re: #286 Second Amendment Renegation

I have a ton of sympathy for cops on the beat. It’s a sucky job, and they’re at the bottom of a totem pole.

But I grew up mainly in San Francisco, where the police department has veered between incompetent and corrupt for decades, and worked in Oakland, where it is simply a goddamn shambles. I had a co-worker murdered and the police attempt to declare it a suicide.

But the problem is not just with the police force. It is also with prosecutors being a political position, often elected, and often using it as a stepping-stone to further political positions. It is also with the prison unions leadership that don’t want to reduce the number of people in prison, even as some of their rank and file are paying the price for overcrowded prisons and inhumane conditions.

We need to improve the quality of the police, but their agenda is set by prosecutors, chiefs, mayors. Police departments are very much top-down, and to reform them takes more than prosecuting individual cops for misdeeds.