no, but it could be someone elected who is not part of the police. Of course you can argue that you believe that other someone would be corrupt anyway, but at least this removes the appearance of impropriety
Appearances might not be as important as actual issues, though - I think it is okay to do it this way. Doctors in the UK sit on ethics boards looking at other doctors' behaviour.
I would think it would be good to say that not more than 50% can be ex-law enforcement though, to ensure a reasonable mixture.
That is a different type of review though. Police departments also have Internal Affairs officers who review the work of other policemen for various problems.
Citizen review boards become necessary because the public is losing confidence in an entire institution. If the public trusted the police department, then an outside review board would have been entirely unnecessary, the IA department would have been enough.
Hospital review boards are not necessary for this reason: overall local hospitals are trusted enough to ensure that they can handle bad actors on their own (in general - it's not like there are 0 cases of bad doctors being covered by their colleagues, but they are the exception).
> in general - it's not like there are 0 cases of bad doctors being covered by their colleagues, but they are the exception
I don't think this statement aligns with reality:
> The mission of our various state medical boards is to “protect health care consumers through the proper licensing and regulation of physicians and surgeons” [15]—to protect, in other words, specifically from doctors who would intentionally harm their patients. But medical boards typically are more lenient with problem physicians than other patient safety processes.
> For example, over a 10-year period, researchers found that “seventy percent of the physicians with a clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment report due to sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this problem” [1]. Additionally, 67% of insurance fraud convictions were associated only with what I would describe as light discipline—no suspensions or license revocation from medical boards. It seems that medical board members have confused their statutory duty toward patient safety with a well-meaning but terribly misjudged desire to rehabilitate problem doctors.
> Board member Eserick "TJ" Watkins, who was appointed in 2019, charged that the board doesn't serve patients. Watkins started tracking discipline cases and says the California Medical Board handed out more lenient punishments than its guidelines suggested in nine out of every 10 cases. [...]
> "The way they speak is always with doctor care in mind. You never hear patient care, ever — and I mean, ever," said Watkins.
This suggests that maybe there should exist citizen's review boards of medical malpraxis just as we are trying to create for police. Thanks for bringing this up.
Yep. There's just incredible demand for media attention on police problems (or certain problems) and in a country of 350m you can always find something somewhere that can be reported.
What the poster above is showing is that even the medical review boards are actually bad and should probably be replaced with independent oversight. You seem to think that it's the other way around.
You genuinely believe that the United States is #1 in the world for lowest per capital w.r.t. police problems like corruption and brutality?
Where does that belief come from? Do you just default to thinking that the US is the best, or is this opinion based on some sort of life experience?
Like can you not conceive of another country where the kinds of things that go on in America with police are not routine?
Have you been to another country? Have you ever just walked down the street somewhere else? I've been to many countries, one of which is America and holy shit I can tell you that the police there are weird.
