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It's not a structural weakness, it's an intentional feature. Our legislature specifically and intentionally made it impossible for citizens (or anyone) to hold

It's not a structural weakness, it's an intentional feature. Our legislature specifically and intentionally made it impossible for citizens (or anyone) to hold police responsible for anything.

idle_zealot 5mo ago
It is a weakness, but yes, an intentional one. Why a weakness? It leads to structural instability.
db48x 5mo ago
This is a misunderstanding. In most cases you cannot sue the federal and state governments, with very important exceptions, but you can definitely sue the police. Government officials, such as the police, usually only have _qualified_ immunity rather than absolute or sovereign immunity, and even then only when they were acting in good faith and are not being accused of violating someone’s constitutional rights. The real problem right now is how the courts determine if an official was acting in good faith. Right now they are assumed to have acted in good faith unless it has already been “clearly established” that what they did was illegal. This means that the official can argue that they didn’t know that their actions were illegal because no prior case ever dealt with that exact fact pattern. This works far too often and has let a lot of very guilty police get away with their crimes. Still, some police officers _are_ held to account, so it is not actually impossible.
- petsfed 5mo ago
  Which has led to police officers using "the punishment I received is far in excess of the last time an officer of this department was punished for habitually arresting and raping minors!" as a defense, and it works.
mandevil 5mo ago
Not the legislature: the Supreme Court. Qualified Immunity was created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court back in the 1960's when a police officer arrested- and then a judge convicted- a group of black and white Episcopal priests for "making a disturbance of the peace"- that is, having black and white people out in public together as equals. This was Pierson v. Ray, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967. The current implementation of it- where you need to have "clearly establish" a Constitutional right with a prior case in this region- is based on Pearson v. Callahan from 2009, and it takes a terrible Supreme Court precedent and makes it even worse. This has created the patchwork "no case in the circuit has clearly established that a police officer must not make a warrantless search on a Tuesday in May" sort of quibbling. The work of legislatures has been to roll back qualified immunity. Colorado, New Mexico, and California have removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level. LEO's can still claim qualified immunity for suits under federal law, but they cannot for some suits brought under state law or the state constitution in those states. The Supreme Court has also, at the same time they've made it harder to hold police to account, made it harder to hold politicians to account, gutting bribery laws and expanding "free speech" to include paying politicians. And the recent idea that a President can't be prosecuted for any "official acts" is also nonsense created by the Supreme Court. This isn't Congress fault, there were laws that prevented it. The Supreme Court just decided that they didn't want to enforce those laws. The Supreme Court at the root of a lot of the dysfunction in American politics, and somehow still has more respect than they deserve.
- throwworhtthrow 5mo ago
  What's your source for: > California [has] removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#State_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#State_law, it's Connecticut, not California, as the third state which limited qualified immunity.
  - mandevil 5mo ago
    California SB 2, signed by Gavin Newsome in 2021, removed Qualified Immunity as a defense for all lawsuits brought under the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act. I'm not a lawyer, and I have never lived in California so I don't know how much that covers. The QI removal I knew best was Colorado (CO's law also made individual LEO's have to pay with their own money, up to certain limits), and was doing some googling which listed California and New Mexico.
- sidewndr46 5mo ago
  Isn't it way more narrow than what you're saying? For New Mexico's cases it only applies to civil rights violations. If the police officer just for example kills someone in the line of duty, he still has qualified immunity
  - mandevil 5mo ago
    Civil Rights law is how these sorts of things are enforced by individuals who were harmed, in your example a Law Enforcement Officer violated someone's civil rights by killing them in the line of duty and their family can sue for violation of the deceased's civil right to life. Qualified Immunity short-circuits that entire process for the individual LEO's (it does not protect the organization, just individual officers). If the prosecutor thinks they can get a criminal conviction for murder (or whatever) that is a totally separate process that is between the People (whom the prosecutor represents) and the defendant (in this case, the LEO who killed the guy in the line of duty). Qualified Immunity never applied to criminal cases(1). But criminal cases will not provide any money or anything like that to the victim (or their family)- that comes from civil suits alleging that the LEO violated someone's civil rights. And that is what removing Qualified Immunity encourages, individuals who were harmed can sue individual officers and receive payments from those individual officers (Colorado's police reform bill holds individual officers responsible with their own money up to certain limits where the organization becomes responsible; I don't know about other states). 1: Which are rare against LEO's because prosecutor's don't want to anger the LEO's that they work with regularly. This is why civil suits are generally the main avenue for people to get justice from over-zealous LEO's.

