“And what, exactly, is your personal experience with a cop who violated your lawful liberties?”
It’s about accountability. When a public body messes up, it must be accountable to the public through the ballot box. The unaccountable bureaucracy is one of the primary tools of a dictatorship.
Police are an armed bureaucracy not accountable to the people. A police chief cannot be voted out of office. That’s why I’m a strong backer of the elected sheriff. An elected sheriff can be petitioned by the people and voted out of office if need be. An unaccountable police chief can’t be voted out. Unaccountability can too often lead to mounting corruption.
An elected sheriff is the proper and necessary form of police power for a free people.
The sheriff in my county is a constitutionalist and a strong backer of the 2nd. He sends his deputies out on stake-outs and nabs bad guys. He doesn’t have a ninja-turtle swat team that busts down doors at O dark-thirty in the morning. He’s also good at nabbing crooked embezzlers in government through detective work by his crack accounting team. We bought him a WWII landing craft should the bridge to the peninsula fall down and citizens are cut off from the mainland.
He’s a good guy.
But any department is susceptible to corruption or negligent administration: the rot starts at the top. No argument from me.