Supreme Court asked to strike down immunity for police who brutally beat student | Hacker News Reader

Supreme Court asked to strike down immunity for police who brutally beat student

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268 pointsstefan_222 comments

There needs to be a police reform.

Before I became a programmer, I wanted to be a cop, studied criminal justice....as I was going to school I had some cops in class. I befriended many cops and started meeting outside of school with them.

That has resulted in me switching to computer science. I saw cops drinking, telling me to have a drink and not worry....telling me to just call them if I get pulled over. This really didn't sit right with me, and bothers me even today. Then, I heard a story from one cop being out with cop buddies and driving wasted, smashing into car and running away.

I also ran into extremely racist narcs in Chicago. Who would loudly say the N word around African-Americans.

This was like 10+ years ago.

I actually have a cop close to me now, he is a sergeant. He recently told me all his new recruits cannot write, and his job is to rewrite their reports. They have a hard time hiring people now, and this is in one of the most affluent areas in the US.

It seems that younger generation have a very negative view of the police, and rightfully so. There really needs to be an overhaul, however, I really don't know how can you fix something so rotten.

Start by not hiring anyone with a history in law enforcement.

That will only make it worse, what decent person would go into a job that blacklists you from other jobs?

Not sure why that matters. If you're a town and you don't want terrible law enforcement then you could fire all of the cops, hire new ones that are actually just social workers, lawyers, etc. and go from there. Other towns would be hiring people that you never would but that doesn't affect your local area.

> He recently told me all his new recruits cannot write

That is shocking and depressing.

That it is.

Every time some new videos comes out, I'm like yep no surprise. However, there is a significant percentage of Americans who refuse to listen, they just want to defend police, saying there are "bad apples" everywhere. However, there is systemic rot in the police. An honest cop will have a bad time, as they did not obey the bullshit "thin blue line".

People who use the "bad apple" phrase like that are using it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means and it drives me crazy. The phrase is "one bad apple spoils the bunch."

It's all phrases, like there is some "reclamation" of language to mean the opposite of its original intent. I was recently talking to someone who called himself a "pacifist" so I began the phrase "Si Vis Pacem..." (If you want peace... note that the word pacem is the root of the word pacifist), but even after explaining to him that the ancient phrase ends with "para bellum" (prepare for war) he still defended his draft dodging as "for peace".

Was he using the phrase or just calling himself a pacifist?

He was calling himself a pacifist. But he had no idea what the word "pacifist" actually means - the people who use it today use it without knowing the actual meaning. I did actually ask him to tell me in our language (not English, but he was using the English word) what "pacifist" means and he could not tell me. It's an excuse, not a belief.

But I'm not ranting about pacifists. I'm ranting about how many words are phrases are being redefined. Another one is the word "shame" in my country. Those is favour of judicial reform are using the word as if it has a positive connotation for the past few weeks.

There is nothing in the etymology of the word "pacifism" that restricts it to use in the context or support of war or preparations thereof.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pacifism#etymonline_v_2963

I love Etymology online, I use that site often. You need to read between the lines to understand the context that the site provides. The root of the word "pacifist" is "peace", the word means one who promotes or supports peace and peaceful methods. The ancient phrase that I referenced literally means "if you want peace, prepare for war" - meaning that if this pacifist really believes in peaceful methods, the way to persuade for the other side to use peaceful methods is to be prepared to wage war. There is a good reason that this phrase has stood the test of the centuries.

the way to persuade for the other side to use peaceful methods

But being a pacifist has nothing to do with persuading other people to be peaceful. He's describing himself and his own attitude. I agree with the para bellum saying but it has nothing to do with an individual being a pacifist.

If his own attitude is to prefer the path of peace to the path of war, history has shown over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that one must demonstrate that he is prepared to fight back. Hence the well known ancient proverb. And I would argue that it is far more true today than it was in an age when the aggressors couldn't readily determine one's preparedness.

The "a few bad apples" line is always darkly funny to me - a complete 180 of the familiar "a few bad apples spoils the barrel."

Most cops are probably not horrible people. However, the current policing system protects the worst, and punishes anyone for speaking out - sometimes violently.

I don't think it's a 180. It's to the effect of 'a few bad apples ... spoils the reputation of the bunch and we should be conscious that not everyone is bad.'

Not that I agree with it, but that's the angle it comes from at least from what I gather.

That's not the historical or empirical meaning of that phrase.

Rot in fruit literally spreads to adjacent fruit. This isn't a lemon market, it's a literal "a few bad apples cause the rest to rot".

I've got anecdotal reports from middle school & junior high teachers that the literacy level of incoming classes been trending strongly downward for about seven or eight years. No sign of stopping so far. Hopefully it's just our city, but I doubt it.

And coincidentally, I listened to the first episode of this podcast today!

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Wow. Just wow. Really nuts how we got where we are.

Not defending any of that. In addition it also doesn't help that we've had generations of parents telling kids to be lawyers and doctors and PhDs and avoid any type of civil service work. I feel like a large contributor to the apathy surrounding our government institutions is that nobody wants to be a civil servant. I'm not sure how exactly to fix this, it's just an observation.

I feel like that's generally because parents want their kids to be financially secure, and civil service jobs generally pay pretty poorly. That said, policing is often an exception - there are places where they're underpaid, but often their salaries are solid relative to cost of living.

One direction into resolving this, which may seem counter intuitive, is to put more money into police training, and have higher salaries for desired positions.

This in turn (should) attract more people and thus get a better pool to select candidates from.

However the nepotism and in-group mentality does make this difficult to another degree.

Though to play devils advocate, it’s human nature to pull more into an in-group when you feel anyone outside that group is attacking you, and threatening your livelihood for the actions of others.

We should condemn the officers that act wrongly, but calling all of them bastards and such just makes the problem far worse.

Now there’s even greater incentive for police officers to stand with their own, and not call out inappropriate behavior.

Further, now people don’t want to be police officers, making the talent pool very low. And I don’t blame anyone for that. I had a desire to also be an officer at one point, but if I were a kid today, I’d steer clear of it even if I wanted to do more good.

The problem with any solution in US is focus on hyperlocal policing.

US, even if it has private medicine, has tons of regulations around it - like requirement to have regulated medical degree to practice medicine.

For some reason it's impossible to pass law that police needs to have some regulated degree to practice policing.

Police unions are generally the reason it's impossible to pass any sort of reform laws, they easily strongarm politicians and spread copaganda

Cops at the police department I was talking about make around $100K+ with overtime. This is a pretty popular around many departments. Salaries are $60k but cops get a lot of overtime.

