The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation.
It applies to all parts of government. Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally.
The way to fix policing isn't by making the rest of government worse. Reform unions for employees of the people. Create independent civilian oversight boards with the teeth to suspend and terminate. Invest more in mental health and drug rehabilitation services. Invest in educational resources to teach communities how to deal with law enforcement.
Edit to add: People are confusing civil liability with criminal liability. If you are found guilty of a crime, then you can be sued.
> Invest in educational resources to teach communities how to deal with law enforcement.
You have this exactly backwards.
It's telling that instead of mentioning doing away with warrior training, for instance, you list things we, the people, need to do to deal with poorly trained cops with licenses to kill, which, in the case of the police, is exactly what this immunity grants.
The police need better training to handle the people they serve and protect, period. The police need to perform better psychological evaluations of prospective cops. The police need to develop better community relations with the communities they serve.
I agree with reforming the unions and installing more independent civilian oversight. I also agree that the U.S. needs major reform of metal health and drug rehab, but that particular issue is more of a left outer join with the issue being discussed; they overlap unfortunately, but the all-too-often grim outcomes of that overlap are due to the state of policing.
The police and their unions acting in bad faith, and abusing their immunity, is why we're here. WE don't need to clean up our interactions with police. It's the other way around.
Edited: typo, wording, and removed unnecessary emphasis
I agree with all of your points, except for your idea of "the people they serve and protect."
If you read about the historical origins of the US police force, their (verifiably documented) lineage goes back to the days of English colonialism. Those original patrol groups were created to "protect" the damage/loss of property- namely to prevent runaway slaves from escaping their owner's control.
The US police force has, quite literally, always been first and foremost a way for the richest upper class to protect their wealth, power, and assets. They are a way to keep the status quo. The fact that they (sometimes) help poor and working class citizens is merely a by-product of their primary goal.
> The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation.
This is a general problem with the US court system. People with more resources can use it to destroy people with fewer resources, because litigation is expensive and time consuming even if you ultimately prevail.
This isn't a problem for the rich because they can survive the loss, and then the incentive to frivolously harass them isn't there when it costs you as much as it does them. It isn't a problem for government officials because of qualified immunity. It's a problem for everybody else.
Maybe we should take the exception away from government officials, to increase their incentive to solve it for everybody else.
Instead of creating yet another special case for government officials, the solution for the US problem is to go and take some ideas from Europe. In Germany, all costs associated with a lawsuit have to be paid/reimbursed by the losing party. This quickly solves the "I know I won't win, but lets ruin the other guy" problem.
> The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation.
Shouldn’t we all be able to carry out our lives without undue fear of personal liability or harassing litigation?
It makes no sense to provide a special civil liberty for government employees and no one else.
If we need to reign in law suits, then let’s do that for everyone.
Yes, but certain groups of people who's job it is to confront people in the public are the recipients of orders of magnitude more complaints than the average individual.
The legal system is unfortunately set up such that there is a significant burden (time and cost) on defendants, even when cases are brought without merit.
In that way, the legal system can be "weaponized" and public employees can be influenced to act a certain way under the threat of a sea of PERSONAL lawsuits. ...something that seldom happens to individuals.
For that reason, immunity was created. I think we'll see a very sharp increase in lawsuits as a result of this change. ...and a lot of resignations. I wouldn't be a police officer if I didn't have immunity. At the very least, I would refuse to work shifts/neighborhoods with high crime.
Sure it does. I don’t want paramedics prematurely giving up on saving peoples lives because there is fear of a lawsuit.
Software developers don’t have this fear, so we get to kill people through releasing buggy bloated applications without any fear of personal liability.
Qualified immunity was made up by courts, their legislating from the bench should have no merit, and therefore revoking qualified immunity is the right thing to do under checks and balances.
We need a replacement, one written in legislation, that puts fixed narrow limits on how immunity applies. If you break the law - you should receive no protections. There is no excuse for enforcers of law to not know the law. This will put the liability into officers And government workers/representatives hands and force them to respect the law.
> There is no excuse for enforcers of law to not know the law.
I wonder how often cops break the law because they actually don't know, or if they do know but also know they'll get away with it.
For example, police are still trying to arrest people for recording them, despite courts repeatedly upholding that citizens have a right to record police. Do cops actually don't know citizens have the right to record them, or are they just making threats that they know won't hold up because they know they can get away with the lie?
