They ultimately supervise and choose the people that hire the police, the people that set the policies for the police, and the people (both in and out of police departments) directly responsible for holding police accountable.
> Inability to fire police officers, even for gross misconduct including unlawful homocide is baked in to many jurisdictions due to PBA contracts.
I'm pretty sure there is no jurisdiction in which you can't fire a police officer convicted of unlawful homicide. It's true prosecutors aren't likely to prosecute police officers, but that's because they are elected officials that are held accountable for being sufficiently successful in prosecuting non-cops, but not for prosecuting cops.
Second, while both Constitutional law regarding due process rights attached to public civil service employment and employment contract terms may make it difficult, time consuming, and procedurally involved to fire police officers, which also makes agencies reluctant to even initiate the process, you are significantly overstating the case even absent criminal prosecution.
And third, the only reason it is possible to have contract terms that make it so hard to fire police officers for misconduct is that the the law doesn't set out accountability standards or qualifications for continuation in such roles that would make such a contract void as contrary to public policy. Which is, even if a negative choice, a legislative policy choice by elective representatives. And the decision to enter into such contracts, given that they are allowed, is also a decision made by publicly accountable officials.
So, a whole lot of different, directly publicly accountable decision makers are necessarily involved, either actively or tacitly, in permitting bad cops to continue to do bad things. If the public cared to stop it, they could through the democratic process.
Looking from the outside, seems like the police system used to work at some point in the past and now it doesn’t. Maybe taxpayers taking the brunt of it in case of police misbehavior is a case of a system “failing loudly”, a useful indicator that the police doesn’t work well and people should elect differently in favor of revamping the police according to current realities.
Okay. You mentioned looking from the outside, so I was curious if there was some “golden age” from news reports or our exported entertainment that you had in mind. A lot of domestic folks think that time was the 1950s, and I wondered if that was your impression as well. It was certainly mine until I started looking into things further.
The reality is that the police in the US are here to enforce the social order, not to protect the public.[0] It has always been that way; as the sibling poster said, it’s just more visible now. I think we have the chance to improve policing now because of that visibility.
Edit: I’m adding this paragraph in response to your other comment, which says in part “Police must have satisfied the primary requirements posed by the people at some point in the past, if we are to believe that democracy works at all.” I understand what you’re saying, but we are still struggling to get equal representation up and running here. Democracy may or may not work, but lots of people were excluded from the process until very recently, and there are continuing efforts to keep it that way. So in a very narrow sense, sure, police did what they were designed to, which is to enforce the social order. The social order is messed up, therefore police are too and always have been.
I think it was always broken, but it’s only since police body cams and everyone carrying a video camera (10 years, give or take a few years) that problem has been given a voice.
Police must have satisfied the primary requirements posed by the people at some point in the past, if we are to believe that democracy works at all. Requirements must have evolved since then, which is to be expected.
Sometimes it feels like the prevailing sentiment is just “police hurts us so we need to create outrage until they remove police and/or give us a better one”, which is understandable but remembering that how police works today is in fact a result of democratic process (and that indeed it works for the taxpayer) might be useful—less “us vs. them” and more “taxpayer today vs. taxpayer of the past”.
Not really. In many places there are huge influences from political parties and heavy stakeholders. For example, in California a well-known financial mogul got a few DAs appointed - it was an election but one could call it "buy a DA".
