A new lawsuit filed in federal court last month alleges that the Baton Rouge Police Department ran a “torture warehouse” where members of its Street Crimes Unit strip searched, beat, and otherwise humiliated people and then released them, often without their being charged with a crime. Soon after the lawsuit was filed, the FBI opened a civil rights investigation into the allegations of misconduct at the now-shuttered warehouse known as “the BRAVE Cave.”
The main problem with this is that the hits these days are in the millions of dollars and that adds up fast. So the inevitable result even with just good faith mistakes would be that people would stop being cops. People who could be good cops wouldn’t join to replace them because of the risk, and the entire thing would likely just disintegrate.
On the one hand fine! On the other hand, what takes its place?
This is not intended to be a pro-cop argument, just an explanation of the problem. We need a social institution that can fill that gap in a better way.
City of Chicago is 22,000 police officers short of full enforcement. That means the good ones have left and they can’t fire the bad ones, and they pay ridiculous salaries because nobody wants to be a cop. That song ain’t called “fuck the firemen”
I prefer the insurance angle, where LEOs have to carry insurance similar to how doctors carry malpractice insurance. Any settlements are paid for by insurance instead of the department; officers who cause problems will have their rates go up, until they eventually become uninsurable.
Pretty appropriate way to handle it with current “systems and institutions”, too, nice.