It isn't a problem that can be solved with money.

I'd argue that the salaries would be well-deserved if the police were in general better at their jobs, or at least weren't obviously abusive and corrupt in pretty much every jurisdiction.

I don't think 100k is such a magic number anymore that you couldn't find takers for "Make more, without needing the overtime, but get fired more easily if you fuck up". Break things up so you do simple shit that doesn't need to carry a gun for today's pay, have big responsibility but also big rewards if you do the hard shit.

Look how few people in this discussion are saying "oh man that's so much money for that job, I'm gonna quit my job and become a cop." Want top-tier people? Then you have to compete with other top-tier opportunities.

But unfortunately that would really only be easy if you were starting brand new thing from scratch. Much harder with entrenched interests anyway.

You have to have the money but you also have to have the ability to be top-tier. If everything is set up so that you're doomed to fail, you'll only have failures bothering to apply.

In the past this type of thing has usually been solved by creating a new police force under a different name, specific to some aspect that needs work. No idea if it would really help now.

> ...get fired more easily if you fuck up

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Cops already cover for each other's illegalities today when the worst punishment they seem to be getting is paid leave. How much more would they do when a job is on the line?

I've heard this argument before, and I think there's a kernel of truth there. Thing is, municipalities+towns+states have already poured significant public money into police earnings, thanks in part to police unions who negotiate generous overtime rules, defined benefit pensions, and even off-duty pay for private security [1].

I think most people would agree that higher education tends to bring higher salaries, but strangely this is exactly backwards with US policing. It seems to me becoming a police officer is a rare way to get comparatively high and stable earnings _without_ earning a degree or putting in the work and time investment associated with other decently paying jobs.

Meanwhile, Norway requires police officers to earn a three year bachelor's degree and over the past 12 months the # of police killings is low (I think 1). In the US, it's 1,117 - around 3 a day.[2][3]

How would you add a degree or substantial training requirement when the pay is already so high? The status quo in America is a national embarrassment, IMO.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/new-jersey-police-contrac...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

"There needs to be a police reform."

Americorps style residency in low income areas for, let's say, five years.

After such period, with exemplary behavior, one would become eligible for subsidized home ownership in a high income, single family zoned community - with similar covenants on professionalism and decorum.

It's win-win-win:

- Low income areas get young eager beavers who actually live and work in their neighborhoods - and are strongly incentivized to do good.

- Blue-collar workers (the police, very often BIPOC) have a pathway to home ownership and integration into higher income areas.

- Those areas end up with a police force that lives (and polices, and raises their kids) locally in their area.

Who decides "exemplary behavior"? If it's the current institutions, then anything up to and excluding shooting people in their beds at the wrong house will still be "exemplary".

That's the point - it's an end-run around the existing police institutions and unions, etc.

Both destinations - the communities that one polices in during the five year "public service" stint and the eventual destination communities with the subsidized housing - would create their own rules as to what constitutes "exemplary behavior".

There is nothing that the existing policing structures can offer that trumps subsidized home ownership in an affluent/upscale community. The officers will listen to the community and follow their rules.

Note: this is a very rough first expression of an idea I've been kicking around for a while so I will admit it's a little rough around the edges.

> If it's the current institutions, then anything up to and excluding shooting people in their beds at the wrong house will still be "exemplary".

Hell, some institutions make killing an obviously innocent person part of the rite of passage, like the LA Sheriff gangs.

I really like this idea, but you're going to need major top-down cultural changes as well. In the USA, I think it might have to come from Congress and/or SCOTUS, and their heads are very very far up their asses in this regard.

They already do that. The behavior is already stellar according to the people who actually measure it (other cops, what a coincidence)

The house in a HCOL area is paid for with overtime fraud and the only pensions left in America.

Georgia (the country, not the state in US) reformed the police by firing all cops and hiring brand new ones. Not sure how it will work long term, it was relatively recent.

A few localities in the US have tried things like this too. Fire all cops, fold city police department into surrounding county police department, re-hire fired city cops who meet certain criteria.

Back in 2020 amidst the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests, a lot was written about such a program in Camden, NJ: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/06/11/police-reform-camden.... However I don't know if things are still going well.

That's just politics and ensuring loyalty to the top of an organization one does not have control of

You could have joined and raised the bar, but shied away from it. The more negative the perception is, the more you guarantee only the worst will join

You can't. They filter out the people who are a threat to them. They even use the union to do this.

I would suggest doing some research on what happens when you try to raise the bar from the inside. There are countless examples of retaliation, to the point of murder, against people who question the status quo. Often times people who do as you suggest end up quitting in disgust anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico

You can't reform a bad institution from within as a low-level worker. Workplace culture comes from the top.

No you cannot. There are a bunch of politics, and silent rules. I don't think you understand how toxic the environment is and how childishly these cops can act.

I suggest reading r/protectandserve for a while. Bonus points if you follow threads after some massive video gets released. You will see a lot of bans of non-verified users and a lot of siding with the cop.

Here is a locked thread from Derek Chauvin sentencing, according to users trial was a sham. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/o7vpe7/der...

Take away their guns and build community service into their work schedules and they'll reform themselves pretty quickly. At the moment it's an attractive overglamorized profession for young men who played too much cops and robbers as children and who haven't spent enough time in their communities empathizing with people.

I think you need to intelligently create and build a parallel institution, with goals, tools, and organization culture better aligned to the needs of building up communities while keeping order in a modern society.

Start with a small scope at the start, fulfilling a small need in a niche part of government. You want to avoid starting a large organization or growing fast, as that would require to lift pieces and personel from existing law enforcement. Then you demonstrate value and a better track record as you build the good-will and cultural cache to slowly expand and push out traditional law enforcement from more and more areas of concern. This should be fairly tractable, as most law enforcement forces these days have a vast array of duties.

You will need a deft political hand to avoid getting on the bad side of existing "law and order" political power centers. You need to present yourself as someone who cares about safety and wants to free up cops to focus on "serious crime". This will help you control the narrative and undermine the eventual "not tough on crime" arguments.

Problem: that's been tried and failed so far. Eg. campus police, security guards, etc.

I think one major problem is that rejects from one domain can transition to another domain without penalties or problems.

Campus police and security guards are just an extension of the state-monopolized violence concept; that isn't what GP was suggesting.

Portland has been having success with Street Response program. 911 dispatches teams of EMTs and mental health specialists to deal with mental health crises.

