4 ms·

No, it's worse than that. QI means officers are immune from lawsuits unless their behavior has been previously found to be unworthy of immunity and they were aw

No, it's worse than that. QI means officers are immune from lawsuits unless their behavior has been previously found to be unworthy of immunity and they were aware or should have been aware of this fact. This is, by design, an impossible standard to meet, so in practice QI is unlimited and absolute.

bradleyjg 4y ago
So we should expect zero lawsuits against police officers to have been won at trial or settled last year, right?
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  ~ zero. Tangent: are settlements not typically paid by the city or the union? (And the union will get the money from the city in the end, anyway.)
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    Always the city. There’s universal indemnification de facto or de jure. This is a bigger issue than QI but gets virtually no attention. I suspect the plaintiff’s bar is behind that as they’d prefer QI go but indemnification stay.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      if you fix QI, cities would fix indemnification themselves pretty quickly. The problem with QI is that since the suits never even get started, the police and the cities get to ignore the problem.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  the actual figure is way lower than it should be. there are, however police officers dumb enough and violent enough to meet the ridiculously high bar that is required.
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    I don’t disagree. But statements like this are inaccurate and unhelpful: in practice QI is unlimited and absolute
petsfed 4y ago
Which leads to these nightmare scenarios where actual defense attorneys and union officials ask in earnest "Why is this officer being held liable for forcible rape of a minor today, when such behavior was already found to be immune 90 years ago?" [1] Something that gets tossed around a lot for firearms is a national database of owners. I think there's a variety of problems with that idea, but I really don't understand why we don't have such a thing for police officers. Like, what is the harm in having a federal database of every officer of the peace, so in the future, somebody like Derek Colling can't be fired for assaulting a photographer, find work 2 states away where he then shoots a prone, incapacitated man in the back, twice[2]. Like, that shouldn't have happened in the first place. We have such a system for doctors and lawyers and engineers. Why not police? 1. https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/06/09/patrick-rose-boston-police-files-sexual-assault https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/06/09/patrick-rose-boston-pol... 2. https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/settlement-reached-in-albany-county-officer-shooting-case/article_1e94c716-d56a-11ec-af3f-eb334ebb8cae.html https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/se...

bradleyjg 4y ago

So we should expect zero lawsuits against police officers to have been won at trial or settled last year, right?

actionfromafar 4y ago
~ zero. Tangent: are settlements not typically paid by the city or the union? (And the union will get the money from the city in the end, anyway.)
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  Always the city. There’s universal indemnification de facto or de jure. This is a bigger issue than QI but gets virtually no attention. I suspect the plaintiff’s bar is behind that as they’d prefer QI go but indemnification stay.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    if you fix QI, cities would fix indemnification themselves pretty quickly. The problem with QI is that since the suits never even get started, the police and the cities get to ignore the problem.
adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
the actual figure is way lower than it should be. there are, however police officers dumb enough and violent enough to meet the ridiculously high bar that is required.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  I don’t disagree. But statements like this are inaccurate and unhelpful: in practice QI is unlimited and absolute

petsfed 4y ago

Which leads to these nightmare scenarios where actual defense attorneys and union officials ask in earnest "Why is this officer being held liable for forcible rape of a minor today, when such behavior was already found to be immune 90 years ago?" [1] Something that gets tossed around a lot for firearms is a national database of owners. I think there's a variety of problems with that idea, but I really don't understand why we don't have such a thing for police officers. Like, what is the harm in having a federal database of every officer of the peace, so in the future, somebody like Derek Colling can't be fired for assaulting a photographer, find work 2 states away where he then shoots a prone, incapacitated man in the back, twice[2]. Like, that shouldn't have happened in the first place. We have such a system for doctors and lawyers and engineers. Why not police? 1. https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/06/09/patrick-rose-boston-police-files-sexual-assault https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/06/09/patrick-rose-boston-pol... 2. https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/settlement-reached-in-albany-county-officer-shooting-case/article_1e94c716-d56a-11ec-af3f-eb334ebb8cae.html https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/se...