25 ms·

No Qualified Immunity for Cops Who Made Stuff Up to Justify Phone Seizure

234 points by pmiller2 6y ago

trianglem 6y ago
The only union in America that needs busting is the cops union. Low skilled work that doesn’t even rank in the top 20 most dangerous jobs. Bring on personal liability insurance and call it a day.
- seibelj 6y ago
  How about any public sector union? They do services that have no competition, allowing them to extract taxpayer money with no substitute providers.
  - myWindoonn 6y ago
    Sure. Let's start with the police, and then we'll go after whichever next union is killing people across the country. Edit: Your downvotes only make it more obvious that you don't really have a counterpoint to the police's homicidal tendencies nor their unions' participation in crafting legal protections for their actions.
    - dimensi0nal 6y ago
      > whichever next union is killing people across the country teachers' unions causing student suicides by refusing to let schools open like in the rest of the developed world?
      - judge2020 6y ago
        The rest of the developed world doesn't have 100k covid cases a day.
        spijdar 6y ago
        What's "the rest of the developed world"? France has 21k new covid cases in a day, and a population of 67 million versus a population of 328 million in the US, so the per capita rate is almost identical. Other west European countries at least are similar, usually slightly lower, but not dramatically lower e.g. by orders of magnitude.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        The rest of the developed world isn't in a very different position with respect to covid. The US is around 30 cases/100k/day and the EU is around 20 cases/100k/day https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=United%20Kingdom&show=25-lg&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right-12wk&extra=United%20States%2CEuropean%20Union%2CSwitzerland%2CFrance%2CSpain#countries-normalized https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
      - monocasa 6y ago
        Yeah let's hate on teachers because.. checks notes... they don't want to die due to a disproportionate amount of them being in covid high risk groups.
        jacob2484 6y ago
        Even CDC says it's safe to open schools - kids are not a major transmission vector. How come private and Catholic schools are open and there isn't a massive spike in Covid cases? Do you think it's fine for American kids to be even further behind in today's global skill race?
        namibj 6y ago
        > Even CDC says it's safe to open schools - kids are not a major transmission vector. The last time I heard of a local government opening schools with the "not a major transmission vector" argument was in Berlin, and they had no grasp on infection tracing. Yes, kids tend to be asymptomatic. But asymptomatic carriers are still infectious. > How come private and Catholic schools are open and there isn't a massive spike in Covid cases? Because that's just a small section of the population.
      - trianglem 6y ago
        That’s on par with busting the plumbers union because people die in their bathtubs. It’s a bad faith argument and your bias is showing.
  - mchusma 6y ago
    I agree. I cannot think of a justification for public sector unions. The typical pro-union argument for companies is that they protect workers against abuses by the company. In the public sector, the union is supposed to protect workers from the citizens? I haven't ever heard of a good theoretical argument for them. Would be interested if someone knew of one.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Perhaps public entities should not enter into collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions, but freedom of association is guaranteed in the constitution, it's not going to be possible to ban unions in the US.
    - salawat 6y ago
      There is no bigger abuser of workers than we the citizens. We don't intend to, but we do generally expect extraordinary results for a pittance investment of resources with all sorts of strings attached. Public sector unions are fine.
      - xiphias2 6y ago
        US government spending was $6.5 Trillion last year. I think it's OK to expect extraordinary results for that amount of money.
    - astura 6y ago
      I guess (?) that they protect low level civil servants from the whims of politicians and political administrative changes.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Interestingly, in the UK the police are explicitly not allowed to unionize. The fire brigade are and have occasionally gone on strike. Instead they have three different professional organisations, because the UK is ridiculously class-stratified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_and_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_a... > Superintendents and Chief superintendents are represented by a separate staff association, the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales (PSA),[3] while the most senior officers are members of the Chief Police Officers Staff Association (CPOSA).
  - trianglem 6y ago
    You’re being downvoted because of right wing teamism that dang and company refuse to address or are not equipped to deal with.
- jacob2484 6y ago
  And the teacher's union... which will not allow the firing of bad teachers ("reassignments"), resulting in mis-justice to student in US who then fail to get necessary skills to succeed in this world.