I have wondered if could have separate organization or non-armed police that deals with administrative issues. Like taking reports or investigating crimes. I think it would be fine doing noise complaints or traffic violations. These are all things that the police have been ignoring recently. I think it would also reduce the problems with having armed police dealing with everything.

As someone living in Portland, I'll add to this that there's a general sense here that Street Response does a great job at handling these issues in a way that's both humane and efficient, while at the same time pretty much the entire city would agree that the police here have been intentionally both slow and unhelpful for years.

I think the biggest takeaway here is that having smaller organizations focused around specific areas, and that have legal intervention power but aren't inherently organized around violence, can help with public issues in statistically significant ways, and do it for cheap. PSR's budget is $12.6 million/year, compared to Portland police getting $249 million in 2023... and yet PSR by itself has reduced police dispatches by 3.2%, reduced fire department dispatches by 3.2%, dramatically cut down on the number of people taken to the hospital as a result of calls, and gets wildly positive reviews from both the general public and the people they respond to, who consider them extremely trustworthy compared to the police.

There are two problems in Portland that could benefit from focused non-police groups. I dont know if city could organize them or if police would allow them.

There has been big jump in murders since pandemic, mostly gang violence. Other cities have had success engaging with gang members and breaking the cycle of violence. Teams with trusted community members and social workers might have some success. Police probably wouldn’t work unlike cities where they are more trusted. Not sure if group should work with police to solve murder or if that hurt their position.

The other place would theft task force, probably inside police but staffed by non-officers. Taking reports would be sufficient but would be better if they could investigate and make cases, No need for armed police except for arrests.

On that second part, I think that Portland, like many other cities, would benefit tremendously if there was a legally empowered but non-police group that existed for after-the-fact fact-finding and record-keeping responses to crimes that have already occurred. Currently if a theft or robbery happens here, the police pretty much don't give a shit and will only even record it if you hassle them at length about it.

Raheem.ai is building the PATCH network as an alternative dispatch system for community crisis responders to show up instead of having to call the police for non-criminal situations. They started with trying to build better complaint systems to support data-driven reform but pivoted toward building an alternative after failing to get buy-in from civic institutions.

I remember reading Luigi Barzini claim that competition between the Carabinieri and Polizia was intended to limit coordinated corruption. In practice the Guardia di Finanza has been especially important in many corruption cases in Italy.

I understood the complaints that a lack of cooperation between law enforcement agencies was instrumental to 9/11, but even at the time putting everything under the Department of Homeland Security sounded like a recipe for a deterioration in attitudes among federal law enforcement agencies, and like it would eventually replicate the problems that come out of police and sheriff unions.

I agree that parallel law enforcement that has a reinforced focus on serving the public, and that has minimal contact with rot-inducing organizations is an excellent idea, and may be the only way to affect change without having to bear the increased incidence of work slowdowns suspected in many cities.

On a broad level, I don't disagree. But I think it is helpful to keep in mind that the "police" in the US is not monolithic. There are over 18,000 separate police organizations in the US and they are not organized in a strict command hierarchy. Jurisdictions have much more independence in the US than is common in other countries. Canada has just less than 200 police agencies and Sweden has just one (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...)

Some places need a much more aggressive approach to reform than others. Unfortunately I think the public narrative over the last few years regarding policing in general has very little nuance. As a side effect, the type of people we would like to be involved in policing are being discouraged from considering that career. This is not a healthy trend.

The decentralization of police power in the US is intentional. While better recruitment, training, and implementation is desirable, solutions in this area are going to have to acknowledge that decentralization to be successful, IMHO.

Or just do away with some of that decentralization. Germany also has a federalized system and based on our historical experience, avoiding centralized control over security forces has high priority in our constitutional system. But we still have a quite well-structured system that consists of a couple of federal police forces designed for very specific purposes and state police forces (which are subordinate to state governments only), which are those that interact with citizens on a day-to-day basis. States have their own regulations and laws that govern police work, but they have a loose process of coordinating those among each other and have to work within a federal constitutional framework that sets some explicit boundaries. Having 18,000 police organizations is just asking for bad outcomes, imho, we have plenty of stuff going wrong with 20-30.

If you are concerned about "bad outcomes" in a decentralized system, why do you think consolidating power in a more centralized system would be an improvement?

The idea of minimizing and decentralizing power runs pretty deep in the US.

If the problem is that you want to enforce common minimum standards, improve transparency and training, my guess is that this would be easier to achieve on the more centralized end of the spectrum. If your goal is to maximize the dispersion of power to the local level, go ahead and give every community its own independently run police organization. To a certain extend these goals are in conflict with each other and you have to decide where your priorities are, would be my intuitive sense. For me personally, I feel most comfortable with a system where the police (who are carrying guns and are under certain circumstances entitled to shoot me) is run by institutions that have at least the theoretical capacity to properly finance, run and train those forces and which at the same time have a modicum of accountability to me. In my view that would be state governments, certainly not municipalities.

> Then, I heard a story from one cop being out with cop buddies and driving wasted, smashing into car and running away.

In BC, a cop was driving from the bar, hit and killed a motorcyclist, left the scene, drove home, downed a couple of shots of vodka to 'steady his nerves'. [1] An old trick that he allegedly shared with his RCMP buddies.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/ex-rcmp-cpl-monty-robinson-get...

He got a 12-month suspended sentence for it. Quite a bit less than what he'd face for killing someone while DUI.

(He later got a 2-year sentence for perjury in an inquiry regarding him killing a Polish immigrant with a taser.)

[1] Which is to say, make it impossible to determine how intoxicated he was at the time that he killed Orion Hutchinson.

26% of arrests in the US are for drug related crimes. 46% of prisoners in federal prison are there for drug related crimes.[1]

We need more than police reform: we need to reform the context that police work in.

There is a huge incentive for police to focus on the most easily accusable crime types. Because drug related offenses are so easy to prosecute, police are heavily motivated to pursue drug related arrests.

The act of pursuing drug related arrests can itself be trivially abused. There is very little distinction between a baseless accusation and a successfully prosecuted crime. This makes it incredibly difficult and subjective to regulate the behavior of officers who are pursuing drug related arrests.

On top of that, we have an overwhelmed court system that can keep the accused waiting weeks, months, or even years to see trial. This pressures the courts to rush justice. From within the court system, a conviction is seen as a success; so it's pretty obvious what outcome is most likely to be falsely generated by that rushed justice.

It's also trivial to abuse those wait times: a dubious accusation is enough to lock away any person the officer chooses. That person may need to wait in jail (generally considered worse than prison) for as much time as the sentence they would be convinced for! Even if an officer faces consequences to that abuse, the consequence can only happen after a length of time that itself is extended by the increasing wait times of the overwhelmed court system.

