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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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The analogy would be medical malpractice.

Medical malpractice is the area of civil law dealing with incompetence. Outside the medical context, culpable incompetence leading to the death of an innocent is the crime of manslaughter. Medics are de facto but not de jure immune to criminal prosecution for manslaughter, even if they fall so far below the standard of care that they might as well just be cutting people up at random. We do prosecute medics for murder where malicious intent is proved (the famous cases in the UK are Harold Shipman and Lucy Letby, and the controversy around the Letby case demonstrates how hard it is to draw the line between sufficiently severe incompetence and malice). The primary control on culpable incompetence in medics is professional discipline, up to and including withdrawing licenses to practice. When a junior doctor and a nurse were prosecuted for incompetence under conditions of overwork and inadequate supervision, the UK medical profession had a collective freakout that required the Health Secretary to promise never again.

One of the problems with US policing is that there is no licensing regime for cops, and qualified immunity and sovereign immunity are sufficiently broad that civil law is not an effective remedy for culpable incompetence by police. There is a huge and highly technical body of police malpractice law, but it only protects guilty criminals who can get off (due to the exclusionary rule) if the police made a legal mistake while building the case - thus giving the worst of both worlds, with no remedy for genuinely innocent victims and all the costs of overlawyering. So criminal prosecution of rogue cops is the only stick the system has, and it is too big a stick for the required detail work. Defensive policing is just as harmful as defensive medicine, and people (quite properly) go ultra-defensive in the face of possible jail time. (See also the unintended consequences of abortion bans with doctors preferring to let pregnant women die rather than risk relying on the medical-necessity exception - this issue can be resolved with sufficiently clear published guidance and Texas has done so, but badly-governed red states haven't bothered.)

(No, it does not suffice to go after the top guy, because then you end up in situations where the top guy kills himself in some bunkers and all his goons were blameless people merely following orders.)

If this is the covert Godwin's law violation it looks like, then letting the vast majority of the goons off worked out pretty well in the end that time. The worst thing you can do is to prosecute the goons while letting the boss hide behind plausible deniability - that destroys non-criminal organisations.