Edit: Guess the comment got deleted while I wrote this.
Did you read that twitter thread I posted? You should. The answer is shit because the reality is shit. I’m sorry if it doesn’t lend itself to simple solutions.
One of the fundamental problems is that the definition of “police misconduct” is determined by courts. Who have declared that, for instance, the cops stealing your $10,000 coin collection while searching your house isn’t “established” as a crime. So you can pass all the legislation you want targeting police misconduct and take the violating cops to court, but when the courts say, “Under qualified immunity, cops can murder someone for fun,” and the cop goes back to work, you haven’t accomplished anything. The fact of the matter is, during the Obama administration, there actually was a concerted effort, in most states, to pass laws about use of force in policing. Yet here we are. That’s not to say that legislation isn’t important - it’s just not going to solve the problem by itself. (Especially if your local police force is full of white supremacists who shield each other.)
Also the idea that states have control over law enforcement is… not how things work. They may set standards of training, but in some states even that has been largely ceded to local agencies. (Which is why the quality of local, rural forces is often… disturbingly lacking.) We’ve got over 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country. They’re incredibly diverse in how they operate. Some states retain archaic rules that allow just about anyone, with little to no oversight or training, to start their own semi-private police forces, for example.
