I knew that cops can frame people, and in some areas they run wild without any checks to their power, but the incredible productivity of these cops is scary.
(Ironically, if someone would have taken justice into their own hands, they’d have been celebrated as hero martyrs for years.)
As a side note about framings: I think the biggest framing in all history occurred when software errors in a system built by ICL sent sub-postmasters to court and prison in the UK.
By 2022, 736 prosecutions had been identified, 83 convictions had been overturned and more were expected to be quashed. The number of those affected by other types of abuse by the Post Office, torts, breach of contract, coercion etc., has not been tabulated or published.
I think that if society wants to keep police, it has to ensure that it takes a stable personality with functioning ethics and reasonable intellect to get a job there. Becoming a cop should be equivalent to getting a doctor’s degree in medicine, with plenty of possibilities for dropping out. The implication would be that cops would be scarce - that sort of society would want to reduce its crime levels via prevention.
Alternatively, a random selection of ordinary people might be chosen to investigate crimes. Lower efficacy, but far less chance of abuse.
As the bare minimum, allegations against the police should be investigated by some other institution - one which gets zero benefit from good relations with cops.
Sortition is already the basis for juries, and is an interesting solution for community self-defense.
One objection I imagine is that juries are currently inadequately educated about jurisprudence, but I think improving the civics education freely available for both tasks would benefit everyone.
Being able to pull a month of peace officer duty the same way you do jury duty would be an interesting change. There’s a real risk of unsuitable people being given power, but we kind of already have that and at least these ones wouldn’t be entrenched for years. Similarly there may be less chance that they’ll push confrontations. The temporary officers might take it less as a part of their identity, us vs them, just something they’re doing in their community for the moment, like directing traffic at a volunteer event or something. And there’d be much more community transparency.
The big thing (as now) would have to be in the vetting, making sure we’re not empowering stalkers with victims in the community, or the kind of people who would abuse someone on the worst day of their life (which is when most of us find ourselves interacting with the police IRL). and in offering enough societal safety nets to reduce the overall incidence of violence. We’d also want some way to ensure continuity, investigations being done by full time officers (perhaps these being those doctor-level cops).
Something to play with in a fictional setting at first, perhaps. It’d be a cool role in one of the solarpunk tabletop RPGs people have been making
I like where you’re going.
Roles drift as society changes, and I don’t think it is necessary for the investigator to be the same as the police - in many ways it might be better if their roles are partitioned. Some of the greatest crimes of the century were investigated by journalists, not police detectives. When Daniel Ellsberg uncovered the conspiracy to pillage Vietnam, he delivered the evidence to The Washington Post and New York Times. When the US President broke into his rival’s headquarters, it was Woodward and Bernstein that listened to witnesses and investigated the crime. Crime on a much smaller scale are also the purview of journalists, especially when the police are incapable of doing their jobs. Mexican beat reporters are instrumental in performing the investigative functions typically associated with police work. It is not unheard of in other countries either. In a world where people can do whatever they want, why wouldn’t many of them turn to solving mysteries?