This creates a feedback loop: the sheer volume of drug convictions creates a conviction in the mind of each officer: pursuing drug related offenses is easy and inherently justified. It's no surprise to me that so many officers approach arrests with oversized egos: incredulous at the idea they could possibly do wrong. This is normal everyday stuff to them, and the entire system expects them to continue.

We all know the war on drugs is a failure of epic proportions. It's time to move on. Every moment we wait is an abuse to the justice system itself and the people to whom it is served.

[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistic...

It's honestly mind boggling that we grant such tremendous grace to abuses of power from folks who don't consistently experience any form of accredited training, and who much of the time have been on the job an amount of time that would make them an apprentice in any other profession.

"The officers never identified themselves as law enforcement to James, and bystanders who witnessed the beating were equally in the dark, calling 911 to report what they believed to be an attempted murder in broad daylight."

Sounds like the officers got lucky. Plain clothes, not identifying themselves, onlookers thinking it's attempted murder... in some parts of the country that will get you shot.

Most of the time, when officers do this, they get paid vacation.

This reminds me of when people were being rounded up and shoved into white panel vans by people who refused to identify themselves during the portland protests.

If an officer refuses to identify themselves, it's not a lawful arrest, it's a kidnapping. I argued at the time that someone would be entirely within their rights to defend themselves in this circumstance. No doubt the DA would press charges but do you really think a jury would convict?

The people doing that were CBP deployed in Portland under statutory authorization passed in the wake of 9/11. CBP are a federal police force who aren't required to follow the constitution within 100 miles of the border (so no need to follow constitution in portland) and any case would go to federal courts where 99% of cases end up in plea deal.

"but do you really think a jury would convict?"

I have no doubt they would (assuming survival).

> but do you really think a jury would convict?

Would you bet your life on it? Or on the officers in question not gunning you down for your troubles?

Bear in mind the alternative here are letting a group of unidentified randos throw you into an unmarked van. You're already betting your life on it.

Getting kidnapped by US police is one of the few kidnapping situations where you are vastly better off not trying to fight.

They have no problem with turning you into a corpse on the street, but, unlike your run-of-the-mill serial killer are probably not kidnapping you so they can turn you into one in their murder basement.

You have to know who is kidnapping you first though. I don't think most people would be able to figure it out in time when a bunch of camouflaged federal police jump out of an unmarked van. You've got maybe a second at best to make the decision, and if you've done nothing wrong the idea some unmarked federal police force you've never seen before is going to snatch you up is probably not even in the realm of your imagination, thus it must be criminal kidnappers.

Once again for clarity: you just don't know they are police.

In a properly working law system those officers getting shot and killed by bystanders could solve the problem by making the police think twice. Of course it won’t work in this case.

If the officers were shot and killed then others would just hunt down and murder the innocent bystander that did the shooting, and probably hurt a few more for good measure. Any threat real or imagined against police is not tolerated in the US and the police will retaliate when necessary to enforce that.

Maybe it also depends on the skin of the attackers. But even without it, I'm still baffled (as many other commenters here) by the holy statute of the police in the States. They're no lambs in other places either, for sure, and they will also fight tooth and nail against any accusations of wrongdoing, but there's still a huge difference...

This article is weirdly written. Unlike most news article they refer to the plaintiff throughout as 'James', his given name rather than 'King' his surname. The author also capitalizes 'High Court' when referring to the Supreme Court, which is not correct and had me checking to make sure this was in the US.

All that aside, this is a grave miscarriage of justice.

I would advise anyone interested to read the 6th Court of Appeals decision https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/22a0219p-06.pd..., especially the dissent:

"The majority’s holding is a profound and frightening miscarriage of justice. That federal officers who refuse to identify themselves can spontaneously, and unprovoked, beat an individual nearly to death and be entirely free from civil liability simply because the individual chooses not to waste judicial resources on a frivolous appeal is not compatible with notions of an ordered and civilized society. Because the majority follows outdated law and dismisses King’s claims, I strongly dissent."

I hope the Supreme Court treats this differently

While I want strong law enforcement, logically when law enforcement isn’t required to identify themselves when using force then citizens are inclined to defend themselves including use of deadly force.

This would be counter to law enforcement’s self interests, at least in the Ivory Tower perspective.

Obviously I am not a lawyer, so none of this matters.

Yeah. The Michigan stand your ground law allows bystanders to use deadly force to protect the life of another. It's crazy that neither of the two even yelled "police" or "FBI".

https://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(hvjaycoaabfuusgipd1rveks))...

> (a) The individual honestly and reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent the imminent death of or imminent great bodily harm to himself or herself or to another individual.

In Texas, the law specifically states that you can use force to protect yourself if a peace officer uses unlawful force.

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.9.htm.

Sec. 9.31.c

Sec. 9.32 and 9.33 goes on to say, that you can use lethal force against a peace officer in protection of yourself or of a third person whom the peace officer is using unlawful force against.

I wonder how many peace officers actually know about that law though.

And regardless if it was legal to use force against the peace officer, there's a saying: "you may beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride" (in the back of a police car, or if it was against a police officer, probably in the back of a coroner's vehicle).

As it currently stands, qualified immunity means that officers are immune from lawsuits unless their behavior (e.g., beating the hell out of a guy to whom you never identified yourself) has previously been found to be unworthy of immunity.

That's a recursive definition, it precludes expansion of not-immune behavior. Any behavior you think should be unworthy of immunity by definition has not yet been demonstrated as being unworthy of immunity? And therefore is worthy of immunity?

Congratulations, you now understand how qualified immunity works in the US!

I think the idea is similar to the "ex post facto" provision of the constitution. In "ex post facto", you can't be convicted for something if, when you did it, it was legal. The idea here is that police can't be sued for something if, when they did it, there was no court ruling explicitly saying "that's a violation of constitutional rights". So a court could say, "Yes, this court is now declaring what those officers did to be unconstitutional. But there was no clear court case at that time, so they can't be sued unless they do it again."

Which leads to really bizzare outcomes, like this instance -- or an instance where police just outright stole stuff from a guy [1]. A court had never ruled that stealing from citizens was unconstitutional, so he couldn't sue them for it.

[1] https://reason.com/2020/05/19/qualified-immunity-supreme-cou...

there's a really big difference between ex post facto and specific existing case-law.

Note that qualified immunity is entirely a matter of statutory interpretation and not at all constitutional law. Congress can change any part of the doctrine or get rid of it altogether at any time.