TravHatesMe 6y ago
> Chances are Robbins will receive a settlement I think this is underscores the biggest issue. Mistakes are made by these power-hungry ignorant police officers, usually due to their fragile ego, and then they face little consequences. Someone sues and gets a nice settlement. Nothing changes. Taxpayers are taking the brunt instead of the police officer. The offending officer will likely get a slap on the wrist, or if it's a really bad mistake that went viral they might choose an early, comfortable retirement. In order for change to happen, police officers need to be held accountable for their actions. Not sure how to implement that but I think that would result in police officers being much more careful about their conduct.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Taxpayers should take the brunt of the damage in the end. They hire the police after all.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    They pay their salaries. They do not hire them. Big difference.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      They hire (i.e. elect) the people that hire them.
      - frostwhale 6y ago
        They hire (i.e. elect) the people that hire the people that decide who hires them.
        strogonoff 6y ago
        Looking from the outside, seems like the police system used to work at some point in the past and now it doesn’t. Maybe taxpayers taking the brunt of it in case of police misbehavior is a case of a system “failing loudly”, a useful indicator that the police doesn’t work well and people should elect differently in favor of revamping the police according to current realities.
classified 6y ago
The whole civil asset forfeiture shtick is making things up to rob people. How are phones different?
AdrianB1 6y ago
I saw an article of a real lawyer that explained the decision, but he also included a priceless information: qualified immunity does not come from a law or statute, it is a made-up term by the SCOTUS a few decades away. It is mind-boggling that such thing exists and it is also very hard to believe that legislators did not remove it into oblivion.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Please post a link to the article.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    The case is discussed here: https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/court-rules-against-cops-who-arrested-man-on-sidewalk-ep-7288 https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/court-rules-against-cops-w... The qualified immunity is discussed here: https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/supreme-court-strikes-down-qualified-immunity-claim-ep-7276 https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/supreme-court-strikes-down... The lawyer's web site is: https://lehtoslaw.com/ https://lehtoslaw.com/
hayst4ck 6y ago
There must be some uncomfortable truth in regards to police officers, the type of thing you only understand if you are responsible for leading/paying them. Clearly police officers are above the law in America. Clearly blue lives matter/thin blue line is a very deep cultural problem within the force. Clearly police unions protect people who shouldn't be protected. Clearly police officers protect their peers when their peers commit crime. Clearly there is some level of infiltration by white supremacists into police forces. Clearly police in major cities do not do a very good job of de-escalation at all. The average citizen has almost certainly seen a video of a police officer acting outrageously and not ending up in prison. Everyone here has theories that will solve it: end qualified immunity, fix incentives, destroy police unions. Most likely none of us are experts. I can't shake the feeling that there is some truth or barrier to this problem that the average person doesn't know about/the government doesn't think we can handle being told. If nothing else any reform must have the blessing of police officers. If police officers quit en masse that is something society at large isn't willing to tolerate. Just like the old slashdot e-mail reform meme of ol' (https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/04/06/1629219/analysis-of-spam-and-a-proposed-solution https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/04/06/1629219/analysis-of-...), I suspect we need a similar meme for police reform.
- itronitron 6y ago
  >> Clearly police officers are above the law in America. I think many law enforcement officers view themselves as 'the law' and therefore believe that the ends justify the means. The popular, although dated, culture backs them up on that and there are many laws that favor law enforcement over suspects. Police in the US think they are above the law because in many ways they are. The good ones know how to find the balance and keep the peace.
  - aneemzic 6y ago
    I guess it stems from a time when all you really had to work with was physical evidence and the only records being what officers had written down. So it really wouldn't have worked any other way. A suspect is always going to say whatever makes them seem innocent. "I wasn't holding that knife when you arrested me" would be impossible to disprove if the suspect was wearing gloves at the time or forensic evidence wasn't yet available. So in some ways the officers word had to hold more weight. It seems like the only solution is for every single interaction to be digitally recorded.

