Al Sharpton Endorses Yet Another Terrible Obama Admin Idea: Federalize The Police
Glenn Reynolds in USA Today is all over the unintended consequences that are practically jumping out of their little desks, demanding to be called upon:

The idea behind federal supervision of local police forces is that it will make them more accountable. Instead of a bunch of presumptively racist, violent hicks running things on a local level, we'll see the cool professionalism of the national government in charge.

There are (at least) two problems with this approach. The first is that federal law enforcement, especially in recent years, hasn't exactly been a haven of cool professionalism. The second is that no law enforcement agency is very good at policing itself, meaning that a national police force is likely to be less accountable, not more.

...To believe that a federalized approach to policing would be an improvement over the current system, you'd have to ignore an awful lot of misbehavior by federal law enforcement lately. There's the scandal with the Secret Service and hookers just before Obama's trip to Colombia. There's the entirely separate scandal with the Drug Enforcement Agency and hookers (hookers paid for by Colombia drug lords, no less).

The list goes on. And on. My favorite bit from his piece is in the list of FBI misconduct and how their lab was allowed to convict people based on bogus forensic evidence (and then not admit the problem for years, letting many potentially innocent people rot in jail).

In one case, a man, Santae Tribble, spent 28 years in prison after FBI analysts said that a single hair found at a crime scene was one of his, when in fact it came from a dog.

And then, why federalizing police is terrible for civil liberties and more:

The third problem with unifying police authority under a national umbrella is that it's much more prone to political abuse by the party in power. As we've seen with the IRS -- which, interestingly, shows little interest in frequent White House visitor Al Sharpton's unpaid taxes -- federal bureaucrats are all too willing to serve the interests of their political masters even when doing so violates the law. Putting most law enforcement in the hands of diverse state and local authorities helps limit the potential for abuse. Putting everything under federal control, on the other hand, magnifies it.

Instead, if we're really serious about increasing law enforcement accountability, we should end civil service protections for federal employees, while outlawing public employee unions. We should also abolish governmental immunity for federal, state, and local employees, forcing them to face civil lawsuits for illegal behavior, just as the rest of us must do.

In other words, the answers here are decentralization and accountability -- a practice that Al Sharpton seems virulently allergic to.