That is how our whole system works. The first amendment for example doesn't have an explicit "yelling fire in a movie theatre" exemption, yet the courts have defined tests that determine if speech is protected.
> We need a replacement [...] If you break the law - you should receive no protections
That is exactly how it works today. Once you have been found guilty in a criminal court, you no longer have any protections against civil cases.
You're not including the reasons why qualified immunity is bad though, is this a "devil's advocate" post?
I mean the examples you mentioned would get thrown out by a judge because the examples cited are people doing their jobs.
They're getting rid of qualified immunity because the police is abusing their power to assault and murder people.
I'm not even going to soften that one by saying 'some' police, because inaction is complicity. If one in ten cops are bad, the other nine are complicit for not acting and correcting the one.
> Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally.
That’s exactly the way it should work! If an animal control guy has it in for you and writes you off-leash citations every week while you’re in your own back yard, if the health inspector says he won’t permit black people to stay in business, then you absolutely should be protected by the law. Anything else is plain classism: an implicit assumption that members of a certain class are always in the right, and a requirement to deal with conflict with them not from a position of equal power and rights, but only by hoping to convince them to have mercy.
Certainly getting sued over every little thing would be impracticable, too. But that’s also true for citizens. If the laws that protect us aren’t good enough, then the solution is better laws, not to exempt some classes from the law!
It's undemocratic, because unless all lawyers are great and free for all, this path is a matter of money. Now, you may have bought into the libertarian marketing of freedom without democracy, after all so many Americans have, but there are extremely good reasons for why this is problematic, which are actually not that difficult to cobble together with some spare time.
Other countries don't have a problem with officials getting sued. In the UK there doesn't even seem to be a problem with employees getting sued; cases always seem to end up being against the employer. So why does only the US need "qualified immunity"? (That's a real question, not a rhetorical one.)
You always sue the people with money. In the US the employer is always the one sued by default. Individuals only really get sued when the individual's actions are so squarely of their own doing that the employer can't possibly be held responsible.
If a truck driver enraged about his wife's infidelity decides to drive his truck through the motel his wife is cheating in you don't sue the trucking company (well you probably do, but they lawyer up and their lawyers spell out why it's not worth your time), you sue the driver.
The problem is that this pattern of action falls apart for agents the government because of qualified immunity. If a cop does something bad and the government says "hey, it ain't on us, we told him not to do that, heck, we even trained him to avoid getting into those situations" the plaintiff is out of luck (except for the existing narrow exception to qualified immunity). Getting rid of qualified immunity would put government employees in the same situation literally every other employee is in.
Sweden basically has qualified immunity for all employees (our law is a bit different but offers almost as strong protections). So, no, I do not think the US is the only country which needs qualified immunity.
> The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation.
> It applies to all parts of government. Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally.
In Germany, police officers (and other government officials) only have personal liability if they intentionally act against the law or are grossly negligent in following their duties. The scenarios you describe would lead to all these lawsuits being thrown out in court as frivolous.
The correct way to appeal against executive decisions (the denial of building permit, the citation for your unleashed poodle or the bad health rating for the bar) is to file a suit at an administrative court ("Verwaltungsgericht"). Plead your case there and the court can override the executive decision.
The problem is that then when a police officer breaks the law and harms you, and you later sue them, the taxpayers end up paying the settlement due to the fact that you have to sue the whole department rather than the criminal themselves. There are no consequences, criminal or civil, for the person who actually broke the law.
New York City taxpayers pay $300M a year or so (IIRC) paying out civil judgements against the exceptionally violent NYPD.
To be clear: qualified immunity is about civil liability. It doesn’t protect from criminal liability. Qualified immunity isn’t the reason cops don’t go to jail for murder, because it doesn’t apply at all for criminal procedures
Qualified immunity isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is released, for example, when a government official breaks clearly established law. (Counterfactual: the courts have been very narrow in interpreting what "clearly established" means.)
You say "sue the inspector" like it's obviously a bad thing. If the inspector used their special government appointed powers to intentionally or negligently screw you over, they should be sued. Prohibiting individuals from being sued created two perverse incentives:
1. It emboldens those who do harm and allows that kind of behavior to become systemic (as it has in police culture)
2. It removes an incentive to improve our court systems and legal processes, because those closest to those legal systems have generally been immune.
> If you are found guilty of a crime, then you can be sued.
