Comment by rcvassallo83
17 hours ago
The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.
The incentive is to prosecte and prove the charges.
Speaking from the experience of being falsely accused after calling 911 to stop a drunk woman from driving.
The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.
There needs to be consequences for shitty, procedure-ignoring police work. Period.
Minimum 1 year of jail time for grossly wrongful arrests that could be avoided with standard procedure or investigation tactics that were not applied.
I agree with this sentiment but when you start punishing this sort of thing you create more incentive to cover it up. It's a tricky problem and I'm not sure there's a perfect solution.
What we really need is a change in police culture.
Then the system should be redesigned such that transparency is a priority and cover ups are not feasible. And when cover ups eventually get found out, the punishments even more severe.
We already have administrative punishments for the police when they incorrectly assign blame and cause a public relations mess.
Is the termination of your career and/or potential retraining and social embarrassment not already an incentive to cover up?
> change in police culture
until then, there's a simple rule which works well: never talk to a cop. Or at least say the minimum number of words possible, give them nothing to use against you. Present ID if they ask for it, but never admit anything. If they persist, "lawyer". That has worked for me.
These dialogs always prompt me to chime in with my solution: make the police be self-insured, backed by their pension fund.
The police today have zero incentive to serve the public, they have zero skin in the game and can literally get away with murder.
Any time you hear the call for "law and order", that is the audience that supports the current system, because they like it like this.
Great idea, Except that this will never happen because public sector unions are important voting blocks. Public sector unions should be abolished (don’t have a problem with unions) but the conflict of interest is just too great.
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> The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.
I don't get it, if they only care about prosecuting and proving the case, wouldn't they go by the bodycam evidence? They didn't prove the case. Maybe if their incentive was to prosecute and prove the charges, they'd go by the obvious evidence. Or am I missing something here?
> The thing about the legal system is there's no incentive to investigate to find the truth.
The truth is much more complicated and involves politics. For example Seattle (and possibly other cities?) enacted a law that involves paying damages for being wrong in the event of bringing certain types of charges. But that has resulted in some widely publicized examples where the prosecutor erred by being overly cautious.
And then you have Florida who will bill you about $100 a day for finding yourself in a Florida jail, regardless of whether charges were dismissed, you were found not guilty or any such thing.
And to nobody’s surprise, failure to pay this bill is in itself a Class B felony…
That sounds like a recipe for domestic terrorism - the systemic disenfranchisement of people who have done nothing wrong for no apparent reason other than sheer greed. How long has this been in effect there?
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That sounds absolutely terrifying.
There’s a judge down in Texas, Dallas area I believe, who is in social media a lot because he will excoriate prosecutors who bring bs in to his court room. He’s not soft on crime but hard on rights and process. If a defendant did the wrong thing, he will have the appropriate amount of sympathy, down to zero. At times he will tell them, we all know you got lucky here, do better. But he won’t let prosecutors slate by on garbage charges or statements or investigations by police. Which leads to my primary point at least for this discussion in particular:
To me the scariest part of this as a process is how many times (I’d casually estimate at least 75%) it is blindingly obvious that the prosecutor has not read the statement of charges or officer statements until everyone is in front of the judge. I get on one hand this judge seems to often be handling probable cause hearings but so many of these should never have resulted in any paperwork being turned in to the prosecution, let alone anyone having to show up in court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Fleischer_(judge)
It's fascinating to me that judges are elected in Texas, and what's more, run as members of a political party.
There is an incentive . It’s called fraud by negligence. I’m hoping she sues everyone here.
That’s seems to be in the realm of poissibility here if I am understanding things correctly (imo)
I would absolutely never call the police on a woman. Simply walk far away and let her be someone else's problem.
Unless it’s a Karen chasing you and yelling and threatening to call the police on you for some asinine reason?
Imo they're right, if you're faced with the option of running away from some crazy person or interacting with the police in the USA, the safer option is to run.
A police interaction can escalate to ruinous heights within seconds due to no fault of your own. Remember that cop that got scared by an acorn falling and started shooting at random? I don't care how many "good cops" there are, I'm not rolling the dice on encountering an acorn cop.