Comment by virgil_disgr4ce
7 hours ago
Is there a framework—any framework, however hypothetical—that actually makes police accountable and subject to the laws they supposedly enforce?
7 hours ago
Is there a framework—any framework, however hypothetical—that actually makes police accountable and subject to the laws they supposedly enforce?
I have always gravitated towards a market model. Force police, like doctors, to have malpractice insurance. Let for-profit insurance companies model what that risk looks like. Now cities have to make a financial decision when hiring cops that is directionally accurate to the risk of said cop. Imperfect but I don’t believe perfect systems exist.
But this goes back to government agencies never thinking about budgets. Modern politics is about marketing a tax reduction but never how that impacts the budget.
That might help for straight up murder cases, but I think it leaves a LOT of room for continued abuse of position and power with the only real risk being a small increase in monthly payment to offenders that makes it seem acceptable.
Absolutely! This would also mean when cops break the law taxpayers don't pay out. Their privately held insurance does. Enough bad behavior and a criminal cop becomes uninsurable. This also prevents the abuse where a criminal cop gets fired, then moved over to another jurisdiction to repeat the process all over again. The insurance companies should have to share history with one another.
Perhaps the only tweak would be to regulate these insurance companies to control their profit margins. We don't want to end up in the same situation as medical insurance in the US. Tax payers will have to pay some of the insurance premiums indirectly. So this idea can work well so long as insurance is in that goldilox zone: enough to provide incentive for the companies to exist, but not so much that their greed creates an even worse system.
> but not so much that their greed creates an even worse system.
The market model won't work because greed isn't real when discussing corporations. That's like calling a tree growing towards the sun "greedy." No, the tree is fulfilling it's biological imperative: put more leaves closer to the sun.
Corporations must maximize profit. The corporation that maximizes profit best is the one that can consume other ones and tend towards monopoly, the perfect state. All actions are permitted when fulfilling biological imperative.
So, trying to fenangle a market based solution to police brutality issues will result in a couple predetermined outcomes: insurance payouts won't happen because why would they voluntarily pay, furthermore, cop insurance companies would leverage their superior capital to lobby the government to protect their profit margins, which individuals can't prevent through market efforts or individual actions since the corporation's power is so much greater.
yeah market models are working so great everywhere else...
Instead of being hyperbolic why don’t you share your idea then?
Markets are not perfect but on average they do a decent job of finding equilibrium.
“Democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others that have been tried.”
4 replies →
This is pretty straightforward actually. The third party doctrine [1] has been extrapolated to the digital age to the massive detriment of privacy. All it takes is for Congress to pass a law clarifying to the courts that the third party doctrine isn't correct.
There's also an alteration to the interpretation of "reasonable expectation of privacy" that could be made (again, by Congress) to account for the total sum of information, rather than each individual piece of information in isolation. For example, I have no expectation of privacy that people don't see my license plate when I'm driving but I don't expect that a single person/entity would have all of the locations my license plate has been in the last 3 days.
The other clarification/change Congress could make would be to change the "reasonable expectation" test to something less susceptible to erosion over time. (I didn't used to expect I'd be tracked in certain way because I thought it would have been illegal but now I do expect it even though I still feel it's illegal). The reasonable expectation test encourages normalizing surveillance for as long as possible before it gets to court so that it's unreasonable to expect otherwise.
All of these things, of course, would be still within the grasp of investigators with a simple warrant which would normally take less than an hour to attain.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
A storage locker or bank deposit box is private property even if it's effectively held by a 3rd party.
There's no reason the same doctrine couldn't extend to digital papers and effects.
I'm not a lawyer or anything but the third party doctrine holds because you're willingly and knowingly giving your information to said third party. I expect that the difference there is that the contents of a storage locker or safety deposit box are explicitly confidential from the company their are leased/rented from.
I feel like this actually isn't that complicated. Just remove any special protections that they get on the judicial end. The judicial is already there with the intention of balancing the powers of the executive, it just doesn't do that currently because they limply decided that the executive can go and do whatever the hell they please.
there's never been a point human history where the ruling class was subject to its rules. so no.
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