Do you mean lawsuits against the individual cops?
Yes, that's part of it. One method of accountability is individual
civil liability for violating a citizen's Constitutional rights, and qualified immunity coupled with local police departments indemnifying officers from the financial burden of the lawsuits/settlements rather than requiring them to carry liability insurance for their actions.
Two actions that would make a difference:
- End qualified immunity.
- Require officers to carry individual liability insurance and don't allow departments to indemnify them.
Making those two changes would be much more useful than a database of officer complaints, or "better training" (which isn't enforced in the streets), etc.
I think he means jail time. But I'll let him speak on that.
It's this too. Quite often you see issues of police brutality which are
crimes by the officer, and the DA declines to prosecute. And even when officers are disciplined without prosecution, the police unions make it nearly impossible to actually punish them in any meaningful way.
As I've said elsewhere, this is a harder one for structural reasons--public sector unions in general and police unions in particular are very powerful, especially in local elections and local politics. A district attorney (usually an elected official) or a mayor who acts counter to the police unions' wishes will usually find those unions backing someone else once the next election rolls around.
But yes, when police are actually committing criminal acts, they should be prosecuted. We should be holding them to a higher standard than the public given the responsibilities and power they are afforded, not a lower standard.