234 points by pmiller2 6y ago

The only union in America that needs busting is the cops union. Low skilled work that doesn’t even rank in the top 20 most dangerous jobs. Bring on personal liability insurance and call it a day.

seibelj 6y ago
How about any public sector union? They do services that have no competition, allowing them to extract taxpayer money with no substitute providers.
- myWindoonn 6y ago
  Sure. Let's start with the police, and then we'll go after whichever next union is killing people across the country. Edit: Your downvotes only make it more obvious that you don't really have a counterpoint to the police's homicidal tendencies nor their unions' participation in crafting legal protections for their actions.
  - dimensi0nal 6y ago
    > whichever next union is killing people across the country teachers' unions causing student suicides by refusing to let schools open like in the rest of the developed world?
    - judge2020 6y ago
      The rest of the developed world doesn't have 100k covid cases a day.
      - spijdar 6y ago
        What's "the rest of the developed world"? France has 21k new covid cases in a day, and a population of 67 million versus a population of 328 million in the US, so the per capita rate is almost identical. Other west European countries at least are similar, usually slightly lower, but not dramatically lower e.g. by orders of magnitude.
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        The rest of the developed world isn't in a very different position with respect to covid. The US is around 30 cases/100k/day and the EU is around 20 cases/100k/day https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=United%20Kingdom&show=25-lg&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right-12wk&extra=United%20States%2CEuropean%20Union%2CSwitzerland%2CFrance%2CSpain#countries-normalized https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Yeah let's hate on teachers because.. checks notes... they don't want to die due to a disproportionate amount of them being in covid high risk groups.
      - jacob2484 6y ago
        Even CDC says it's safe to open schools - kids are not a major transmission vector. How come private and Catholic schools are open and there isn't a massive spike in Covid cases? Do you think it's fine for American kids to be even further behind in today's global skill race?
        namibj 6y ago
        > Even CDC says it's safe to open schools - kids are not a major transmission vector. The last time I heard of a local government opening schools with the "not a major transmission vector" argument was in Berlin, and they had no grasp on infection tracing. Yes, kids tend to be asymptomatic. But asymptomatic carriers are still infectious. > How come private and Catholic schools are open and there isn't a massive spike in Covid cases? Because that's just a small section of the population.
    - trianglem 6y ago
      That’s on par with busting the plumbers union because people die in their bathtubs. It’s a bad faith argument and your bias is showing.
- mchusma 6y ago
  I agree. I cannot think of a justification for public sector unions. The typical pro-union argument for companies is that they protect workers against abuses by the company. In the public sector, the union is supposed to protect workers from the citizens? I haven't ever heard of a good theoretical argument for them. Would be interested if someone knew of one.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Perhaps public entities should not enter into collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions, but freedom of association is guaranteed in the constitution, it's not going to be possible to ban unions in the US.
  - salawat 6y ago
    There is no bigger abuser of workers than we the citizens. We don't intend to, but we do generally expect extraordinary results for a pittance investment of resources with all sorts of strings attached. Public sector unions are fine.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      US government spending was $6.5 Trillion last year. I think it's OK to expect extraordinary results for that amount of money.
  - astura 6y ago
    I guess (?) that they protect low level civil servants from the whims of politicians and political administrative changes.
pjc50 6y ago
Interestingly, in the UK the police are explicitly not allowed to unionize. The fire brigade are and have occasionally gone on strike. Instead they have three different professional organisations, because the UK is ridiculously class-stratified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_and_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_a... > Superintendents and Chief superintendents are represented by a separate staff association, the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales (PSA),[3] while the most senior officers are members of the Chief Police Officers Staff Association (CPOSA).
- trianglem 6y ago
  You’re being downvoted because of right wing teamism that dang and company refuse to address or are not equipped to deal with.
jacob2484 6y ago
And the teacher's union... which will not allow the firing of bad teachers ("reassignments"), resulting in mis-justice to student in US who then fail to get necessary skills to succeed in this world.

