This is why high speed police chases are banned in many states, and the PIT maneuver is banned in many countries.
Qualified immunity is troubling. Because it was a judicial invention and never actually codified into law, it does seem too easy for it to become “I Am The Law” even if it is legitimate sometimes.
The ant thing in particular is fucked up. All that just for some erratic driving? That’s nuts.
The fucked up part is the ant bit.
The premise behind qualified immunity isn’t necessarily bad (although some of the bigotry in the lower-court actions in the case that gave rise to the doctrine do taint that premise with unsavoriness), but the current implementation is ridiculous.
I’m not an attorney and I don’t know anything beyond what was in the article, but I’d think that the two questions to explore would/should have been:
- Was it excessive force to use that restraint technique under the circumstances among common police practices?
- Was it negligence to not check for fire ants when bringing the plaintiff to ground, under the circumstances?
In a perfect world, I’d think there would/should be some kind of standards in place regarding police behavior. If such a thing existed, it would be reasonable to compare the details of the situation against those standards to come up with an answer.
I’d also think that it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to have “qualified immunity” for police, but the hurdle being crossed be having a judge do that comparison, rather than checking to see whether there has been an analogous court ruling saying it’s bad.
But, having spent a few years doing public entities business (including law enforcement liability)… maybe that opinion isn’t as objective as I wish it to be. It’s quite possible that such a shift would only make qualified immunity a little less effed.
I think it is. Imo, those who it applies to (I suppose that should be to whom it applies) should be held to a higher standard than everyone else, not a lower (or no, as is increasingly the case) standard. And if there really are circumstances that should make the behavior acceptable, well then that’s exactly what the trial should be for. They shouldn’t get an easy blanket excuse for breaking laws they’re meant to uphold.
The legal liability situation with LEOs is challenging because of the predicaments they sometimes find themselves in, they do operate in a grey area and sometimes things that are reasonable and the correct decision in a law enforcement context look really horrible to folks unfamiliar with the nature of the decision-making.
For example, several years ago, video circulated of a cop running down a fleeing suspect with his patrol car. It looked horrific, and there was a lot of public outcry.
However, that individual was armed, had a history of home invasions (or at least home invasion allegations), and there was a plausibly legitimate fear by officers in pursuit that by they time they caught up with him on foot, he would have gone into someone’s home and potentially taken a hostage. But there was an officer there, still in his vehicle, and there was a perceived need to end the pursuit NOW before the public was put in greater danger. So…
Even in normal times, had the suspect filed a civil suit against the officer, and had it gone before a jury…the jury could very well have found the officer liable even though the split-second decision was plausibly the least-bad decision that could have been made.
I’m doubly sensitive to that because of a phenomenon that dominated the last few years of my time doing public entity work (I moved to capital modeling from there about 10 years ago). In several districts in the US, if a police department or a police officer ended up before a jury in a civil suit, the police would likely lose even when they were objectively, legally in the right. For very understandable reasons, police could not get a fair trial.
Going beyond that is the very real likelihood that in criminal cases, folks accused of crimes could, and probably would, use frivolous or dubious civil litigation to derail, delay, or interfere with the criminal prosecution against them.
Qualified immunity as it is done today is a bad thing. There absolutely are officers and departments/agencies that behave badly and need to be held accountable.
However, that need for accountability can’t hold open the door for the use of civil courts to interfere or deter officers from doing their necessary, and sometimes very ugly-looking jobs.
I don’t know how you do that and manage the risk of abuse of such a mechanism.
(But qualified immunity as it’s done today sure as hell isn’t it.)
1 Like
So is this a real post or AI?
My long post above was fully written by me, with no AI editing.
The post I just made to the Republican darndest thing thread, the one that included reference to development of an Office theme (boy, have we digressed there), was AI-edited after I wrote the draft from scratch.
This comment, is fully written by me, with no AI editing. It’s not AI. I just sound like a bot sometimes. 