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The odds of this are astronomically low, even in a hypothetical state that is significantly more authoritarian than the one in which we currently live. I, like every member of my family, is a productive and law-abiding citizen. Nobody in my living extended family, so far as I’m aware, has ever been arrested, ever charged with even a minor crime, etc. There just isn’t anything about their or my behavior that would incentivize the government to go through the trouble of railroading them, not anything that could be credibly pinned on them that a government could use to railroad them or me.
Ultimately that’s the calculation that underpins my rejection of slippery slope arguments about harsh justice. It’s the same reason I reject John Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance. I know who I am, I know what my family is like, I am very confident that the risk to me and mine presented by a loosening of prosecutorial standards is extremely low, so it doesn’t worry me. Any knock-on effects created as a result of reducing the number of hoops prosecutors need to jump through are unlikely to redound onto normal citizens, but are likely to redound onto the sort of people who deserve it anyway. In other words, I do trust the justice system to keep the welfare of normal law-abiding people in mind, and to appreciate the natural disincentives against corruption and malice built into the psyche of conscientious and intelligent individuals.
Many commentators of a more libertarian bent are, I’m sure, going to implore me to consider the possibility that the current “woke” regime will use the powers I’m recommending to persecute random white men and bend the rules for guilty blacks. They’ll point to the treatment of J6 defendants, or to the prosecution of right-wing demonstrators and Twitter users in the UK and Europe.
Well, while those things are bad, I still believe the tradeoff is still worth it. I believe that it’s more important to preserve state and law enforcement capability so that people with my politics can seize it and use it for our purposes, than it is to dismantle or hobble state and law enforcement capability to ensure it doesn’t fall into the hands of my enemies.
They might be, for you, depending on where you live, but I suspect they aren't as low as you think. I come from a background much the same as you, but I had a family member get cited for hunting with an illegal shotgun. Game warden jumped the fence onto private property to inspect the firearm (a search with no warrant or probable cause, which ordinarily would be extremely unlawful but game wardens get special dispensation to violate normal Constitutional precepts.) Did my family member have a blocker installed in the tube (the typical way of ensuring compliance)? Yes. Was he hunting with more shells than legally allowed? No. Was the warden able to force an extra shell in because the blocker was slightly too short? Yes.
The amount of "trouble" the warden had to go through to issue a ticket for ~no reason was considerable (and frankly I think he put himself in actual physical danger by jumping people's fences like that, you don't know what's on the other side) but cops and prosecutors are incentivized to "catch" people. Expanding the circle a bit wider to issues I have much less knowledge about, I had a classmate at college whose friend went to prison for rape. Girl later copped to lying about it. Did my classmate's friend get out of prison? Nope (and as far as I know there were no legal consequences for the accuser, either, but I didn't keep up with the story).
Is this all anecdata? Sure. I could pull up real data, but I think you'd claim that it was poisoned by specious anti-cop organizations. And I might not even disagree with you on that. I've even had fairly good experiences with law enforcement types, and I'm not about to go on an unhinged anti-cop rant. I just don't think police and prosecutors are really different from anyone else.
Well, I'm not arguing against harsh justice. I'm fine with executing murderers. I'd be okay if we executed more people (a lot more people). If we can be confident that the right people have been caught for the right crimes, I have no problem with harsh justice. If you want to argue that a single bad prosecutor shouldn't automatically result in release of a prisoner, that's fine – and my understanding is that it doesn't; retrials exist for a reason – but I suspect pragmatically the reason accused criminals so often walk due to prosecutorial misconduct is that past prosecutorial misconduct is an excellent way to introduce doubt in the mind of the jury on retrial. (Perhaps some actual lawyers here can weigh in.)
I don't think that police officers – whose reporting is what prosecutors and judges rely on – are particularly conscientious or intelligent – probably on average less intelligent than college graduates. In my personal experiences speaking to people in the military and law enforcement (and related careers, such as firefighting) I get the impression or "vibe" that what you might call petty corruption is fairly commonplace. Prosecutors I would guess are probably more intelligent than police officers (law school filter) but that does not make them any less corrupt than other intelligent individuals (see the long catalogue of PhDs who keep getting busted for outright fraud despite every reason not to commit outright fraud.)
My point here isn't that cops and prosecutors are bad people. They're probably slightly better than average levels of badness. But they're people people and you can't just trust to their natural disincentives against corruption and malice.
I don't think that's how these sorts of things work. Whose politics is in control of the FBI? No, the answer isn't "woke," the answer is "the FBI." Whose politics is in control of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department? The answer isn't "woke," the answer (apparently) is "literal organized criminal gangs."
What I think people often fail to consider is that all power structures develop their own interests and they pursue them independent of what the people nominally in charge of them believe. And it is in the best interest of society to properly align prosecutors (and cops) to exercise basic competence, to actually catch the right people, and to avoid imprisoning innocent ones.
Cops have to be squeaky clean, so they’re probably much more virtuous than the general population of ‘males with an associates degree’(and most police have some college and all of them have police academy, so it’s probably the rough equivalent) because less virtuous people do things like experiment with drugs that preclude entering the police force.
Broadly agree, but it is worth noting that as far as I can tell past drug experimentation is not a hard bar to entering the police force, and being convicted of crimes is not a guaranteed bar to continuing to serve on a police force.
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