?? Generally, people want justice to be served. If a police officer had already been found guilty, they've already been given a sentence. That rarely happens because police departments and their unions stonewall efforts to determine truth and charge appropriately.
And then they will need to buy private liability insurance, and bad cops will get their rates hiked until they can't afford to keep being cops, instead of just getting transferred to a new district to offend again.
makes a lot of sense to me. if you sue someone for "bad ratings" as you mentioned, you likely have no case and incur court expanses, including penalty for wasting time... but at least you have that option for when you really have a case.
Qualified immunity for police officers includes immunity from criminal prosecution and is extremely different from the civil liability you are talking about.
Isn't qualified immunity applies only to police?
If not, then the solution should be to end qualified immunity for police only.
There is a difference between health department inspector and police officer, no reason to apply the same standards in both cases.
> the solution should be to end qualified immunity for police only. There is a difference between health department inspector and police officer, no reason to apply the same standards in both cases.
That makes no sense. A government official performing a government job because they are required to by the government should not then be ordered by the government's court system to pay restitution for damages caused by the government's ordered action.
Beyond the principle of the matter, the pragmatic reality is that no sane person would ever work in law enforcement if their kid's college fund is subject to being raided for doing their jobs.
For what it's worth, while New Mexico's law covers all governmental bodies, Colorado passed a law last June that only banned qualified immunity for law enforcement [1]. The city of New York also recently did so for NYPD officers [2].
If true that’s more to the point. The deal is that you work for the police, govt gives you some discretion and power to act on their behalf.
If I don’t get any protection for that, why would I err on the side of intervening in ambiguous situations.
I’d even argue that it’s normal to expect some mistakes, and in general QI should be protected for this reason.
Govt should realize police are only real thing they have to enforce those reams of legalese (not taking about other things like fines). Meaning if they want to stop you RIGHT NOW, they going to have to use a cop. Govt shooting themselves in the foot by neutering their legitimacy to enforce what they say we have to do
In Sweden all employees have these protections and I feel our system works mostly fine. The employer is by default on the hook for all damages caused by employees. There are of course some exceptions like gross negligence, but in general all employees have qualified immunity here.
I understand the arguments that "QI has reasonable goals in theory", but it is time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If cops didn't want to lose QI, they should have held themselves to account for the last few decades. Maybe the unions should have spoken up when cops steal tens of thousands of dollars in cash from a suspect, and get away with it due to QI.
San Antonio, TX will be voting in May on whether to disband the police union. "Back the Blue" types are saying it's Defund in disguise, that we won't be able to find good cops, and so on.
Except several large cities in Texas don't have unionized police, and they do alright. Furthermore, the cops in San Antonio can commit really awful crimes, and still have months- or years-long appeals.
Being a cop isn't a right, it is a privilege and a critical duty. It should be easy to fire bad cops. SAPD, if you didn't want your union to be busted, maybe you should have held yourselves to a higher standard.
The same way you change any other service provider. You find another vendor or renegotiate. The people will vote to instruct their officials to do so. Pretty straightforward.
Public unions, and police unions specifically, are distinct in their impact on society from other unions.
Police have negotiated the right to beat and murder people and keep their jobs with pay for months.
There are cities where Derek Chauvin would have been on paid leave for weeks after killing george floyd. Minneapolis had the right to fire his ass when they saw how bad a cop he was.
From the outside, the US has big issues with race, poverty, mental health and access to firearms. That makes policing very difficult and pushes towards a "shoot first" approach.
But since the US refuses to address any of the issues, it's stuck trying to fix the problem without being able to fix the problem.
What concerns me most (and I see it here in the UK too) isn't these issues themselves, it is the inability of people (media, politicians and everyday citizens) to have an adult conversation about any of it. If the US collectively said "we accept these events as a downside of our way of life" I might not agree but I'd understand. Instead people act like they're surprised or pretend they can be fixed by tinkering around the edges. It seems quite dishonest...
> But since the US refuses to address any of the issues, it's stuck trying to fix the problem without being able to fix the problem.
That's a bit unfair I think. We have a lot of things to improve, but we absolutely are trying to change things all over the country.
Volunteer programs for under-privileged kids on the east side of my town make sure kids have food during the day and a positive adult role model to spend time with them after school for a few hours a week. That's a slow burn kind of investment that affects poverty, racial inequalities (and kinds of intolerance), mental health, violence, and all sort of other stuff. I haven't performed a trial or a study, so I don't have any sort of peer reviewed journal to link you to. But it's happening.
