Pretty much every professional field EXCEPT police have clear, rigorous, transparent consequences for unethical behavior, negligence and malpractice.

The idea that we can "disbar" lawyers but not police is absolute foolishness.

All the factors that make disbarment a necessary tool for lawyers apply to cops... except that cops don't need to be qualified in the first place.
It is a rank absurdity of the criminal justice system that one needs to be educated and certified with a degree in order to argue on behalf of someone's life in court, but to have no qualifications necessary to detain, assault, or prematurely end that same life.
There are countless circumstances in which a lawyer's unethical behavior will result in them not only losing their job but never being able to practice it again.

But corrupt and murderous cops can be rehired indefinitely.
A lawyer's entire career can be ended forever if they were found to have knowingly put someone on a stand to lie.

Police officers however are allowed to lie in court on the stand under oath.

So much that lawyers aren't penalized for putting cops on the stand to lie.
Everyone knows that cops lie under oath. Both prosecutors and judges know this, but they will still pretend that they don't.

Because if you start holding cops accountable, the whole system falls apart.
And this is why there is never traction on cracking down on cops.

If you impugn a cop's reliability, then that affects all the cases that rely on their testimony.

So better to just look the other way, lest hundreds of cases be upended.
In the same way that police hold city governments hostage, threatening all sorts of things if their funding is cut or reforms imposed, so do they hold the criminal justice system hostage, but instead of through threats, through the natural instability that follows outing liars.
The court system is so overloaded by the demands of our carceral society that they don't even have the time or resources to try 90% of cases in the first case.

MUCH less RETRYING them because cops were found to be liars.
So the answer is to just let cops lie.

And omit critical information from reports

And falsify reports

And lie about firsthand eyewitness testimony

And invent convenient facts

And make false IDs

And everyone just moves forward because the machine must churn.
Nobody will reign in cops because nobody will take the responsibility for managing the ensuing chaos.

Because the whole system WILL come crashing down without overhaul.

There isn't the will to change the system so nobody will remove the radioactive Jenga brick.
It's the part that even opponents of police frequently don't see.

They are looking to change a brick.

Those in power are protecting the structure built atop that brick.

Because they know the mortar holding everything together is a joke.
Many within the system are aware of the problems in the system and desperately want them gone, but in the absence of a scaffold to hold everything up, they will side with the system over chaos.

The alternative structure needs to exist first.

And that's the problem.

More from Law

We are live tweeting from the preliminary hearing of the Employment Tribunal case in which #AllisonBailey is suing Stonewall and Garden Court chambers.


The judge has ruled that for this hearing only, the names should remain redacted.

It is a Rule 50 Order. These particular individuals are members of Stonewall’s Trans Advisory Group and their names may well be known elsewhere. What is relevant is the messages from the group to Garden Court.

The judge states she would not make the same decision at the full hearing. This is only for the preliminary hearing.

Having dealt with the anonymity issue we now move to the main submissions in the case.
This is what he wants to do.

No matter how this trial plays out, the US will remain divided between those who choose truth, Democracy, and rule of law and the millions who reject these things.

1/


The question is how to move forward.

My mantra is that there are no magic bullets and these people will always be with us.

Except for state legislatures, they have less power now than they have for a while.

2/

The only real and lasting solutions are political ones. Get Democrats into local offices. Get people who want democracy to survive to the polls at every election, at every level.

It’s a constant battle.

3/

Maybe I should tell you all about Thurgood Marshall’s life to illustrate how hard the task is and how there will be backlash after each step of progress.

4/

Precisely. That's why Thurgood Marshall's life came to mind.

We are still riding the backlash that started after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

That's why I keep saying there are no easy
I was right. "Lawyer" starts out with name-calling and an insistence that trial is "unconstitutional". He's saying Trump's 1/6 speech was rather bland, and pretending that was the only thing the House managers talked about, and the managers were "slanderous."

Bilious bullshit.


"Lawyer" is arguing that since there were objections raised by Democrats to some of the vote counts in 2016, that means Trump didn't engage in sedition.

I'm not sure how that logic works.

Now they're running a Trump campaign commercial.

A bunch of whataboutism, contrasting patriotic music behind Trump's racist dogwhistles about "law and order" against Democrats making firey speeches with dark music.

He went to the moronic Gym Jordan argument that Trump couldn't have instigated insurrection if the violence was gonna happen anyway (without acknowledging Trump had been encouraging and building up to that violence for close to a year).

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