TravHatesMe 6y ago

> Chances are Robbins will receive a settlement I think this is underscores the biggest issue. Mistakes are made by these power-hungry ignorant police officers, usually due to their fragile ego, and then they face little consequences. Someone sues and gets a nice settlement. Nothing changes. Taxpayers are taking the brunt instead of the police officer. The offending officer will likely get a slap on the wrist, or if it's a really bad mistake that went viral they might choose an early, comfortable retirement. In order for change to happen, police officers need to be held accountable for their actions. Not sure how to implement that but I think that would result in police officers being much more careful about their conduct.

oh_sigh 6y ago
Taxpayers should take the brunt of the damage in the end. They hire the police after all.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  They pay their salaries. They do not hire them. Big difference.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    They hire (i.e. elect) the people that hire them.
    - frostwhale 6y ago
      They hire (i.e. elect) the people that hire the people that decide who hires them.
      - strogonoff 6y ago
        Looking from the outside, seems like the police system used to work at some point in the past and now it doesn’t. Maybe taxpayers taking the brunt of it in case of police misbehavior is a case of a system “failing loudly”, a useful indicator that the police doesn’t work well and people should elect differently in favor of revamping the police according to current realities.

classified 6y ago

The whole civil asset forfeiture shtick is making things up to rob people. How are phones different?

AdrianB1 6y ago

I saw an article of a real lawyer that explained the decision, but he also included a priceless information: qualified immunity does not come from a law or statute, it is a made-up term by the SCOTUS a few decades away. It is mind-boggling that such thing exists and it is also very hard to believe that legislators did not remove it into oblivion.

mleonhard 6y ago
Please post a link to the article.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  The case is discussed here: https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/court-rules-against-cops-who-arrested-man-on-sidewalk-ep-7288 https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/court-rules-against-cops-w... The qualified immunity is discussed here: https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/supreme-court-strikes-down-qualified-immunity-claim-ep-7276 https://soundcloud.com/stevelehto/supreme-court-strikes-down... The lawyer's web site is: https://lehtoslaw.com/ https://lehtoslaw.com/

hayst4ck 6y ago

There must be some uncomfortable truth in regards to police officers, the type of thing you only understand if you are responsible for leading/paying them. Clearly police officers are above the law in America. Clearly blue lives matter/thin blue line is a very deep cultural problem within the force. Clearly police unions protect people who shouldn't be protected. Clearly police officers protect their peers when their peers commit crime. Clearly there is some level of infiltration by white supremacists into police forces. Clearly police in major cities do not do a very good job of de-escalation at all. The average citizen has almost certainly seen a video of a police officer acting outrageously and not ending up in prison. Everyone here has theories that will solve it: end qualified immunity, fix incentives, destroy police unions. Most likely none of us are experts. I can't shake the feeling that there is some truth or barrier to this problem that the average person doesn't know about/the government doesn't think we can handle being told. If nothing else any reform must have the blessing of police officers. If police officers quit en masse that is something society at large isn't willing to tolerate. Just like the old slashdot e-mail reform meme of ol' (https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/04/06/1629219/analysis-of-spam-and-a-proposed-solution https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/04/06/1629219/analysis-of-...), I suspect we need a similar meme for police reform.

itronitron 6y ago
>> Clearly police officers are above the law in America. I think many law enforcement officers view themselves as 'the law' and therefore believe that the ends justify the means. The popular, although dated, culture backs them up on that and there are many laws that favor law enforcement over suspects. Police in the US think they are above the law because in many ways they are. The good ones know how to find the balance and keep the peace.
- aneemzic 6y ago
  I guess it stems from a time when all you really had to work with was physical evidence and the only records being what officers had written down. So it really wouldn't have worked any other way. A suspect is always going to say whatever makes them seem innocent. "I wasn't holding that knife when you arrested me" would be impossible to disprove if the suspect was wearing gloves at the time or forensic evidence wasn't yet available. So in some ways the officers word had to hold more weight. It seems like the only solution is for every single interaction to be digitally recorded.