WHAT TO DO ABOUT OUR POLICE
2 min readApr 22, 2021
An associate of mine left a great list of ideas for how to repair the problem we have with police.
Feel free to add ideas in the comments. Thank you!
- Vicarious liability of governments for their employees.
- Governmental liability under a takings doctrine like strict liability for compensatory damages for all violations of constitutional rights even if not intentional.
- Subject police pensions to civil rights liability.
- End qualified immunity from civil liability for police officers.
- National blacklist of bad cops.
- Give courts in civil rights actions the right to order entities to fire civil rights violators and to black list civil rights violators.
- Use unarmed civilians for welfare checks.
- Systemically and automatically ethics violations by prosecutors.
- Make law enforcement officers employees at will and management and hence not eligible to unionize and vigorously fire and suspend officers who engage in misconduct.
- Decriminalize ordinance violations and many other offenses to make them have just civil money penalties avoiding arrests and potential for death in confrontations.
- Allow dash cam imposition of traffic citations on people who flee.
- Get cops out of schools.
- Increase education and background check requirements for cops.
- Limit law enforcement overtime.
- Create a department appointed by chief public defender to prosecute bad cops administratively and criminally.
- Disqualify judges with law enforcement/DA backgrounds from hearing bad cop criminal cases.
- Send trained mental health professionals on every mental health call.
- Criminalize sex with arrestees and detainees and subjects of their work by law enforcement.
- Substitute “day fines” for jail terms when possible.
- Vigorously investigate every case where evidence is excluded under the 4th or 6th Amendment as a police misconduct case.