After You've Made Someone Your Master Can You Still Control Them? Gullible Reformers in Cleveland Push for an Oversight Panel w/the Power to Fire Bad Cops [while good cops remain uncontrollable]

Did we delegate our power to our servants, to make them our masters? If a “public servant," such as a police officer, is uncontrollable, unaccountable, can’t be hired or fired by you, has irresponsible power over you and provides a compulsory “service” then he is actually your Master. Lysander Spooner, explained “It is of no importance that I appointed him, and put all power in his hands. If I made him uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me, he is no longer my servant, agent, attorney, or representative. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over my property, I gave him the property. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over myself, I made him my master, and gave myself to him as a slave. And it is of no importance whether I called him master or servant, agent or owner.

From [HERE] There was a time when Brenda Bickerstaff believed the Justice Department could fix this city's police department.

When Bickerstaff's brother was shot and killed by police in January 2002, the Cleveland Division of Police was already under federal investigation, and officials had interviewed her as part of the probe. She remembers thinking she had found the people who were going to help her family get justice.

But 20 years and two federal probes later, Bickerstaff thinks it's time for residents to take the lead in transforming the only police department in the nation that has entered into federal oversight twice.

She is now part of a group of Black women pushing a reform effort that includes, among other things, a November ballot initiative for a civilian oversight panel that would have the authority to fire problem officers.

“We have to understand the Department of Justice is not our savior,” Bickerstaff said. “The people of Cleveland have to take charge of this reform. If we want this reform to work, if we want to have the relationship that the police and the community is supposed to have with one another, we have to take charge of it.”

Police shootings continue daily, despite a pandemic, protests and pushes for reform

While cities nationwide have struggled with police killings, Cleveland’s record is particularly stark. Since 2000, 48 people have been killed by Cleveland police officers. In August 2000, the Justice Department launched an investigation of the department and examined a number of shootings and other police use-of-force cases from 1998 to 2000.

The probe, which found patterns of spotty investigations of police use-of-force cases and officers unnecessarily escalating violent situations, ended with the city entering into a voluntary agreement to revise its use-of-force policy, expand training, and commit to a more thorough review process for police shootings.

That agreement ended in March 2005. In September of that year, 15-year-old Brandon McCloud was shot 10 times in the bedroom of his home by detectives searching for evidence in the armed robbery of a pizza deliveryman. Police said that McCloud came at them with a knife. His death, and the deaths of four others between March of 2004 and December of 2005, led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, who eventually determined that all the shootings were justified. [MORE]