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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

You're not including the reasons why qualified immunity is bad though, is this a "devil's advocate" post?

I mean the examples you mentioned would get thrown out by a judge because the examples cited are people doing their jobs.

They're getting rid of qualified immunity because the police is abusing their power to assault and murder people.

I'm not even going to soften that one by saying 'some' police, because inaction is complicity. If one in ten cops are bad, the other nine are complicit for not acting and correcting the one.

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Qualified immunity does not allow assault or murder.

Well it does protect your from civil penalties for law and murder

Not in the case of criminal law violations. Civil suits should not be used as a blunt weapon to end run criminal complaints only because they set the bar lower. This is antithetical to tort reform.

Most police officers don't get murder charges anyway. Civil court exist for something. Saying that people should sue criminal instead of civil is up to the victim team not you.

If people don't want to be sued civil they should do a better job first. Removing bs laws that don't regulate anything anyway would be good also.

Laws are meant to be respected not to be dodge because your job is important. Everybody job is.

> Civil court exist for something.

Sure, but that something isn't criminal law.

What you are saying is factually wrong. If I can sue a mall security for something. I should be able to sue a police officer for the same. The job of the defendant doesn't change the status of the charge/request. Most public servant don't work as a spy imbedded in Russia.

Your logic doesn't make any sense. You can sue for absolutely anything, but that doesn't mean a judge is willing to hear your case or that it is grounded upon any law.

An individual can be found innocent in criminal court and guilty in civil court for the same incident

It allows for harassment, though, and for folks to arrest people willy-nilly. And as the other person said, you are never really responsible for the assault or murder like you would be if you were a private person.

Qualified immunity does not shield police from wrongful detention or arrest. An arrest must be valid according to a given charge and evidence even if those do not survive to trial.

In practice, it does.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/they-get-a-get-out-of-jail...

> “In such cases, when the court declines to establish whether police used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, it avoids setting a clearly established precedent for future cases, even for the most egregious acts of police violence,” the report said. “In effect, the same conduct can repeatedly go unpunished.”

> For example, there’s Jessop v. City of Fresno, Calif., in which a pair of businessmen alleged that police officers had stolen some $225,000 in cash and rare coins they had seized while executing search warrants. The officers were deemed entitled to qualified immunity because “at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant.”

Those are both irrelevant to the issue at hand: wrongful arrest. Wrongful arrest occurs when either the incorrect person is detained or when a person is detained without merit.

In order for police to detain people they need to place them under arrest, which includes Maranda warnings, or have a signed warrant.

It shields them from civil liability for wrongful arrest, as the courts will apparently go "there's no established law that you can't arrest someone for no good reason on Thursday at 9:53pm on Third Street".

We have friendly prosecutors who "could indict a ham sandwich" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich#Cultural_impact) mysteriously failing to get an indictment to handle the criminal side of it.

An indictment is not an arrest. An indictment comes from a district attorney while an arrest comes from police. The two don't even have to be associated with each other as a person can be indicted before they are arrested, or vise versa.

An indictment is a motion to proceed to trial, and often doesn't even require the availability or presence of the person. An arrest is a detention of a person to police custody.

The point: there aren't gonna be criminal consequences for a bad cop who made a wrongful arrest if it never goes to trial.

QI shields them from civil suits, so they're quite well protected on both fronts.

Even more to the point is that there is a readily identifiable problem. It is better to put energy towards fixing the problem than apply a really shit work around with horrible second and third order sequences only for the point of doing what you couldn't do the correct way.

Police absolutely do not have to read your Miranda rights in order to arrest you -- they only need to read your rights if they plan to question you with regards to a criminal investigation and they would like to use your statements as evidence in a court of law.

> In order for police to detain people they need to place them under arrest

That is not true. Police can detain you for some period of time without placing you under arrest. You can be detained for “reasonable suspicion” that you were involved in a crime. There are naturally a lot of arguments about what qualifies as reasonable suspicion.

This is why every “know your rights” organization instructs people to ask, “am I being detained? am I free to leave?” when trying to determine their status or end a police encounter. The link below is just one example.

https://www.halt.org/am-i-being-detained-6-questions-you-sho...

> That is not true. Police can detain you for some period of time without placing you under arrest.

That is a 4th amendment violation. You are free to leave police presence at any time up until they place you under arrest. If you are detained without arrest the remedy is to ask to be arrested. At that point police must arrest you or release you, because any evidence or detention after that point is invalid and invalidate such in the future for the related matter.

Of course an even better answer is to just ask for an attorney, but either way the result is the same.

No, it's not.

A traffic stop is a temporary detention without an arrest. You are not free to leave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_stop

The most important word in that entire Wikipedia article is brief. The stop requires probably cause and must not exceed the minimum time necessary to inform dispatch, issue a citation, and perform a basic warrant search on their computer. Signing a citation provides a written promise to appear in court so that police do not have to arrest you and is not an admission of guilt. Refusal to sign is grounds for arrest. Either way police cannot reasonably communicate to you from another moving vehicle, which is the primary basis of such a stop, not a detainment pending other inquiries.

There are a number of reasons they can detain you without arresting you. For example, you can be detained because you refused to let the police search your car for drugs and they make you wait while they get a warrant. Similar situations can happen in residences, and a traffic ticket is detaining without arrest.

Asking for arrest will not help your case, nor will asking for a lawyer.

You can be hauled to jail without charges as well, since most places have a grace period before they file the charges.

> For example, you can be detained because you refused to let the police search your car for drugs and they make you wait while they get a warrant.

That is not a lawful detainment. Out convenience for both parties police can ask a suspect to wait until a warrant arrives so that the police don't have to arrest them. In other words you can offer to leave, but they are going to arrest you anyways otherwise the detainment is completely voluntary.

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