worry, on 04 April 2018 - 07:25 AM, said:
That's pretty interesting. The pursuit of justice is an ongoing process and perfection isn't ever really possible. But progress requires trying, which happens piecemeal here.
I don't know how it sounds to other countries that we handle so much of these big questions state-by-state. I live in the state where Stephon Clark was killed, California, which actually isn't super progressive on this issue at the moment -- but it is right now considering a change in policy that would shift the use of force laws to require an "only when necessary" threshold for lethal force, rather than the current standard of "when reasonable". If both sound nebulous at first glance, I'm with you, but what it means is that instead of in-the-moment-am-I-scared? reasoning -- which is literally all it takes to justify lethal force in most states -- officers must exhaust all other reasonable options first. Also, that what they do leading up to a lethal force incident will be taken into account (in terms of escalation/de-escalation, etc.). If you think it's crazy that's not already the standard, I'm with you there too.
Yeah, that should literally be the law already.
As someone who has lived in a small country with mainly national level laws, and a medium size country (well, geographically fucking gigantic, population on the small end) that has state laws, albeit the majority of things like this are still legislated at a national level.... States are fucking stupid, the variations in laws for common things between states make life needlessly complex (e.g. Tenancy laws, sale of property laws, driving laws) and to have variations in the practice and implementation of law enforcement - a fundamental constant of a nation - is actually actively working against the goal of a functional society.
Everything I've seen has led me to believe that states are a poor unit of government. Councils and districts should be the next smallest step after a national government and their powers for legislation should be limited to that domain - rates, parking, littering, noise control, public transport (save where the size of the project is significant or the city has trouble running services properly). In other words, administrative functions and maintenance functions for the day to day running of the city/town/region, freeing the national government to focus on major infrastructure, legislation, and long term planning and budgeting.
Obviously immediate oversight of police operations and the like would be at a regional or city level but the legislation and codes of practice would be at the national level as would ultimate oversight and responsibility.
The only purpose I see for state governments is to coordinate larger geographical groups of city councils etc, by which I mean overseeing the implementation of national policies in a uniform manner (because I appreciate 300 million or so people over an area the size of America probably requires some coordination at a higher level than your average council) but again, this shouldn't be of the legislation creation or interpretation variety.
America's hard-on for hating federal government is almost as weird as the hard-on for guns (though I appreciate they're very closely tied together) but if you have no interest in acting like a coherent nation then why be one? And seeing as the individual states can't really be self-sufficient (and wouldn't want to be, no matter what the extremist states' rights folks might like to fantasise about) then they need to actually unify and start behaving like a single nation.
It's utterly perplexing from where I'm sitting (and from here it mostly looks like a misguided, state-level version of nationalism coupled with an irrational level of fear of an unlikely to occur tyranny). And before anyone points out the states that are resisting Trump I'd just like to turn your attention to all the states that have been behaving like Trump for the past decade or two. Not really a net positive at this stage.
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