And yet somehow this statutory interpretation trumps Constitutional prohibitions. What does "supreme law of the land" even mean if the Supreme Court can privilege a statute over redress for the violation of Constitutional rights?

The Supreme Court rarely implies a cause of action for money damages. The inherent constitutional remedies are things like the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine that forbids things found in an illegal search to be introduced at a criminal trial.

Because Congress created the cause of action, it can control its contours (whether QI is a reasonable interpretation of the statute is a different question.)

This is a good point. I understand what you're saying. But it makes various rights toothless in all ways, since there's effectively no way to enforce them. For instance, how do you post facto enforce the third amendment without a tort claim?

> Because Congress created the cause of action

I've seen this rationale stated before, but in common law, and natural law before that ("natural" as in how it functions, not the political philosophy), didn't some of these causes of action pre-exist Congress, and thus should be grandfathered in as ninth amendment rights?

This gets into the distinction between law and equity. It’s a pretty obscure topic for non-lawyers but the gist is that a court sitting in equity would almost never award damages.

While the Supreme Court is a court of law and equity, the power to imply a cause of action stems from its inheritance of equity powers and so is limited by them as well.

(This is all based on memory and so the details may be off.)

If the reasoning was actually based on an ex post facto analysis, wouldn’t it have to apply broadly to all actors and all civil lawsuits?

The fact that qualified immunity only applies to state actors in their job functions makes me skeptical of the “ex post facto” reasoning.

If that’s the case, why isn’t it a much more broad concept?

No, it's worse than that. QI means officers are immune from lawsuits unless their behavior has been previously found to be unworthy of immunity and they were aware or should have been aware of this fact. This is, by design, an impossible standard to meet, so in practice QI is unlimited and absolute.

So we should expect zero lawsuits against police officers to have been won at trial or settled last year, right?

~ zero. Tangent: are settlements not typically paid by the city or the union? (And the union will get the money from the city in the end, anyway.)

Always the city. There’s universal indemnification de facto or de jure. This is a bigger issue than QI but gets virtually no attention.

I suspect the plaintiff’s bar is behind that as they’d prefer QI go but indemnification stay.

if you fix QI, cities would fix indemnification themselves pretty quickly. The problem with QI is that since the suits never even get started, the police and the cities get to ignore the problem.

the actual figure is way lower than it should be. there are, however police officers dumb enough and violent enough to meet the ridiculously high bar that is required.

I don’t disagree. But statements like this are inaccurate and unhelpful:

in practice QI is unlimited and absolute

Which leads to these nightmare scenarios where actual defense attorneys and union officials ask in earnest "Why is this officer being held liable for forcible rape of a minor today, when such behavior was already found to be immune 90 years ago?" [1]

Something that gets tossed around a lot for firearms is a national database of owners. I think there's a variety of problems with that idea, but I really don't understand why we don't have such a thing for police officers. Like, what is the harm in having a federal database of every officer of the peace, so in the future, somebody like Derek Colling can't be fired for assaulting a photographer, find work 2 states away where he then shoots a prone, incapacitated man in the back, twice[2]. Like, that shouldn't have happened in the first place. We have such a system for doctors and lawyers and engineers. Why not police?

1. https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/06/09/patrick-rose-boston-pol...

2. https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/se...

Qualified immunity is just part of the problem, and it is only relevant to civil suits. While it would be nice for the victim to get some sort of legal vindication and compensation, what we really need is for this gang of violent criminals to go to prison for a long time. The larger problem is that sovereign immunity is being extended to people who happen to work for the government, rather than only applying to the government itself. This convention needs to be completely eliminated.

I’ve had a dark and terrifying thought recently. John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who lived outside of Chicago appeared to be an upstanding citizen, and preyed upon the most vulnerable boys and young men in society.

And I started to think about how vulnerable many of the high-profile victims of police were. The conclusion that I just can’t shake is that by far the obvious career choice for a legitimately pathological serial killer would be the police. It’s a position with authority, and that is largely respected. Not only would such a person likely not be arrested, but they would be vigorously defended.

The so-called "Golden State Killer" was a cop, which excluded him from investigations for decades.

*spoiler alert*:

The television show Mentalist explores this idea of serial killer law enforcement officer.

But, the crimes are committed with support from a network of accomplices (some coerced).

This write-up is pretty confusing, because it doesn't address the actual legal issue or what happened in the court system earlier. That's covered in the actual petition: https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Cert-Petition_FINA..., and the decision the first time this case was before the Supreme Court: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-546_7mip.pdf

The Question Presented is:

> This case returns after remand from Brownback v. King, 141 S. Ct. 740 (2021), where this Court flagged for future review the question presented:

> Whether the Federal Tort Claims Act’s judgment bar, 28 U.S.C. 2676, which this Court has repeatedly said functions in much the same way as the common- law doctrine of res judicata, nevertheless operates to bar claims brought together in the same action.

The actual question before the Supreme Court is an odd procedural issue. King sued the police officers, raising FTCA and Bivens claims for constitutional violations. The district court dismissed both claims. King appealed only the Bivens claims to the Sixth Circuit, which found that the officers did not have immunity under federal law and allowed that claim to proceed.

Back in the district court, however, the government invoked Section 2676, a provision of the FTCA that bars subsequent litigation involving the same facts after a decision on the FTCA claim. The government argued that the unappealed dismissal of the FTCA claim barred the Bivens claims from proceeding.

The first time around, the Supreme Court held that the FTCA's judgment bar could be triggered by a dismissal (for weird reasons specific to the FTCA), but left the question open as to whether the bar could apply to another claim in the same action. (In this case, whether dismissal of the FTCA claim could bar the Bivens claim.) The Sixth Circuit decided that the section 2676 bar could apply to other claims brought in the same action. So now King is seeking to have the Supreme Court decide that question.

Police who brutally beat an innocent person like this aren't just not doing their job, they are doing the exact opposite of their job. Even if they brutally beat a criminal, they are going far beyond incompetence. What these cops did wasn't just incompetence or a mistake, it was corruption and pure evil. Why the FUCK are we protecting these criminals? Why do we want this as a society?

Giving the police qualified immunity in situations like this is unlicensed freedom for them to not only be incompetent, but be corrupt and destroy the foundations of what our society is supposed to be about. Are we really okay with allowing fucking cops to ruthlessly beat people for no reason and think that's just part of their job?

