Policing the Police Act of 2014 (Redraft passed)

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One initial point I'd like to make is to point that out there are elected police commissioners in England and Wales, and they are widely regarded as a joke, and are basically useless. I don;t think that's a model we should be copying.

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Just going through section 4 I'll list a few of my concerns

1. I'm very concerned about the privacy implications of this, namely the fact that these videos would be available online for anyone to access. They should, in my opinion, be inaccessible unless needed for an investigation.
2. This is a good section, but the other military equipment may be too restrictive. For example I don't see why the police should be unable to buy surplus night vision goggles or stuff like that.
3. This could very easily be abused.
4. I'm fine with this as an aspiration, but we shouldn't be too restrictive. In some cases, like a cartel controlling an area the best option is for police officers with no ties to the area, so they're less easy to blackmail or control. Your average police officer should be local though.
5.I largely agree with this, with the proviso that hate groups is defined centrally and pretty narrowly. If we banned everyone with in some way questionable opinions or allegiances pretty much no one would qualify.
6. Sometimes unmarked cars are necessary for operations. Police officers should never be pretending to be acting under orders when they're not though, because that's a clear abuse of power.
7. I'm OK with this
8. I feel like this is a case by case situation. I'm fine with the police using this stuff to catch perverts on the internet or things like that.
9. I agree in principle with this section, but we need to be very very careful to avoid a paedophile with a clear file turning up as a teacher or anything like that.
10. Again, I'm fine with implementing terrorist cells or the KKK. This should be a case by case thing

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Yeah. Police unions, like doctors unions do need to be treated differently because of the importance of the job they do, but that's no reason for them not to have one.

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For the reasons mentioned earlier I can't see elected police commissioners ever being a good idea. People simply don't care about the position enough to vote, and even if they did you'd get police commissioners tailored to their area, so lots more Joe Arpaio's. But I do think that the police oversight board should be independent of the police, and thus close relations of officers should be banned.

Again though, I'm struggling to see why entrapment is bad in all circumstances. What about the example of using it to catch online predators?

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Again though, I'm struggling to see why entrapment is bad in all circumstances. What about the example of using it to catch online predators?

Why don't we just allow mobs to lynch them if we're going to start pulling on heartstrings to justify an abhorrent tactic by mentioning an abhorrent crime?

I wasn't meaning to go all Why won't someone think of the children, it's just that is an area where this tactic is used.

I guess this is the difference. I don't think it's necessarily an abhorrent tactic. There's a difference between a police officer harassing a particular person into committing a crime and just throwing down some bait. Posting on a paedophilia board to lure them out into the open, or making clear to potential terrorists that they can pick up some bombs at a certain point doesn't seem to be morally wrong to me.

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Personally I like the conditions used to decide whether entrapment is legal in Britain, and I would support them being introduced here:

Whether the police acted in good faith;
Whether the police had good reason to suspect the accused of criminal activities;
Whether the police suspected that crime was particularly prevalent in the area in which the investigation took place (Williams v. DPP);
Whether pro-active investigatory techniques were necessary because of the secrecy and difficulty of detection of the criminal activity in question;
The defendant's circumstances and vulnerability; and
The nature of the offence.

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This is a very difficult area. Obviously someone in the KKK should never be allowed to join the police, but if we ban everybody with questionable opinions then almost no one would be left to actually join. Even more scarily if we leave this decision up to local bodies we can have a conservative region banning left wingers and left wing regions doing the opposite.

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Looking through the constitution, I suppose the argument you'd want to use is this one:

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But I'm not sure if that would hold water

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I'm looking forward to seeing what Blair proposes

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I should in principle state first that I support a lot of what Blair's amendment proposes, with a few reservations about some of the wording and the commissions.

That said, I think that everything apart from 1 and 3A is unconstitional, and, upon consultation with the AG, he agrees.

As the court affirmed in Roe vs Zuwo, the senate only has the powers explicitly given to it in the constitution, and no more. Importantly the only power listed in the constituion that can even be slighlty relevant is this one:

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Now, this is vague enough that you could make such an argument, and it does seem to imply the senate has power to legislate certain offences (such as perhaps, a suitably defined entrapment) there is a difference between matters of justice and the police procedure. We can legilate against murder but not the colour of the polices uniform, to take an extreme example.

The other argument the AG makes, which I find convincing, is based on this section of the constitution:

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This is problematic because police matters in the US, and thus by derivation in atlasia, are state/regional matters. What that means is even if we are allowed by the Justice power to do this, we can not do it to the all important local police forces because we can't force the regions to do something

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This is our current budget, with the relevant section being here:

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So we can certainly do something about the FBI, but we don't seem to actually fund local police. Unless, of course, that's what criminal justice asistance means, but while I don't actually know what that does mean, I don't think it's that. Even if it is though, that's a tiny sum, my own region spends 25 billion on Public Safety, for example.

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Of course holding that real life events do happen in atlasia runs into difficulties for political events, seeing as we have been on a completely different track for 10 years now. It's certainly a very knotty issue. That said, while I'm agnostic about whether an event like Baltimore could happen in Baltimore, it's impossible that we have reformed humanity, of which police officers are a subset, to be able to be a law unto themselves.

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Basically I'm inclined to agree with Hagrid that policing is often not the sort of thing that can be easily understood by members of the public, but on the other hand just leaving enforcement to the police, as we've seen in places like Staten Island and Ferguson, doesn't work either. I think by placing 2, but nowhere close to a majority in the PIC we have the benefit of their understanding of police work, but without the danger of them closing ranks on their own.

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