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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 7/19/16

How to Fix the Broken Relationship Between the People and the Police

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Ted Rall
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If the police were really here to help us, if they were here to protect us, the policeman who tells you about your broken taillight wouldn't write you a ticket. He certainly wouldn't use that traffic stop as an excuse to search your vehicle for drugs or other contraband, much less steal it through "asset forfeiture." He would tell you about the problem so that you could fix it. Period.

For the vast majority of Americans, the typical interaction with law-enforcement -- indeed, their typical interaction with their government -- is a police officer issuing them a parking or a traffic ticket. The role of government shakedown thug/municipal revenue enhancement is incompatible with the role of a guardian. A guardian wants you to drive safely, not to sit cleverly behind a tree at the bottom of a steep hill where the last speed limit sign was hard to see in order to extract a few hundred bucks from your wallet. Ask a kid who wants to be a police officer one day whether she wants to catch bad guys or write tickets. You know the answer.

At bare minimum, municipalities should create separate agencies for parking and traffic enforcement. It would be better, of course, if traffic safety had nothing to do with fines. Raise taxes on the rich if you want to replace the billions of dollars collected annually from tickets.

Third, we need a federal agency to appoint independent federal prosecutors to replace the current system of local district attorneys.

When the police are charged with wrongdoing against civilians, the odds are that they will get away with it. In fact, the odds are that they will never face an indictment. In 2015, 85% of police shootings were handled by DAs who work closely with the officer's own department.

Which isn't surprising considering the fact that the DA who decides whether or not charges get filed has to have a high conviction rate in order to get reelected or reappointed, which requires him or her to have a friendly relationship with law-enforcement. It's a ridiculously brazen conflict of interest that ought to have been done away with a long time ago.

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Ted Rall, a political cartoonist, is the author of "The Anti-American Manifesto." He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1963, raised in Kettering, Ohio and graduated from Fairmont West High School in 1981. His first cartoons were published (more...)
 

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