We shouldn't be, but the majority of this Supreme Court does in fact want this, yes. They have been systematically expanding qualified immunity over the last few years

Maybe it's the tone of this comment that is rubbing people the wrong way but its basic content is correct. Since the major court rulings of the mid-century which created our modern concept of protection for the accused, there has been a slow and consistent chipping away at those rulings. Various forms of immunity being expanded little by little in case after case is a big part of that.

You are correct, and this Supreme Court in particular has made large changes to the concept, furthering the degree to which qualified immunity can be applied, and have done so in a time when there is a large, popular pushback to the concept. :)

They are doing their job, this is their job. The mistake here was who they did it to not what they did.

> Why do we want this as a society?

This is a very very good question to spend some time with. Understand just how routine this sort of activity is for police, understand that it is not a mistake or anomaly. Why do we want this? It's an interesting question.

It’s their job to beat people senseless?

Kind of. It was pretty much the job of the proto-police forces which naturally became our modern police forces. The development of policing in America is much more crude and ad-hoc than people would like to admit. I don't think modern police generally join the force with this spirit but there's a root of violent lackiness that has maybe never been fully exercised from the system.

Police should enforce the law, they are not in the retribution business.

Tasers and chemical agents aren't as effective as they'd like, and guns are a bit too permanent (though that doesn't always stop them). The truncheon is a long-standing symbol of police for a reason.

> The case started in 2014. James, then a college student, was walking between two summer jobs in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when two men stopped him, demanded his name, and took his wallet. Thinking he was being mugged, James ran. But the men caught him, beat him to the point that his face was unrecognizable, and choked him unconscious. James only later discovered that the men were members of a police task force—one an FBI agent and the other a local detective. The officers never identified themselves as law enforcement to James, and bystanders who witnessed the beating were equally in the dark, calling 911 to report what they believed to be an attempted murder in broad daylight. Uniformed officers arrived, and, even though it was clear James was not the wanted suspect, arrested James, transported him to the hospital, and handcuffed him to his bed.

> They are doing their job, this is their job.

Maybe elaborate on that a little I'm not sure I understand. How exactly is what they did their job?

I think you misunderstand giraffe_lady's point. She's saying that beating up on random people is actually the job of the police - not the job we think they have, not the job they have morally or legally, but given the system and society we have, that's their actual job. And the question is, why do we as a society want our police to do that?

I'm not sure that I agree with her point. But that's what I think she's saying.

> She's saying that beating up on random people is actually the job of the police

I mean it's obviously not literally that. Is it the outcome of something that is the police's job? Maybe but then what would that be?

Maybe they were just trying to score some internet points by being a troll, I don't get it.

The point I was making is similar to "the purpose of a system is what it does."

Regardless of or alongside what we say the police do, or what they claim to do, they also beat the shit out of people a lot. We don't prevent them from doing this, or usually impose consequences for them doing it, we don't even seem to generally mind that they do it. We continue to pay them.

So, the job of the police is what they do, and a significant portion of what they do is beating the shit out of people. That makes it their job in a limited but still useful and very real way.

>"this is their job."

To beat the living shit out of people? I doubt it.

Well we pay them to do it, don't stop them from doing it, and almost never impose consequences for doing it. In a real practical way I think that makes it their job.

"we" do not pay them for doing it. Government does and is not asking us. We are just a cowards that do not have enough guts to protect our rights or hoping that as long as it is not me it is fine.

The mistake you are making is to think that beating people up is part of their job description at all. They're supposed to either arrest people or stop them from fleeing, beyond that any violence is utterly off limits.

Any LE officer that 'beats people up' deserves to have the book thrown at them. With some extra penalty because of the abuse of their badge.

No the mistake you've made is thinking that their job is defined or limited by the job description. What police do is violence, and it's not off limits at all because they almost never face consequences for the violence they do.

So regardless of what we say the police should be, or the standard we say they should be held to, in practice they beat up who they want and we let them. We keep paying them to do it and don't stop them from doing it, that makes it their job in a very real way.

They should not only not have immunity, they should face increase penalties for any crimes committed in or off the clock.

being a devils advocate, but who is going to enforce that?

Prosecutors, if they'd do their jobs.

The issue is prosecutors rely on police a lot for their normal criminal cases so whenever one does get the courage to seriously pursue things like this they can get sabotaged or slow walked by the rest of the department in retaliation.

Classic "Who watches the watchmen?"

DA's office. Its separate from the police for a reason

It still works for a government controlled by the ruling class. The problem is not some malfunction with "police departments" as though a department with a new name could reform it.

"Checks and balances" is and always was a laughably naive and probably intentionally unserious response to overtly structural problems.

What is your serious response to these structural problems then? How do we improve?

Structural problems require structural solutions. A best first step would be reforming the brainwashed American conception of Marxist studies so we can someday conduct a serious discourse concerning the contradictions and consequences of capitalism, which belie the origins and effective purpose of our police departments as we know them.

If anything is for sure, defunding the police was never a remotely serious proposal and it's not lost on Marxists why working people found it such a laughable phrase. Calling it a "proposal" or "strategy" would be giving far too much credit.

In what ways are the existing police services "capitalist"?

All of the police services that I'm familiar with in places like the US, Canada, and Europe lack the fundamental traits of capitalism.

For example, they're the creations of centralized, monopolistic (and often quite socialist) governments, and funded with taxpayer money, rather than arising from the private sector.

As such, there's no competition. Residents and visitors don't get to individually choose which, if any, police service(s) they'll voluntarily receive services from, and what compensation they'll provide, if any. They can't just switch to some other police service if they're dissatisfied with one they've already been choosing to use. They can't unilaterally opt out of dealing with a particular police service.

Entry to the market is also extremely limited. An individual can't just declare himself to be a police officer, and then start offering policing services. An organization of such people can't declare themselves to be a police force.

Unionization of police officers is quite common, as well.

While private security may be available in some areas, it's typically very limited, with no real ability to intervene. They merely monitor an area for trouble, and alert the government's police service(s) if anything arises.

The problems with policing today seem to me to be due to its highly-socialist nature.

Many prisons have been bought up by private companies.

Judges have been convicted of taking bribes in exchange for convictions: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-ma...

The first business of the first modern police forces in the US were catching runaway slaves in the south and crushing strikes in the north.

Calling something a "union" doesn't make it socialist, not even close. Did you really need me to hold your hand with that?

On what planet are police so-called "socialist"? I suspect this is the brainwashing I was referring to. This kind of nonsense is extremely unique to the United States.

The issue with placing that in the DA's office is they work closely with police on basically all their other cases so they have an incentive to not antagonize the police by actually holding them accountable. The ideal situation is a separate body just charged with dealing with police misconduct so they don't have to worry about police torpedoing their day to day case load in retaliation.