It's not a structural weakness, it's an intentional feature. Our legislature specifically and intentionally made it impossible for citizens (or anyone) to hold police responsible for anything.

idle_zealot 5mo ago

It is a weakness, but yes, an intentional one. Why a weakness? It leads to structural instability.

db48x 5mo ago

This is a misunderstanding. In most cases you cannot sue the federal and state governments, with very important exceptions, but you can definitely sue the police. Government officials, such as the police, usually only have _qualified_ immunity rather than absolute or sovereign immunity, and even then only when they were acting in good faith and are not being accused of violating someone’s constitutional rights. The real problem right now is how the courts determine if an official was acting in good faith. Right now they are assumed to have acted in good faith unless it has already been “clearly established” that what they did was illegal. This means that the official can argue that they didn’t know that their actions were illegal because no prior case ever dealt with that exact fact pattern. This works far too often and has let a lot of very guilty police get away with their crimes. Still, some police officers _are_ held to account, so it is not actually impossible.

petsfed 5mo ago
Which has led to police officers using "the punishment I received is far in excess of the last time an officer of this department was punished for habitually arresting and raping minors!" as a defense, and it works.

mandevil 5mo ago

Not the legislature: the Supreme Court. Qualified Immunity was created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court back in the 1960's when a police officer arrested- and then a judge convicted- a group of black and white Episcopal priests for "making a disturbance of the peace"- that is, having black and white people out in public together as equals. This was Pierson v. Ray, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967. The current implementation of it- where you need to have "clearly establish" a Constitutional right with a prior case in this region- is based on Pearson v. Callahan from 2009, and it takes a terrible Supreme Court precedent and makes it even worse. This has created the patchwork "no case in the circuit has clearly established that a police officer must not make a warrantless search on a Tuesday in May" sort of quibbling. The work of legislatures has been to roll back qualified immunity. Colorado, New Mexico, and California have removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level. LEO's can still claim qualified immunity for suits under federal law, but they cannot for some suits brought under state law or the state constitution in those states. The Supreme Court has also, at the same time they've made it harder to hold police to account, made it harder to hold politicians to account, gutting bribery laws and expanding "free speech" to include paying politicians. And the recent idea that a President can't be prosecuted for any "official acts" is also nonsense created by the Supreme Court. This isn't Congress fault, there were laws that prevented it. The Supreme Court just decided that they didn't want to enforce those laws. The Supreme Court at the root of a lot of the dysfunction in American politics, and somehow still has more respect than they deserve.

throwworhtthrow 5mo ago
What's your source for: > California [has] removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#State_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#State_law, it's Connecticut, not California, as the third state which limited qualified immunity.
- mandevil 5mo ago
  California SB 2, signed by Gavin Newsome in 2021, removed Qualified Immunity as a defense for all lawsuits brought under the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act. I'm not a lawyer, and I have never lived in California so I don't know how much that covers. The QI removal I knew best was Colorado (CO's law also made individual LEO's have to pay with their own money, up to certain limits), and was doing some googling which listed California and New Mexico.
sidewndr46 5mo ago
Isn't it way more narrow than what you're saying? For New Mexico's cases it only applies to civil rights violations. If the police officer just for example kills someone in the line of duty, he still has qualified immunity
- mandevil 5mo ago
  Civil Rights law is how these sorts of things are enforced by individuals who were harmed, in your example a Law Enforcement Officer violated someone's civil rights by killing them in the line of duty and their family can sue for violation of the deceased's civil right to life. Qualified Immunity short-circuits that entire process for the individual LEO's (it does not protect the organization, just individual officers). If the prosecutor thinks they can get a criminal conviction for murder (or whatever) that is a totally separate process that is between the People (whom the prosecutor represents) and the defendant (in this case, the LEO who killed the guy in the line of duty). Qualified Immunity never applied to criminal cases(1). But criminal cases will not provide any money or anything like that to the victim (or their family)- that comes from civil suits alleging that the LEO violated someone's civil rights. And that is what removing Qualified Immunity encourages, individuals who were harmed can sue individual officers and receive payments from those individual officers (Colorado's police reform bill holds individual officers responsible with their own money up to certain limits where the organization becomes responsible; I don't know about other states). 1: Which are rare against LEO's because prosecutor's don't want to anger the LEO's that they work with regularly. This is why civil suits are generally the main avenue for people to get justice from over-zealous LEO's.