Why can’t civilians be brought in to manage cops, especially at a time when things have gone so spectacularly wrong?
I’ve been hearing horror stories about Toronto police for as long as I’ve lived in Canada but the repeated call for “civilian” oversight is confusing. The cops are civilians. That’s foundational to the definition of a police force in this country, isn’t it? Rein them in, disband them, do something about the problem — but the idea that they aren’t themselves civilians seems like false consciousness straight out of the mind of a misguided cop.
The paragraph above discusses this:
It is not a commandment from heaven that all police forces need to be treated like the military, where one rises through the ranks and only uniformed officers can manage one another. Few other institutions in our society operate in this way. This is what creates the “thin blue line” culture where officers do whatever they can to protect each other, even at the cost of the public’s well-being.
