> qualified immunity

Qualified immunity gets thrown around a lot, but it's not iron clad. Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable.

The real reason cops face no accountability is 2 fold.

1. Prosecutors refuse to prosecute cops because they need a working relationship with the department.

2. Police unions make any sort of accountability nearly impossible to enforce as they stop all tracking of misdeeds. (As you touch on).

"Defund the police" was an unpopular slogan but it's what we should actually do. We should stop paying this criminal organization and instead do a different public policing structure. Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery. As it currently stands, police departments are where the government goes to violate civil rights.

Qualified immunity concerns civil liability. Prosecution is about criminal liability.

Civil liability is helpful because tax payers do care about $$$ (if judgements/settlements are starting to eat major part of budget the people will start to care on how to lower those costs) and victims are not limited by what prosecutors are ready to do. The QI is especially problematic because it has essentially become "did someone prosecute cops about this before" because that's effectively the only way to establish precedence that allows you to get across the QI-line in future for sufficiently similar conduct. And like you said, prosecutors are often unwilling to prosecute cops.

Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation

IANAL, but that's not quite my understanding... The victim has to prove that the police violated a clearly established right via a previous case, which puts many cases in a sort of chicken-egg situation. "We've never found a cop guilty of peeping on Flock, thus we can't find this cop guilty." (guilty in the civil sense, QI doesn't apply to criminal charges)

> Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable.

[edit: I didn't correctly read the comment I was replying to, which was talking about prosecutions, not civil suits. But I do believe that qualified immunity is still largely an issue with Flock, so I'm not retracting the comment entirely.]

So long as there is already an established legal precedent for the rather specific circumstances at stake, then yes, that's true. But that has to be demonstrated in pre-trial motions because the default is qualified immunity is grounds for dismissal of the case prior to any judgement on the facts absent such a clear cut applicability of precedence. Sure, you could appeal the dismissals... but that's quite a barrier and burden just to get to having a case heard let alone then having to try the case in question.

Consider this quote from the 9th District Court of Appeals' opinion on a qualified immunity appeal:

"The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers were entitled to qualified immunity. The panel reasoned that although the decision in Brewster v. Beck, 859 F.3d 1194 (9th Cir. 2017) was instructive on the question of whether the theft of property covered by the terms of a search warrant, and seized pursuant to the warrant, violates the Fourth Amendment, Brewster’s facts varied in legally significant ways from those in this case. Moreover, the panel noted that the City Officers seized Appellants’ property in 2013, prior to the Brewster decision in 2017. The panel held that although the City Officers ought to have recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong, they did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The panel further held that the Fourth Circuit’s unpublished decision in Mom’s Inc. v. Willman, 109 F. App’x 629, 636– 37 (4th Cir. 2004)—the only case law that the time of the incident holding that the theft of property pursuant to a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment—did not put the “constitutional question beyond debate.”"

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/04/1...

Given that Flock cameras and the associated search technologies raise novel legal circumstances, qualified immunity is a real concern here.

> Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery.

In Belgium, this was the system until 2001. The system was overhauled to the regular single police force after the largest protests in the country's history.

What goes wrong is that these 2 are essentially in competition, and ended up actively obstructing each other.

> We should stop paying this criminal organization

Arguably much of the issue is that it's not a singular organization. It's 18,000 separate law-enforcement organizations. The police in the rest of the wealthy Anglosphere have their own issues, but American policing seems uniquely bad in comparison to them, before even getting on to lethal force.