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…
> their (verifiably documented) lineage Where are these documents, and what do they verify ? Saying that an institution today goes back to an institution from the past doesn’t mean that it shares the same traits. Institutions change over time. What you need to show is that the same purpose can be documented today as was there when the police were established.
Those are both irrelevant to the issue at hand: wrongful arrest. Wrongful arrest occurs when either the incorrect person is detained or when a person is detained without merit. In order for police to detain people they need to place them under arrest, which includes Maranda warnings, or have a signed warrant.
It shields them from civil liability for wrongful arrest, as the courts will apparently go "there's no established law that you can't arrest someone for no good reason on Thursday at 9:53pm on Third Street". We have friendly prosecutors who "could indict a ham sandwich" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich#Cultural_impact ) mysteriously failing to get an indictment to handle the criminal side of it.
An indictment is not an arrest. An indictment comes from a district attorney while an arrest comes from police. The two don't even have to be associated with each other as a person can be indicted before they are arrested, or vise versa.
An indictment is a motion to proceed to trial, and often doesn't even require the availability or presence of the person. An arrest is a detention of a person to police custody.
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…
Way to go turning the whole of the police force into a bunch of racist bigots. With many family members serving in both law enforcement and the military, this is one of the most offensive things I have heard in a long time. 99% of the police are some of the best people you will ever meet, and they will even serve and protect people like you who don't appreciate them and would spit on them if had the chance.
> Qualified immunity isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. No, its a get-out-of-civil-liability-free card. > It is released, for example, when a government official breaks clearly established law. No, its not. As well as meeting the extremely narrow standard established for violating “clearly established law” and act must also fail to meet the extremely broad standard established for being an “objectively reasonable act…
> No, its not. There is no qualified immunity protection upon the conviction of a criminal act regardless of how narrow or broad underlying factors are.
You seem to have confused a true statement (qualified immunity is about torts, not crimes) with a false one (if there was a crime, then there can't be any qualified immunity claim in a corresponding civil case).
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.
Somehow that game theory doesn't seem to apply to most jobs, so maybe your model is overly simplistic to the point of being useless.
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.
Pure nonsense. Cite these cases where software engineers have built a decades-long track record of abusing power and murdering innocents under the guise of civil service and directly abusing qualified immunity to get away with it. Or maybe tone things down.
You can't even do that for civil servants though. The actual number of "encounters gone wrong" vs total encounters is vanishingly small. People think there is an epidemic of police murdering minorities, but in reality the number of unarmed black men killed by police is somewhere between bear attacks and babies drowning in buckets in terms of annual deaths. That's not to downplay the horror of such killings, but to pu…
I think you're underestimating the problem by limiting it to unarmed black men killed by police. There's a lot that a police force can do besides killing people. There's profiling and unlawful arrests and prosecution, cruel and unusual punishments in prisons and jails, along with general harassment. You should look at the results of DOJ investigations into the Ferguson and Baltimore police departments, they are absolutely scathing. In the Baltimore police department, there were incidents in which they arrested people just hanging out on a street corner for no reason (when they told their lieutenant they didn't have a valid reason to arrest them they were told "just make something up") in front of the DOJ investigators! I'd also recommend the book "Just Mercy" for examples of the horrors of malicious prosecution. Just one egregious example from that book: a mentally disabled woman was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her child. The problem? The woman never had a child, and was in fact infertile!
No it's not. Both because courts don't always give you costs, and because even when they do award costs, actually collecting is tough, and finally, because courts don't always award the full amount of your costs. Source: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-fees-does-l... "To further this goal, the losing side doesn’t usually pay the winning side's attorney's fees. In the United States, the rule (called t…
I have an outstanding judgment for over $100k against a home builder that my lawyer told me I have about a 1% chance of ever collecting on. This isn’t even a situation where I can file a lien; the company is out of business because of their shoddy business practices and the former owners are broke. Meanwhile I had to pay my lawyer. I would have been better off doing nothing, and in hindsight I would not pursue the ca…
This is a fairly common pattern among home builders. Start John's Construction, make some money, live the high life for a few years, homes start to show signs of issues, go bankrupt, then start Jon's Construction and begin the process over again.
If you are a private security agent for a mall what's the difference with a cop patrolling a mall? In sectors where private compete with public that's very difficult to understand why people should be regulated by different laws.
People doing their jobs and receive training should be personally immune from legal liability. That liability should be held by their employer. ...which is generally how it works, though it's not as strongly codified as it is with qualified immunity. If you're saying we should expand qualified immunity, I agree.
Did you even read the bill? That is exactly what it does
> INDEMNIFICATION BY PUBLIC BODY.--A judgment awarded pursuant to the New Mexico Civil Rights Act against a person acting on behalf of, under color of or within the course and scope of the authority of the public body shall be paid by the public body.
It shields them from civil liability for wrongful arrest, as the courts will apparently go "there's no established law that you can't arrest someone for no good reason on Thursday at 9:53pm on Third Street". We have friendly prosecutors who "could indict a ham sandwich" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich#Cultural_impact ) mysteriously failing to get an indictment to handle the criminal side of it.
An indictment is not an arrest. An indictment comes from a district attorney while an arrest comes from police. The two don't even have to be associated with each other as a person can be indicted before they are arrested, or vise versa. An indictment is a motion to proceed to trial, and often doesn't even require the availability or presence of the person. An arrest is a detention of a person to police custody.
The point: there aren't gonna be criminal consequences for a bad cop who made a wrongful arrest if it never goes to trial.
QI shields them from civil suits, so they're quite well protected on both fronts.