Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit and professor of law, has
been watching police militarization for years. In his latest
USA Today column, he outlines three reforms that he says
would make cops more accountable:
First, we should abolish police unions. All
public-employee unions are suspect, given that they’re basically
organizations to take more money from taxpayers while minimizing
accountability, but this is even more troubling where the employees
in question carry guns.Second, we should equip all patrol officers with
body cameras that record everything that they do. This actually
benefits both officers and the citizenry: When San Bernardino
adopted them, it found significant
drops both in complaints against the police and in police
use of force. In fact, though calls for body cameras initially came
from police-reform proponents, now many police support them
too.Third, we need to revisit the idea of “qualified
immunity.” Right now, police officers enjoy immunity from
lawsuits so long as they act in “good
faith,” and courts stretch the notion of good faith pretty far.
This change from the common law — where police weren’t immune to
lawsuits — was not the product of legislation and debate, but
of judicial
activism: There’s nothing about it in the Constitution; judges
just thought it was a good idea.
Reynolds is no bleeding heart but the reforms he sketches are
good ideas, I think. And there’s this:
I sometimes think the turning point [toward increased use of
SWAT teams and other paramilitary trappings] was marked by the old
cop show Hill Street
Blues.Each episode opened with a daily briefing before the
officers went out on patrol. In the early seasons, Sergeant Phil
Esterhaus concluded every briefing with “Let’s be careful out
there.” In the later episodes, his replacement, Sergeant Stan
Jablonski, replaced that with “Let’s do it to them
before they do it to us.” The latter attitude is appropriate
for a war zone, but not for a civilized society.
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