That’s a feature not a bug. Just because they work with the DA doesn’t mean they should be all buddy-buddy.

With qualified immunity the only people allowed to enforce that are prosecutors, but they often can't afford to jeopardize their relationship with police. Federal prosecutors are further removed from local cops and have better incentives on that front, but they often run into issues around jurisdiction.

The point of repealing qualified immunity is to let the victims sue as a means of enforcing checks on police.

That lets criminals use the legal system as a DDOS attack on the police. I'm not sure that's a desirable outcome.

Not really. The courts should toss any frivolous claims fairly quickly. If it is still an issue, then perhaps we need wider ranging changes to the legal system as any abuse that could happen with these cases surely happen in other areas of the law too.

Why couldn't the judge?'

Just do things the normal way...and the sentence is announced... oh, you're a cop, and were on duty. Multiply any sentence/fine/community service by 1.5.

The key, as I see it, is less about what the number is, or the details, but that's something very black and white. I'm normally really not a fan of "zero tolerance" type rules but I think this is a case where it makes sense.

Since we ( hopefully ) do not have an army of cops to arrest set up independent specialized task force just for that.

In today's political climate (including the current Supreme Court which is pretty strongly political), the most likely answer is local jurisdictions who have been paying out millions in civil penalties for this behavior. They won't be able to enforce criminal liability, but they could start making changes to training, use of force policies, hiring, etc. If the jurisdictions start taking out insurance to pay these claims, then the insurance companies will probably start mandating changes as well.

I have no issue with your post, but what a ridiculous situation we find ourselves in. We can't get rid of bad apples because of police unions and the relationship between prosecutors and police. It's not politically viable for politicians to enforce standards for police. So, instead, we have to hire a for-profit intermediary to come up with profit-centered reasons to enforce these standards. Yikes.

> who is going to enforce that?

That's exactly why the penalties should be greater. The deterrence factor is a function of both the size of the penalty and the chance of being caught & prosecuted. If the chance of being caught and prosecuted is lower, then the penalty has to be higher for it to have a similar deterrence effect.

A few ideas I like:

- Make police get individual insurance, similarly to doctors. Malpractice should have a monetary impact that doesn't hurt the taxpayer.

- A mirror to the DA, exclusively for prosecuting crimes committed by police. Remove the conflict of interest with the current DA system.

- Make police have some form of practitioners license, and have a board that can revoke it, similarly to the BAR association.

- Mandatory N years of desk duty after being involved in a fatal shooting (regardless of justification)

Isn't this what Internal Affairs are for?

Why would anyone become a Police if they were going to face increased penalties? How does that incentivize people to be Police?

To avoid increased penalties, they just need to not commit crimes. That shouldn't present a problem at all. They have a great deal of expertise in the practical applications of the law and thus should be really well-equipped to follow it.

What is the argument to hold them to a higher standard when they are off duty?

As a class, police officers are expected to be highly knowledgeable of the law and have been trained in both hand-to-hand combat and conflict de-escalation. Off duty police officers should know when they're doing something illegal, they should be ready to stop a volatile situation from coming to blows, and they are at an unfair advantage in a fight vis-a-vis the average civilian and should thus be slower to resort to violence.

> How does that incentivize people to be Police?

Why should we incentivize people to be "Police" where "police" implies a free license to abuse civilians? In fact, people who are deterred by an abuse license repeal are probably the right people to deter from service jobs like policing.

Your analogy is flawed. If someone is a board/director in a company they have additional scrutiny. Why would they ever take that job?

The question should be, would otherwise great people NOT join the force if such a control isn't in place?

Also, without controls - you attract exactly the wrong people (power-hungry bullies).

The question as phrased assumes that the primary incentive for joining the police is impunity for casual lawlessness. That's dystopian.

You could also ask the same question of skilled martial artists and armed forces veterans. Both classes can face higher penalties, but that doesn't deter people from becoming Army Rangers or karate black belts.

It should incentivize them to act with a high degree of professionalism and regard for the law. What’s the point of granting them extraordinary powers over life and liberty if they’re not held to a higher, not lower, standard?

People who work for a broker or market making bank are heavily scrutinized and they, their family, and to some degree associates (room mates, etc) are restricted in their basic conduct - political activity, investing, etc, and face increased penalties for financial crimes vs the average person. It’s telling we hold our money handlers to a higher standard than the armed representatives of the government with extraordinary rights to deprive people of their liberty and life. Money is more important than our freedom and safety?

On recruiting officers by making the job come with the perks of immunity for criminal behavior, seems like we should find another strategy. If you can’t identify yourself as the police before you beat someone half to death, maybe you’re not qualified to be a law enforcement officer? Maybe we should be glad they wouldn’t take the job if it came with reasonable protections for the people they’re supposed to be protecting?

Seriously, most professional careers come with obligation of avoiding even the appearance of impropriety.

Qualified immunity is a civil doctrine. It has nothing to do with criminal law.

More importantly it’s not a law at all. It’s as you say a doctrine established by the courts. If congress wanted to improve civil protections from the police, they would clarify the law and end qualified immunity as a doctrine. It’s absurd this stems from the courts.

As a friendly reminder, the legislature crafts the laws while the courts judge if they are followed or not.

There is a definite place for the legislature to step in and be clear here.

"while the courts judge if they are followed or not."

Or in the case of qualified immunity, create it out of thin air.

It's not created out of thin air. There is a lot of reasoning and background on it. Whether I agree with it or like it is entirely different.

Is there a law granting this power? No. It was created by the court.

I can reason about something all I want, but it doesn't make it the law.

To be clear, qualified immunity is entirely a judicial branch legal principle, and not a law that was passed by the legislative branch.

If laws are created in this space than the judicial legal principle MUST to be reworked/updated/changed to accommodate it. The law is a higher priority.

There IS a law (Section 1983), which stood whole for almost a century, before the Supreme Court largely gutted by inventing this legal principal out of thin air.

In most states, CDL holders receive harsher punishments for traffic violations because they are licensed, trained, and should know better. In some states, they are even treated more strictly in their personal vehicles for the same reason. Truck drivers can lose their job because they were speeding in their free time. LEOs really don't like it when you point out the discrepancy between this logic and how they are treated.

I called the police on the police for reckless driving in Canada and they were pulled over promptly. RCMP really doesn't like it when their reputation is soiled by 'the locals'. Best police force I've interacted with across all countries where I've visited and lived combined. It only happened once but it really made me feel that 'the system works' when those that uphold the law are not above the law.

