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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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There are only two ways to fix this that I see:
Neither of which the US is going to do, because here, the cops and law enforcement are a civic religion. Therefore the best most Americans can do is keep their heads down and avoid the bastards as best you can manage.
In Spain when cops fuck up you simply take away their ability to work in law enforcement. It's really that simple. In US they will just get hired by another city. The problem in US is not that this is hard to solve and requires some clever, hard to write legislation. The problem is that law enforcement always worked for the elites, not the masses and no one in power wants to change it.
It's also that cops have put an amount of investment into pr that is unique among government employees (and that includes pushing you to not think of them as just more government employees) except maybe the military. They're bleeding your local budget dry, but if the news reports on stuff like that or their misconduct they lose access to crime leads. There's a massive push to make you think highly of them. Here's a video I recently watched on the topic that points to true crime as a possible in to get ordinary people to see the cops as as flawed as they are
Very interesting. I assumed that police always held privileged status in US but this could be simply because they are always portrayed like that in movies, even historical ones. The PR is definitely there. In pretty much every movie caps break the laws and ignore rights of everyone and it's shown as something necessary and even 'cool'. Bad guys don't deserve rights...
This is one of the reasons I refused to watch "24". I wasn't going to support a show whose entire premise was "we ignore due process because we're too incompetent to stop the criminals sooner."
The technical solution is: body cam footage is automatically, frequently, uploaded to cloud servers that the department does not control. The department gets read-only access, nobody gets the ability to delete footage for 7 years, and defense attorneys get automatic access to everything remotely related to their case.
Also: planting evidence and sending the falsely accused to prison for 6 months is a misdemeanor punished with suspended sentences and probation? That department owes the falsely accused damages for lost wages and damage to their ability to obtain future employment. That's actually a "superpower" cops know all too well: if you've never been arrested they can seriously screw up your life with absolute impunity just by arresting you - charges never have to be filed, that arrest on your record - however baseless it may be - can hurt you in all sorts of ways, especially employability, for the rest of your life.
The easiest way to get this accomplished politically is to create insurance for them. Have the departments cover the base insurance rate and premium increases from settlements increase that officers insurance which (s)he has to pay out of their pay. If the insurance is unaffordable then you can no longer be a police.
Exactly, that is not a cure all but it's a doable fix that could be implemented even in today's political environment with a little work. Every cop gets the amount of their liability insurance it would cost if they weren't a prick, and they pay the premium.
Every cop gets a score already by liability insurance that departments carry, so it would just be shifting those costs, and would involve renegotiating their union contracts.
I'd love that, but I don't think (at least here in the US) that there will ever be a meaningful change to how killer cops are managed legally, especially after there was zero accountability for Uvalde.
Single events do not define a whole country. We get the changes we fight (vote) for.