L.A. County sheriff’s unit accused of targeting political enemies, vocal critics
I&#x27;ve thought about this a lot, and have some thoughts about what we need to achieve police reform in the US<p>1. Re-organizing police departments into a hierarchy. Currently we have a bunch of different districts with their own regulations and leadership. In some the police chief is appointed by the mayor, in others there&#x27;s the sheriff system where the law enforcement leader is elected. But I don&#x27;t think local elections are a sufficient check on power, same for appointments my mayors. Departments need to be re-organized under a hierarchy, with police departments of individual districts reporting to a regional police department (which can be on county lines or some other organizational system, though this level could be skipped for less populated states) which in turn reports to a state-wide police department. While there are state-wide police organizations now (AKA state troopers) with responsibilities broken up by jurisdiction (i.e. only state troopers enforcing traffic laws on state highways) there isn&#x27;t an actual hierarchy of command. Setting this up will actually make things more efficient, because you can better pool resources, but the main benefit is that it makes it easier to regulate police conduct across the entire state. Currently each police department has their own regulations. It also opens the door to creating more centralized internal affairs divisions and prosecution, so that the local district attorney who works with the police department every day isn&#x27;t the one deciding what police misconduct cases to prosecute.<p>2. We should establish an accrediting body for police departments, made up of legal experts, law enforcement professionals, and others. This body should determine and publish best practices (for use of force standards, training, organization, etc), and be able to review and certify departments. Then states and the federal government can require that police departments be certified by this agency in order to receive funding. Public outrage doesn&#x27;t seem to be doing much to compel changes in behavior, lets see if the threat of denied funding and re-possessing military surplus hardware will do it (fun fact: the program by which most police departments get surplus military gear is structured so that the department doesn&#x27;t actually own the equipment, and the federal government has the power to rep-possess it if they see fit).<p>3. Establishing federal and state resources to actively audit police conduct, investigate corruption, and prosecute cases. This should actually be expanded to all local governing bodies, because there is plenty of corruption in small local governments that goes unnoticed, but there should be a specific focus on police abuses.