How can it be fixed top-down when it’s all cops?

The serious answer is that you need to have outside control over the process. Cops need to be accountable to someone other than themselves. Civilian review boards are a good first step, but you need to make sure that the civilian review boards have real teeth, and that they don’t get captured by the police (e.g., the people on the review board all being family members of cops). Note that police unions and officers have long opposed civilian oversight boards, because that removes part of their power.

You also need to ensure that prosecution is always handled by an independent agency. A local DA will need to continue to work with police, so it’s against their interest–and hopefully also in the public interest–to create a hostile environment where the police think that the DA is ‘against’ them.

You also need a way to limit the power of the police union. A police union does serve a real purpose, in that it should insulate cops from acting as directly political agents. OTOH, it also protects the worst cops out there, and makes it nearly impossible to quickly get rid of someone that’s clearly unfit for public service of any kind. I don’t know how to do the latter without also undercutting protections against the former.

The fundamental reason that people say ACAB is because the people that are trying to do good things still enable the shitty ones. That is, they fail to act when they see shitty cops; the ‘good’ cops don’t police the bad cops, and that makes them, in turn, bad cops themselves, because it allows bad behavior to be normalized. The relatively few cops that won’t go along to get along quickly find themselves left high and dry; the get the worst duties, don’t get backup in a timely manner when they need it, don’t get promoted or end up being demoted, rack up a long list of bullshit infraction of departmental rules, and so on, until they get forced out.

People talk about reforming the system from within, but it’s a top-down problem, and the police unions are either directly involved or, at the absolute minimum, are complicit by working to protect cops that the union knows are corrupt.

I mean, yes, but also no.

For that to really work, you need a labor surplus, i.e., more workers than jobs. As long as there are more jobs than workers, workers are incentivized to hop jobs to get better pay, perks, and working conditions. It’s in the best interest of the capital-owning class to keep a certain level of the population unemployed so that there are always more workers than jobs; that allows them to pocket more of the value that the workers are adding, because the workers have less leverage to negotiate better wages.

But when you suddenly lost 5% of your workforce, and they’re jobs that are physically demanding (and in the case of construction, are a genuinely skilled trade), then capital-owning class doesn’t have the leverage over workers. That’s especially true when the capitalist can’t easily move operations to an area with cheap labor; if you’re a contractor, you’re going to operate where there’s demand for construction, not where there’s cheap labor. An e.g. contractor can’t just not build; they lose money by sitting on land, or on equipment that isn’t being capitalized.

Let me just point out that losing 5% of the workforce like that will make inflation skyrocket, because we’ll have to increase wages on a lot of jobs done for shit pay by undocumented migrants. (Should those jobs pay well now? Of course. But they don’t.) You think houses are expensive now? Just wait until construction grinds to a standstill because there’s no laborers available. Groceries cost too much? Guess who is working in those fields?

Again: we should be paying those people fair wages now. But without significantly raising those wages, which will also raise the cost of the goods they currently produce, you aren’t going to get many citizens to do the jobs.

Well, yeah, actually I can, because of the history surrounding that text, and what it meant when it was written.

The part you are conveniently ignoring is the body of the constitution prior to the bill of rights that gives congress the power to raise an army, and to equip that army. If congress already has the power to raise an army/militia and provide arms for them, then why would you need an amendment saying that congress can’t pass laws to prevent itself from arming an army? (For your reference that is Article 1, Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power … To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years …To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions … To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress”

Moreover, when you look at the bill of rights, all of the rights are pertaining to individual people (or people and states, in the case of 10A). It’s pretty clear that the freedom of the press isn’t a collective right, but one that is an individual right.

Beyond that, you need to understand what they meant by militia; the militia was every able-bodied male below about 50 (not sure on the exact age cutoffs); in many cases they were legally obligated to provide their own arms (despite the constitution saying that the gov’t could pay for them), those arms were required to be militarily useful, and they were required to train both on their own and with other members of the militia.

So, let me see if I’ve got this right.

Maryland wants to have a privately-enforced tax on the exercise of a constitutional right. Do I have that more or less correct? Perhaps you could also have a requirement that all religious congregations or any kind have a $1B policy in case there is sexual misconduct by a member of the congregation?

First: It’s a site dedicated to electric vehicle promotion. So it might be a tiny bit biased.

Second: Their criteria was for their claim was, “13 percent of the cases with starting difficulties are electric cars”. Well, golly gosh gee, how surprising that an electric car would be easier to start in cold weather, since as long as you have any juice left in your battery, it’s gonna go. You don’t have problems like diesel fuel gelling, or oil turning into molasses. (If it gets cold enough, your battery might freeze solid, and then you have real problems.)

Finally: “[…] electric vehicles are involved in roughly 21% of all its cases so far in 2024” Given that Norway is roughly 25% electric vehicles–they don’t give the exact percentage in the article–that’s… Pretty much in line with overall percentages. It might even be high, given that EVs are more likely to be new than ICE vehicles.

If we’re going to do cars–and I don’t think that there’s a reasonable alternative that can be brought to bear in a reasonable time–then I’m all for electric. But this isn’t a great way to promote them.