Apparently the mechanisms to address mental health were largely disbanded in the 80s. Oddly this is when many financial oversights and regulations were also undone. It’s like Not A gets established, the ramifications are obviously bad, but A is never re-established.
I'm always surprised there isn't more push for mental health provision in the US. Everyone who loves guns and everyone who is anti mass-shooting should like that, and that's a lot of voters...
Since it's a USA-specific term and not very self-explanatory (I thought this was a COVID-related thing because it contains 'immunity', but it's not):
> In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle that grants government officials performing discretionary functions immunity from civil suits unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known".
I think that the Game theory suggests that cops will be less inclined to show up to a call or do anything to fight crime, because it could bring too much legal responsibility.
Eat donuts, ignore the radio and you will be fine.
"Cops violate citizens rights, but if we stop them their feelings might get hurt and then they might willfully stop doing their jobs, can't you see that cops are the good guys" isn't exactly the slam dunk defense you think it is.
Neither is a blanket statement like "cops violate citizen rights". The way to fix these issues is not to make it so the good ones are scared of helping people due to possible litigation. That's just silly.
It's already a job very few people want to do and you're making it even less desirable.
This is a good way to ensure you only get shitty cops.
Game theory is an abstract mathematical model. Citing mathematical models is not science: science requires experiment to verify whether your model holds up in practice.
In this case, one could gather data from different countries to see if there's any correlation between the effectiveness of police and their level of legal protection.
AFAIK, police forces in other rich nations function just fine without qualified immunity (admittedly, I have not studied this in detail).
Are police in other countries without qualified immunity more or less likely to be sued? Your argument ignores the rather important consideration of civil litigation frequency, which is a question of torts not policing.
the cops who worry about this are the ones we don't want to be cops. Its like my male friends who complained about the MeToo movement "how will i date when i have to worry about consent" - uh shouldn't you already be confident theres consent before doing anything? lol
The fact that you have multiple men in your life saying this might be an indication of some of the difficulties men face. I'm making an assumption here that you chose good men to be your friends. Either you're picking sex offenders as friends or men have a difficult situation to navigate when dating?
Women are all different. Some women love the idea of men asking for consent, others would find this a huge turnoff. Not all women do non-verbal consent in the same ways. To make it harder, men are expected to be the one making the moves and taking the lead.
I just made a quick Google search - [1] contains a link to a Reddit post from ~2 years ago. This man keeps getting told "it's not sexy to ask". Some women responding love the idea, others say they would hate it. Ever since #metoo I've made sure to very careful about consent, I even get verbal consent, and I know it's turned some dating partners away. So until women make dating clearer for men maybe you should hold back some of your judgement.
P.S. I'm 35 and have an above average partner count despite actively not sleeping around. I'm not some bumbling awkward guy that's never dated women.
Not true. Anyone who joins a job like that is going to want strong protections whether they use them or not. Why would I work for department X where if I make a mistake I can be ruined when department Y will trust that by going thru the process to become LE, in general I’m not looking to be a corrupt maniac. Not to mention those same depts will let me keep an AR in my trunk, send an MRAP to cover me when I am going into a sketchy situations
Similarly, why would I join a dept with a weak union when I can be in one where I’m backed by a union that for better or worse will assume innocent until proven guilty and protect the paying members.
According to psychologists, there is a personality trait called neuroticism. Neurotic people worry about everything. They worry about getting sued. But they also worry about whether they look fat in these clothes, whether they will forget their uncles birthday, 5g radiation, microplastic partles in the air and whether the guy on the ground is dying or not.
What I'm hinting at is that a neurotic police force would be less likely to harm people. But also take less action in general, solve less crime.
> cops will be less inclined to show up to a call or do anything to fight crime, because it could bring too much legal responsibility
Police report to elected governments. They are checked the same way the rest of the state is: through elections.
Police pay is high across America because they're widely seen as bringing value to the community. Their strikes are feared by politicians; the cops turning on the mayor signals instant political death in most cities. If that perception of police frays, their leverage disappears.
More pointedly, if a civil servant decides it's too much legal responsibility to not break the law, they should find another line of work.
Make it so that they have a genuine public duty requirement by reversing warren vs DC and suddenly we can prosecute cops for not showing up if we can prove that they intentionally lollygagged.
