Cops Get Qualified Immunity After Jailing Florida Man for 'I Eat Ass' Sticker
reason.com
reason.com
The current method what we get is officers doing anything they want under the color of law, even when they know better, and they throw up their hands with "immunity". Like those bad movies where they kill someone and be all like "diplomatic immunity".
As it stands now QI is just something made up by SCOTUS and not created by anyone representing the people.
While QI isn't codified in the way you're talking about, Congress and the states do have laws on the books to expose themselves to liability. That's where QI comes from - as an extension of statutory authority to hold the government legally liable. When and how the government and its agents are exposed to liability is very clearly spelled out.
Very early supreme court opinions took a nearly absolutist position on private right of action against the government being barred under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The court has slowly backed away from that position over time.
Flagging for egregious rule-breaking, whatever- but just because someone farmed fake points off the TOP sort, they can go around effectively muting people for sometimes no reason at all.
I've often wondered about scraping HN for dead/flagged comments and see how many were actually throughout, insightful comments vs how many were just trollbait/flaming.
I just feel it may be a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Maybe today will be the day, but shit that's a whole lot of comments to collate, sort and read. Every time I see a grey comment though....
I frequently see stickers promoting implied indecent exposure and vandalism, eg the Calvin/Hobbes theme of a character urinating on Chevy/Ford/etc logos. I see, less often, the king of four letter words. It's been a while since I've seen the brazenly bulbous bovine booboos dangling beneath the rear bumper, typically of a truck, due to necessary clearance. I see conditional threats and calls for violence too.
I can't say that if I was an officer I wouldn't kind of want to arrest him, if only to see the color of his lips. I wouldn't. If the guy has a steady diet of hotdogs, his veracity is unassailable. If he's really a cannibal, so are some officers[1]. If he's simply crass, he's no minority.
My impression is that he's successfully self isolating, which may be good. Who wouldn't keep a distance from someone with such a bumper sticker? Let him have his ass and eat it too.
Free speech.
1. https://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/nypd-cannibal-cop-vs-f...
-FL Resident
If this happened here the chain of events would look somewhat like this: The police would stop the driver and inform them of the distracting attachment, possible giving a fine. If the driver refused to remove the sticker then the police would simply revoke the drivers license and impound the car. If the driver tried to resist they would go to jail over that and/or driving without a license. The driver can then choose to appeal the decision and have a court decide if the attachment was too distracting or not.
But somehow, police departments keep being able to justify and apparently receive their budgets despite cops doing all kinds of wasteful stuff that in no way contributes to public safety. Accountability should be through department budgets, i.e. they should be cut it police are wasting taxpayer money. But somehow that doesnt happen
Look at private security like you'd find at any venue with tens of thousands of rowdy drunks. It has basically none of the problems that municipal policing does because the incentive structure isn't broken. The employers will readily fire non-performers or employees who are a lawsuit waiting to happen. The venues that hire the companies can find replacements if/when the companies fail to deliver what they're paid to. They also don't waste money on MRAPs.
Imagine a private security officer wasting time on a vulgar bumper sticker let alone arresting someone. They'd get chewed out or maybe fired for exposing the employer to liability for an unlawful arrest. That just doesn't happen to government police.
The broken incentives in policing cannot be fixed so long as they are getting their pay stubs on the same letterhead as the judges, DAs and city officials. They need to be kicked out of "the club" so that they can be properly scrutinized.
Police officers use judgement and selective enforcement all the time, seemingly whenever it benefits them, and this case was no different. The officers wanted to rain hell on this guy, and they justified it with legal cruft.
If a law is on the books, then it should be enforced. If it should no longer be enforced, then it should no longer be a law on the books.
And of course I realize this is idealistic, and likely not realistic because lawmakers pretty much never devote time to things like cleaning up such things, short of public outcry.
(Though it supports the idea that all laws should have a sunset clause and have to be intentionally renewed rather than just stay on the books because of apathy)
Furthermore, all bills should be subject to judicial review before they reach the President's desk, and the standard should be whether a literal reading of the Constitution and all its amendments (including the 9th and 10th) in contemporary English grant Congress the authority to have passed it in the first place. None of this "what did the Framers mean?" bullshit. They had their time to govern; it's our turn now.
If a bill fails review, the authors should be booted out of Congress for having exceeded their authority.
This is honestly one of my favourite political concepts at the moment. I first became aware of it after reading an interview of Owsley Stanley of all people, but I've seen it discussed here on HN recently too. I really think it could solve a limited but very important set of society's problems. It's also neither left nor right wing in any meaningful sense, it has a broad non-partisan appeal.
Also, under the US system, many broadly popular policies (marijuana legalization, public health care option) have no realistic path to enactment, so that's far from a guarantee.
are you saying the right is more likely to want to hassle troublemakers? If that were true, sunset clause would be a policy of the left, no?
I don't think of it as left or right, it's a libertarian policy. Right now in the US the left skews authoritarian and the right libertarian but that's not a constant (e.g Texas abortion law)
If that's not ironic, don't know what is.
I don't want to be paranoid, I don't want to be an activist. But I can't even talk to you normally anymore. I constantly have to worry if I'm allowed to say certain words, I have to check my accounts to see if I was shadowbanned and I have to do that on all platforms once in a while.
It's ridiculous. I don't even think any extreme thoughts and I can't even be left alone. Like.. Leave me alone, you know? The internet wasn't like this 10 years ago.
> the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled yesterday that the case is not so cut and dry, awarding qualified immunity to English and thus dooming the suit Webb brought against him for allegedly violating his free speech rights and for falsely arresting him.
The lawsuit wouldn't be against the officer, though, would it? Seems like if an officer is doing the job as they were trained to, and ends up violating a citizen's rights in the process, it's the police dept that should answer for it.
"The purpose of suing a government official in his or her individual capacity is to impose personal liability for actions taken under color of state law."
This case sounds like a Section 1983 civil claim for violation of constitutional rights, where you can hold the individual official responsible for money damages if they violated a clearly-established constitutional right acting under color of state law. 42 USC § 1983.
"Suing a government official in an official capacity, on the other hand, is an alternative way to assert a claim against the entity he or she represents. . . ." (citations omitted).
This is really just suing the state government unit to which the official belongs, but stated differently.
That's not getting into all the immunity issues that arise in suing officials/government units.