Agreed. Cases this knowingly frivolous, for example, should be treated as the criminal kidnapping or false imprisonment it would be if any other citizen perpetrated it.
Changing the system means removing the potential for abuse of power, not punishing abuse of power after the fact.
The point of such a thing is to deter similar conduct in the future.
The fact that this isn't a crime, and that qualified immunity typically means they can't even be held responsible civily, is part of what encourages police to commit misconduct like this.
The only folks punished here were the local taxpayers footing the bill.
The core problem here is that the system allowed an innocent person to stay in jail. That needs to be fixed on a system level, not by trying to punish people after the fact for bad outcomes.
No; the system got the innocent person out of jail and a hefty settlement for their trouble. The system is now, unfortunately, allowing the guilty parties to stay employed as cops after performing a kidnapping.
> That needs to be fixed on a system level, not by trying to punish people after the fact for bad outcomes.
An accidental positive on a drug test is a bad outcome.
Locking someone up for more than a month because they posted a photo of the President and a quote he actually said is a crime.
At a certain point, punishing abuse of power after the fact is the only way to discourage the potential abuse of power. Like there is nothing that actually stops you or me from going and kidnapping someone. And that same dynamic applies to someone who happens to also be a sheriff who controls a jail due to his employment. There is no magic wand for the system to wave that makes it so that the individuals employed by that system can't simply break the law.
Personal civil liability and firing can also help.
I do agree with you in general that we should aim to split system functions between multiple people. But this merely raises the bar, it doesn't make corrupt actions impossible. Which means we should be focusing on both avenues of reform, rather than emphasizing one to downplay another. Especially as when you do this, the entrenched system seems to takes advantage of the downplaying while resisting the solution being emphasized.
