’s not perfect but at least it’s subject to central commands.

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