Forget qualified immunity and civil liability.
Why are police not being held criminally responsible for criminal acts? I am far more concerned about that.
The existence of one problem doesn't preclude the existence of others. Both are problematic. The law being used to sue police officers - the Ku Klux Klan Act - came into being because the Federal Congress recognized that in certain states of the Union, police officers (and other public officers) were taking actions against the public that would never be prosecuted as crimes in those states, yet were egregious and in want of a remedy. The situation is not so different today.
The issue isn't QI in and of itself -- as others have said, it serves a useful purpose in protecting the personal liability of government agents acting out their official duties, which can be reasonable (one example was that a planning board member shouldn't face personal liability for denying a proposal). In my mind, there are two issues (one direct, one indirect) with QI and policing specifically:
- QI has been defined as so broadly covering the police that any situation that hasn't explicitly already been defined as an overreach or overreaction will be considered as covered by QI, so officers face little to no personal accountability.
- Police and civilian oversight boards are largely ineffective at doling out substantial punishments, so officers face little to no professional accountability. Such oversight is typically fought, and fought hard, by police unions.
As a result of this, police officers face little pushback for misbehavior, or even patterns of misbehavior. Court decisions narrowing the scope of QI as it applies to police officers (eg: any behavior by a police officer that's not "by the book" would not be considered eligible for QI) would go a long way towards providing accountability.
I thought that because QI was defended by the SCOTUS, that even if a state doesn't have QI at all, a police officer or department sued for malpractice could still appeal to the SCOTUS and then eventually win?
It's more complicated at the federal level, but in this case the bill abolishes qualified immunity when suing New Mexico officials in New Mexico courts for violations of New Mexico law. Presumably New Mexico courts adopted the federal concept of qualified immunity at some point. See https://www.nmlegis.gov/Sessions/21%20Regular/bills/house/HB...
You usually sue state officials under Federal law when a state doesn't permit residents to sue them atall, or if the claims, defenses, or remedies are too strict. A Civil War Reconstruction-era Federal statue, the Ku Klux Klan Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_Act), enacted under the newly granted powers of the 14th Amendment, permitted people to sue state officials whence previously they were barred by state sovereign immunity. The act was rarely used for the first 80 or so years; why I don't know. Qualified immunity is something SCOTUS cooked up after a rapid increase in such law suits caused some judicial anxiety about the potential chilling effect of supposedly frivolous law suits. To be fair, this was at a time when a rather liberal Supreme Court was effectively inventing new rights, like so-called Miranda rights, right to appointed counsel when indigent, etc, the scope of which were then unclear.
I can't imagine anyone arguing against Miranda rights, the right to appointed council when you can't afford one, etc. Can you think of a single good reason these shouldn't exist?
Whichever rather liberal supreme court that was let's get them back ASAP!
Isn't it more accurately called 'Miranda warning'? The point is, there are no new rights being granted, the notification is merely informing someone of their existing rights. The fifth amendment was ratified back in 1791.
Lower federal courts have no say. It's a state matter up to the supreme court of NM, and then maybe SCOTUS.
But also regardless, QI is an extension of sovereign immunity. Therefore, the legislature is free to waive it by statue. That's what NM has done. It's not saying QI doesn't exist, it's that this state waives its privileges.
We'll see. Part of the Catch-22 of QI is that if it hasn't gone to trial it doesn't exist, so it doesn't go to trial. Let's see if this WinAmp's Box can be bashed open.
Supreme court rulings are always connected to the law at the time of the ruling. If a law changes (at the state, federal, or constitutional level) that can change how the supreme court will rule. The state probably couldn't invalidate QI for federal officers, but for state officers, why not?
Readit News
It applies to all parts of government. Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally.
The way to fix policing isn't by making the rest of government worse. Reform unions for employees of the people. Create independent civilian oversight boards with the teeth to suspend and terminate. Invest more in mental health and drug rehabilitation services. Invest in educational resources to teach communities how to deal with law enforcement.
Edit to add: People are confusing civil liability with criminal liability. If you are found guilty of a crime, then you can be sued.
You have this exactly backwards.
It's telling that instead of mentioning doing away with warrior training, for instance, you list things we, the people, need to do to deal with poorly trained cops with licenses to kill, which, in the case of the police, is exactly what this immunity grants.
