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Qualified immunity is one of these baby-boomer neighborhood patrol vestiges with a subtle undertone of racism and xenophobia that will hopefully be limited in due time as the vast abuses it enables today become more apparent.

The legal burden on the victim is just absurd, not least given how the qualified immunity boomerangs further into the 4th amendment claims.

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Is it a baby-boomer thing? I always thought it was Sovereign Immunity combined with the police acting as agents of the state.

Sovereign Immunity always seemed overall a good idea to me, but its negatives should be mitigated by making the government as small as possible in the first place.

It doesn't seem like there'd be a need for a "right to petition the government" if you removed Sovereign Immunity, since you could otherwise go through the courts. So I don't think it's recent.

Baby boomers ruined everything else, might as well blame them for this too

What are these "subtle undertones of racism and xenophobia"? There is nothing about QI that is predicated upon race.

If it was explicitly predicated on race it wouldn't be subtle undertones.

I'd say it's more a pro-establishment than racist or xenophobic bias, but in the US the former ends up producing the latter in effect.

If something is not based on race, how can it be racist? That makes no sense at all.

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