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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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If you live in a society of laws, you are already not optimizing for preventing victimization. Our loss function is not the sum of innocent police victims and crime victims. If we gave police the powers to kill on sight anyone who they were reasonably sure was a reasonably bad person, it could well be that the number of crime victims saved would be higher than the number of innocents summarily executed by police. But such police states tend to devolve into dictatorships in pretty short order, because there is little in the way of safeguards. This frequently leads to a much higher loss of life down the road.

While it is not commonly admitted, I will grant you that the price we pay for living in a non-totalitarian society where laws impose restrictions on the state is paid (among other things) in victims to crimes which would technically be preventable if we tapped every device and abolished due process.

If we accept that this is the way society sets its priorities, then sacrificing a few more future crime victims to safeguard due process against prosecutorial misconduct just seems more of the same.

Of course, we can debate the exact boundaries for throwing a court case out. Fucking your co-council is generally not the sort of misconduct which sees the defendant walk free, but tampering with witnesses or evidence would be different.

Generally, there are some professions in society where unprofessional conduct can result in innocents losing their lives. We rely on physicians, truck drivers, electricians and so on to do their job reasonably well. The only difference with police and prosecutors is that society would technically be in a position to prevent loss of life due to their fuck-ups after it becomes apparent. But again, this is a price consistent with the priorities of a society of laws.