Police Reform from D.C.
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With the recent events, these last several weeks and protests action would of course be expected from the lawmakers. Surprise surprise, D.C. didn’t fail. The Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians have all written bills on policing in the last few weeks to get at least one of them passed. Of these three bills though the Libertarian bill submitted by Rep. Justin Amash is by far the one we like the most here at CBL. It is only 4 pages long and simply gets rid of “qualified immunity”, the legislation that tries to protect officers from their actions while on the job. The other two bills though are just a mess and large overreach of federal power into policing in our neighborhoods. It is with these bills that we find a lot of issues.
There are differences between the Republican and Democrats’ bills. Mostly it is that the Democrats’ bill does have actual police reform in it while the bill of the Republicans doesn’t. We won’t get much into the details about either of the differences but much more about how they are similar. Both of these bills do not miss a beat, if you will, with “answering” the call and creating new federal organizations that will in turn create more police. That is one of the issues we have with both of those bills. Creating more police to “police the police” just sounds counterproductive. If police and policing are the issue how does creating more of either fix it?
Finally, we have an issue with the idea that D.C. and the federal government should be involved with the policing in our home towns, our neighborhoods, and our children’s schools. It is troubling to see this, to be honest. How people could just want a federal official, thousands of miles away for some people, making policing decisions for a place they have never heard of or been to. Imagine if you were put in a similar situation. You are left to make decisions for a town on the other side of the United States. A place you have never heard of or even be able to find on a map. You don’t know the culture of the people there, the social-economic situation, and even what football team they cheer for. Yet, you not only have the power to making policing decisions there but are expected to. That’s not a job anyone would want as it makes no sense and clearly too much power for anyone to have. All that said though and we see millions of people wanting this to be the solution to their problems, not only in policing but other sectors of their lives as well.
This is a problem with our society today in general. The desire, for those elected officials to handle problems in our backyards. What we seek generally as liberty-minded people is less government control over our lives and a more decentralized government in general. It is the goal to be less governed, especially more so by those that don’t know or care about us. No committee in D.C. is going to fix policing in your home town. The policing issues in the United States can’t just be voted or reformed away.
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Keep that coffee warm for us
LWS