The police need better training to handle the people they serve and protect, period. The police need to perform better psychological evaluations of prospective cops. The police need to develop better community relations with the communities they serve.
I agree with reforming the unions and installing more independent civilian oversight. I also agree that the U.S. needs major reform of metal health and drug rehab, but that particular issue is more of a left outer join with the issue being discussed; they overlap unfortunately, but the all-too-often grim outcomes of that overlap are due to the state of policing.
The police and their unions acting in bad faith, and abusing their immunity, is why we're here. WE don't need to clean up our interactions with police. It's the other way around.
Edited: typo, wording, and removed unnecessary emphasis
If you read about the historical origins of the US police force, their (verifiably documented) lineage goes back to the days of English colonialism. Those original patrol groups were created to "protect" the damage/loss of property- namely to prevent runaway slaves from escaping their owner's control.
The US police force has, quite literally, always been first and foremost a way for the richest upper class to protect their wealth, power, and assets. They are a way to keep the status quo. The fact that they (sometimes) help poor and working class citizens is merely a by-product of their primary goal.
This is a general problem with the US court system. People with more resources can use it to destroy people with fewer resources, because litigation is expensive and time consuming even if you ultimately prevail.
This isn't a problem for the rich because they can survive the loss, and then the incentive to frivolously harass them isn't there when it costs you as much as it does them. It isn't a problem for government officials because of qualified immunity. It's a problem for everybody else.
Maybe we should take the exception away from government officials, to increase their incentive to solve it for everybody else.
Shouldn’t we all be able to carry out our lives without undue fear of personal liability or harassing litigation?
It makes no sense to provide a special civil liberty for government employees and no one else.
If we need to reign in law suits, then let’s do that for everyone.
The legal system is unfortunately set up such that there is a significant burden (time and cost) on defendants, even when cases are brought without merit.
In that way, the legal system can be "weaponized" and public employees can be influenced to act a certain way under the threat of a sea of PERSONAL lawsuits. ...something that seldom happens to individuals.
For that reason, immunity was created. I think we'll see a very sharp increase in lawsuits as a result of this change. ...and a lot of resignations. I wouldn't be a police officer if I didn't have immunity. At the very least, I would refuse to work shifts/neighborhoods with high crime.
Software developers don’t have this fear, so we get to kill people through releasing buggy bloated applications without any fear of personal liability.
We need a replacement, one written in legislation, that puts fixed narrow limits on how immunity applies. If you break the law - you should receive no protections. There is no excuse for enforcers of law to not know the law. This will put the liability into officers And government workers/representatives hands and force them to respect the law.
I wonder how often cops break the law because they actually don't know, or if they do know but also know they'll get away with it.
For example, police are still trying to arrest people for recording them, despite courts repeatedly upholding that citizens have a right to record police. Do cops actually don't know citizens have the right to record them, or are they just making threats that they know won't hold up because they know they can get away with the lie?
That is how our whole system works. The first amendment for example doesn't have an explicit "yelling fire in a movie theatre" exemption, yet the courts have defined tests that determine if speech is protected.
> We need a replacement [...] If you break the law - you should receive no protections
That is exactly how it works today. Once you have been found guilty in a criminal court, you no longer have any protections against civil cases.
That's hardly unusual in a common law system..
I mean the examples you mentioned would get thrown out by a judge because the examples cited are people doing their jobs.
They're getting rid of qualified immunity because the police is abusing their power to assault and murder people.
I'm not even going to soften that one by saying 'some' police, because inaction is complicity. If one in ten cops are bad, the other nine are complicit for not acting and correcting the one.
Dead Comment
That’s exactly the way it should work! If an animal control guy has it in for you and writes you off-leash citations every week while you’re in your own back yard, if the health inspector says he won’t permit black people to stay in business, then you absolutely should be protected by the law. Anything else is plain classism: an implicit assumption that members of a certain class are always in the right, and a requirement to deal with conflict with them not from a position of equal power and rights, but only by hoping to convince them to have mercy.
Certainly getting sued over every little thing would be impracticable, too. But that’s also true for citizens. If the laws that protect us aren’t good enough, then the solution is better laws, not to exempt some classes from the law!
(our own comparable issue is probably Northern Ireland, and the still-outstanding litigation around Bloody Sunday and "Soldier F" etc)
If a truck driver enraged about his wife's infidelity decides to drive his truck through the motel his wife is cheating in you don't sue the trucking company (well you probably do, but they lawyer up and their lawyers spell out why it's not worth your time), you sue the driver.
