The problem I see is, that there is no personal responsibility for anything.
A cop beats someone, plants drugs, fbi does an illegal search, cia trains a future terrorist and people die, etc...
The "best case" that can happen to victims is, that taxpayers cover some costs, and that's it.
For every action, there is a field worker, a chain of command and someone paid to give commands and take responsibility for that. If those people ended up in jail for everything illegal they do (as do all the other people in other industries), the world would be a lot nicer place.
There are several challenges with this: first, courts have adopted the concept of “sovereign immunity” that shields government personnel in most situations. Next, prosecutors usually have a very close relationship with law enforcement and are generally reluctant to prosecute (although there are some that seem to delight in it, different problem).
Finally, we have a judiciary that in general is very deferential to law enforcement (again there are some exceptions but the rule holds).
I think that there are two cultural aspects to the whole law enforcement apparatus that are undesirable- first, that they are a closed brotherhood and have to always take care of each other, and second, that it’s “us against them”, eg that LE is adversarial to the general populace.
For most of US history the armed forces have tried to stamp out these ideas in our officer corps, trying to walk the fine line of encouraging obedience to superiors while emphasizing personal responsibility and ethics. Not always successful but a serious attempt to establish and maintain a culture that avoids the toxic aspects that we see in LE culture.
Let the 'free market' figure it out. Require a private insurance policy to hold a LEO permit; and have the private market decide that specific officers - whole types of policing are too expensive. If a officer has to pay 10,000% of their wages to hold a insurance policy abuse/derliction would have consequences, and department hopping would also be mitigated.
There's practical solutions. If a cop did something bad, it shouldn't be a prosecutor from the same city who they may have to work with one day on a case, it should be one from out of town. And if you say a cop won't cooperate with any prosecutor, then well too bad, that's part of the job and if they don't like it, they should find another career.
Cops and prosecutors are coworkers whose jobs fundamentally depend on cooperation from the other. They aren't and won't ever be adversaries. A given prosecutor having a personal working relationship with a given cop certainly makes this worse but it isn't the core constraint.
An out of town prosecutor will still consider police generally to be allied peers. They still have to go home afterwards and have a working relationship with the local police, who certainly consider the cops a few towns over to be part of the same family and will consider prosecution of one of them an affront to all.
Prosecutors can ask a grand jury of citizens to investigate and indict. Then the prosecutor is the attorney for the State doing the attorney stuff in court.
Grand juries are powerful, and thus can also go off the rails led by prosecutor manipulation.
It's really not reformable in the way people normally mean by that word. The incentives and constraints that create this environment are core to the history, identity, and civil-political mechanics of the systems themselves. The individual people acting within these systems are actively opposed to reform, and there isn't a mechanism to force it without their cooperation. The solution really is to scrap the whole thing and try something else entirely.
Reform and re-form are different words in contemporary usage. Destroying an object to use its resources to make a new one with a different purpose would be re-forming and yes that is what I'm advocating here.
I was careful to indicate which meaning I intended in my originally comment, but of course you can never be so careful as to avoid a bad faith nitpicking here on hacker news can you.
> If those people ended up in jail for everything illegal they do ...
Are you and I included in "those people"? The problem is the western legal system. People don't understand whats illegal. We can't require people to be lawyers just to have a job.
If you shot an unarmed man in the back... would you not be punished for that? Or if you planted drugs on your friend? If you planted a microphone/camera in your friends place?
A cop beats someone, plants drugs, fbi does an illegal search, cia trains a future terrorist and people die, etc...
The "best case" that can happen to victims is, that taxpayers cover some costs, and that's it.
For every action, there is a field worker, a chain of command and someone paid to give commands and take responsibility for that. If those people ended up in jail for everything illegal they do (as do all the other people in other industries), the world would be a lot nicer place.