> This is why there needs to be a law mandating that ALL allegations of police criminality are automatically, statutorily handled by a special prosecutor.
That lets every person arrested charge the police with something criminal, and have it taken seriously, no matter how bogus the charge.
What? You thought the police practice "testilying", but the criminals don't?
Now, true, some such accusations need to be taken more seriously. Not all of them, though. The prosecutors err too often on the side of the police. Erring too much on the side of the accusers is not the answer, though.
> That lets every person arrested charge the police with something criminal, and have it taken seriously, no matter how bogus the charge.
No, it doesn't. An independent special prosecutor can brush off an allegation as not credible as easily as a police-aligned prosecutor; in principle, they won't be biased by their other prosecutions depending on the police, but they don't somehow lose the capacity for judgement along with that source of bias.
I mean, the conviction rate on cops is embarrassingly low. You have body cam footage, cell phone footage, a law abiding citizen's testimony, and they still just get a month suspension. Too frequently we see cops abusing their power and they get a slap on the wrist.
I think there's a pretty wide range of options between "let the DA who needs the cops to lie so he can keep his conviction rate high half-ass his way though the case" and "bring charges literally every time someone wants to bring charges." I think OP was talking more about WHO handles them, rather than whether all of them have merit.
This is a non-issue. District Attorneys handle this situation all the time: they get plenty of bogus cases, or cases that could be real but have flimsy evidence, and then decide which ones are solid enough to take to trial and which ones are ignored. There is no reason a standing office of a special prosecutor for police misconduct couldn't do the same thing.
Fixing problems isn't just a matter of turning a knob on "who gets more trust" or "amount of investigation to do" or "how much government regulation to do'. Real-world problems don't exist on one-dimensional axes.
Fixing problems means making qualitative changes to how the broken processes work.
That lets every person arrested charge the police with something criminal, and have it taken seriously, no matter how bogus the charge.
What? You thought the police practice "testilying", but the criminals don't?
Now, true, some such accusations need to be taken more seriously. Not all of them, though. The prosecutors err too often on the side of the police. Erring too much on the side of the accusers is not the answer, though.