The problem is that this pattern of action falls apart for agents the government because of qualified immunity. If a cop does something bad and the government says "hey, it ain't on us, we told him not to do that, heck, we even trained him to avoid getting into those situations" the plaintiff is out of luck (except for the existing narrow exception to qualified immunity). Getting rid of qualified immunity would put government employees in the same situation literally every other employee is in.
> It applies to all parts of government. Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally.
In Germany, police officers (and other government officials) only have personal liability if they intentionally act against the law or are grossly negligent in following their duties. The scenarios you describe would lead to all these lawsuits being thrown out in court as frivolous.
The correct way to appeal against executive decisions (the denial of building permit, the citation for your unleashed poodle or the bad health rating for the bar) is to file a suit at an administrative court ("Verwaltungsgericht"). Plead your case there and the court can override the executive decision.
I am definitely not a lawyer or even good at "law" but that would just be insane if the truth is otherwise
New York City taxpayers pay $300M a year or so (IIRC) paying out civil judgements against the exceptionally violent NYPD.
You see no issue with that, seriously?
Qualified immunity isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is released, for example, when a government official breaks clearly established law. (Counterfactual: the courts have been very narrow in interpreting what "clearly established" means.)
1. It emboldens those who do harm and allows that kind of behavior to become systemic (as it has in police culture) 2. It removes an incentive to improve our court systems and legal processes, because those closest to those legal systems have generally been immune.
> If you are found guilty of a crime, then you can be sued.
?? Generally, people want justice to be served. If a police officer had already been found guilty, they've already been given a sentence. That rarely happens because police departments and their unions stonewall efforts to determine truth and charge appropriately.
In case of their gross misconduct - sure.
This is the same situation we have with non-government employees right now. Would you sue a club bouncer because he denied you entry? I guess no.
https://abc7.com/lawsuit-virginia-police-threaten-pepper-spr...
Make all employees have qualified immunity, can't be sued for things you did while working, what could go wrong?
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No.
> the solution should be to end qualified immunity for police only. There is a difference between health department inspector and police officer, no reason to apply the same standards in both cases.
That makes no sense. A government official performing a government job because they are required to by the government should not then be ordered by the government's court system to pay restitution for damages caused by the government's ordered action.
Beyond the principle of the matter, the pragmatic reality is that no sane person would ever work in law enforcement if their kid's college fund is subject to being raided for doing their jobs.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-colora...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyc-qualified-immunity-police-m...
If I don’t get any protection for that, why would I err on the side of intervening in ambiguous situations.
I’d even argue that it’s normal to expect some mistakes, and in general QI should be protected for this reason.
Govt should realize police are only real thing they have to enforce those reams of legalese (not taking about other things like fines). Meaning if they want to stop you RIGHT NOW, they going to have to use a cop. Govt shooting themselves in the foot by neutering their legitimacy to enforce what they say we have to do
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They don't for obvious reasons. If people need protection from certain laws, then write that in the specific laws.
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No, you are talking about something else, which is called sovereign immunity.
Qualified immunity is a dumb concept the courts made up to protect police officers.
San Antonio, TX will be voting in May on whether to disband the police union. "Back the Blue" types are saying it's Defund in disguise, that we won't be able to find good cops, and so on.
Except several large cities in Texas don't have unionized police, and they do alright. Furthermore, the cops in San Antonio can commit really awful crimes, and still have months- or years-long appeals.
Being a cop isn't a right, it is a privilege and a critical duty. It should be easy to fire bad cops. SAPD, if you didn't want your union to be busted, maybe you should have held yourselves to a higher standard.
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/LG/htm/LG.174.htm
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Public unions, and police unions specifically, are distinct in their impact on society from other unions.
Police have negotiated the right to beat and murder people and keep their jobs with pay for months.
There are cities where Derek Chauvin would have been on paid leave for weeks after killing george floyd. Minneapolis had the right to fire his ass when they saw how bad a cop he was.
But since the US refuses to address any of the issues, it's stuck trying to fix the problem without being able to fix the problem.
What concerns me most (and I see it here in the UK too) isn't these issues themselves, it is the inability of people (media, politicians and everyday citizens) to have an adult conversation about any of it. If the US collectively said "we accept these events as a downside of our way of life" I might not agree but I'd understand. Instead people act like they're surprised or pretend they can be fixed by tinkering around the edges. It seems quite dishonest...
