> The licensing body will quickly fill with people aligned with police and be entirely useless.

This, 110%.

It will be useless for the same reason Internal Affairs is useless. The line of "We investigated ourselves and found no wrong-doing" will continue.

Police are buddies with the District Attorneys which are buddies with the judges. The result is nobody wants to prosecute police officers.

This is why you have an ‘independent’ police complaints authority, and that then ends up between my stacked in much the same way. TIL.

Make the licensing body pay out settlements against its members and you’ll get them to “manage out” the bad apples.

Changing tort law would be an enormous political fight, way bigger than Obamacare or abortion or environmental regulation or gun rights or any of the other big ticket items.

Not sure if I agree with the idea, but it wouldn’t necessarily require changing tort law. Just require that the licensing body also provide liability insurance, as hospitals do for doctors; and “disbar” any police officer who uses anything other than the group-plan insurance to pay out a settlement, or who goes to court.

I believe unions already tend to kick out union members who don’t accept union-appointed lawyers and instead attempt to litigate their own cases. This wouldn’t be much of a stretch from that.

plenty of people also want engineers to make the cheapest possible building