That's a bit unfair I think. We have a lot of things to improve, but we absolutely are trying to change things all over the country.
Volunteer programs for under-privileged kids on the east side of my town make sure kids have food during the day and a positive adult role model to spend time with them after school for a few hours a week. That's a slow burn kind of investment that affects poverty, racial inequalities (and kinds of intolerance), mental health, violence, and all sort of other stuff. I haven't performed a trial or a study, so I don't have any sort of peer reviewed journal to link you to. But it's happening.
> In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle that grants government officials performing discretionary functions immunity from civil suits unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known".
-- Wikipedia
Eat donuts, ignore the radio and you will be fine.
It's already a job very few people want to do and you're making it even less desirable.
This is a good way to ensure you only get shitty cops.
In this case, one could gather data from different countries to see if there's any correlation between the effectiveness of police and their level of legal protection.
AFAIK, police forces in other rich nations function just fine without qualified immunity (admittedly, I have not studied this in detail).
Wtf kind of logic is this?
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Women are all different. Some women love the idea of men asking for consent, others would find this a huge turnoff. Not all women do non-verbal consent in the same ways. To make it harder, men are expected to be the one making the moves and taking the lead.
I just made a quick Google search - [1] contains a link to a Reddit post from ~2 years ago. This man keeps getting told "it's not sexy to ask". Some women responding love the idea, others say they would hate it. Ever since #metoo I've made sure to very careful about consent, I even get verbal consent, and I know it's turned some dating partners away. So until women make dating clearer for men maybe you should hold back some of your judgement.
P.S. I'm 35 and have an above average partner count despite actively not sleeping around. I'm not some bumbling awkward guy that's never dated women.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/alxofq/me...
Similarly, why would I join a dept with a weak union when I can be in one where I’m backed by a union that for better or worse will assume innocent until proven guilty and protect the paying members.
What I'm hinting at is that a neurotic police force would be less likely to harm people. But also take less action in general, solve less crime.
Police report to elected governments. They are checked the same way the rest of the state is: through elections.
Police pay is high across America because they're widely seen as bringing value to the community. Their strikes are feared by politicians; the cops turning on the mayor signals instant political death in most cities. If that perception of police frays, their leverage disappears.
More pointedly, if a civil servant decides it's too much legal responsibility to not break the law, they should find another line of work.
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Lol what?
Doctors can be sued for malpractice yet they still perform operations.
If we increase (already high) risk of being a cop, then we will have to be ready to pay 200k-300k salaries.
- QI has been defined as so broadly covering the police that any situation that hasn't explicitly already been defined as an overreach or overreaction will be considered as covered by QI, so officers face little to no personal accountability.
- Police and civilian oversight boards are largely ineffective at doling out substantial punishments, so officers face little to no professional accountability. Such oversight is typically fought, and fought hard, by police unions.
As a result of this, police officers face little pushback for misbehavior, or even patterns of misbehavior. Court decisions narrowing the scope of QI as it applies to police officers (eg: any behavior by a police officer that's not "by the book" would not be considered eligible for QI) would go a long way towards providing accountability.
You usually sue state officials under Federal law when a state doesn't permit residents to sue them at all, or if the claims, defenses, or remedies are too strict. A Civil War Reconstruction-era Federal statue, the Ku Klux Klan Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_Act), enacted under the newly granted powers of the 14th Amendment, permitted people to sue state officials whence previously they were barred by state sovereign immunity. The act was rarely used for the first 80 or so years; why I don't know. Qualified immunity is something SCOTUS cooked up after a rapid increase in such law suits caused some judicial anxiety about the potential chilling effect of supposedly frivolous law suits. To be fair, this was at a time when a rather liberal Supreme Court was effectively inventing new rights, like so-called Miranda rights, right to appointed counsel when indigent, etc, the scope of which were then unclear.
Whichever rather liberal supreme court that was let's get them back ASAP!
This is the problem with creating new rules out of whole-cloth from the bench.
But also regardless, QI is an extension of sovereign immunity. Therefore, the legislature is free to waive it by statue. That's what NM has done. It's not saying QI doesn't exist, it's that this state waives its privileges.
Don't! If you bash it open, llamas will flood the world and whip everybody's ass in retaliation!