I'm reminded of a situation some years ago when a Florida Highway Patrol officer pulled over a Miami police officer for speeding in Florida. The Miami officer was fired, but FHP officer was harassed by other police officers.

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/miami-police-fire-cop-pul...

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-sb-jane-watts-...

A good way to implement this would be to have payouts from lawsuits come out of their pensions instead of from taxpayers.

I’m not sure that works. I’m tact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

The situation you have to avoid is when higher ups ALSO want to sweep something under the rug to make their own numbers look better.

There has to be some sort of teeth for those who hire, train, and manage bad cops.

Because qualified imunity and seizure of property worked so well for other areas of the planet like africa and the old robber empires of europe.

If you want to rein in behavior of police officers, then (a) don't allow offenses to be time-barred against retirement, and (b) pay victims out of their pension funds.

I think you'll find that this entire "protect the blue" bullshit that cops have to cover for each other will go out the window when their material interests are in jeopardy.

You don't need to make complicated special rules for going after police. You just need to remove some of the existing special rules that protect them.

If you can sue a doctor for malpractice you should be able to sue a police officer too.

I don’t think (b) will work. The Dallas police pension fund is currently $3b in the red, how will they pay anything?

Presumably "in the red" here means it's underfunded with respect to meeting existing pension obligations, not that the fund has a literal negative balance. If I'm wrong then please disregard the second part of this comment.

The idea is collective punishment. Settlements would make the pension fund deeper in the red, meaning cops wouldn't get their promised pensions due to the actions of the abusive cops who caused the settlement payouts.

The hope is that the threat of losing your retirement security because your coworker fucks up is enough to break the thin blue line and cause cops to police themselves.

> Why the FUCK are we protecting these criminals? Why do we want this as a society?

The police are the foot soldiers of the ruling class. Insofar as the police may serve certain interests of working people, the aggregate sum of the police's influence on our society serves to protect the interests of the rich, which are usually at odds with the interests of working people.

They are not.

The criminals who do this like doing this and get protection from them.

>The police are the foot soldiers of the ruling class.

While they will certainly side with the "rulers" over anyone else when there is a conflict on the day to day the are also the foot soldiers of you the hypothetical average HNer reading this comment.

The people with real power DGAF about the sort of petty "annoyance or minor risk to the public" behavior that the police spend the bulk of their time enforcing.

You think Musk is worried about fentanyl in his weed?

You think Gates cares if you are drunk and disorderly alcohol in public?

You think the Kochs give a crap about some kid doing a burnout at a stop light?

You think Murdoch cares whether some restaurant is staying open in defiance of a health department?

Of course not. They're above that kind of stuff. Ditto for any list of powerful politicians you feel like coming up with.

When the police initiate an interaction they are almost always doing it to enforcing the laws that you the average "well enough paid to give a crap about issues not related to your economic survival in the short/medium term" American want them to enforce (revenue policing notwithstanding).

I’d rather not arrest people for marijuana possession, but owners of private prisons and the alcohol lobbies sure as hell would like that

Incorrect. As we are seeing all over the country, the "ruling class" has been voting to reduce policing--because what the f--k do they care? They have private security, or live in exclusive enclaves. The bulwark of support for the police is middle class parents and property owners. They're the people who, unlike the wealthy, can't rely on private security and geographic barriers to protect themselves from criminals.

Look at who voted for Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa in New York City, who both ran on a pro-police platform.

This is cable news poisoning. In reality, reduction in policing (or "defunding") has no support in either party --- for a poignant example, look at Brandon Johnson's runoff race against Paul Vallas for Chicago mayor, where he's frantically distancing himself from 2020 rhetoric. There are activists pursuing defunding, and even abolition, and to a first approximation none of them live in enclaves or gated communities with private security; defund activists universally live in dense urban areas.

100% wrong. Those votes were to reduce public policing, in favor of private policing. In other words, it was members of the ruling class voting to drop the facade altogether and abandon any remaining semblance of a police that serves the public.

You're wrong and you aren't supporting your argument.

Those votes were to reduce public policing, in favor of private policing. That is nothing new, and it is in no way a reduction of police. This was simply members of the ruling class voting to drop the facade altogether and abandon any remaining semblance of a police that serves the public. Again, nothing new. The ruling class does have to maintain its own legitimacy. That's all you're describing.

Because the people who support them think:

1) It will never happen to them.

2) The victim "must" have done some thing wrong.

> Even if they brutally beat a criminal, they are going far beyond incompetence.

It is actually worse than that. The police cannot be the judge, jury and executor. The Judge Dredd is an anti-hero for a reason.

It's double-worse-than-that, because all these dudes loooove The Punisher and like to post his logo on everything, which is a solid, full step worse than them thinking they're Judge Dredd. It's as if they don't understand the core point of their job. See that great season 3 scene from The Wire with the older officer telling the younger one what police work used to be like before the drug war—far less adversarial, a lot more about building ties with the community. "You call something a war, you're gonna get soldiers", I think one line goes.

>Are we really okay with allowing fucking cops to ruthlessly beat people for no reason and think that's just part of their job?

I mean, the truth is a lot of us are. If James King had been black, this wouldn't even be news.

> Why the FUCK are we protecting these criminals? Why do we want this as a society?

The system (or a corrupt one) will encourage these kind of policeman and provide them with coverage (whether immunity or else). These guys will come in handy when you need them for a dirty job.

Giving anyone qualified immunity is a bad idea, giving it to cops is just a part of it.

I was always confused by the contradiction that you are have legal rights, but if those rights are violated by the government, they are have legal immunity. You don't actually have those rights if they can be violated without consequence.

This is an example of where conflicting policy goals of a political movement clash. Conservatives in the U.S. decry big government and have a general distaste for unrestricted government. Their justices on the Supreme Court seem to be in favor of unrestricted government when it comes to the anything in the military/intelligence/police sphere.

They oddly hold the view that the EPA can’t regulate emissions that weren’t specifically legislated but police can purposefully violate our civil rights with what is in effect impunity. It’s sort of like how they didn’t like pro abortion demonstrations at their homes but saw no problem with legalizing that harassment at abortion doctors’ homes.

You don’t have civil rights if the police can beat you with impunity when you dare to exercise them. This idiocy is effectively tyrannical. One police officer I know said that his chief of police would do what he calls “releasing the dogs”. When that happened they could beat people without fear of negative consequences at work.

There is a reason for this. I remember initially watching BLM protest with a sense not dissimilar to watching to OWS protests, but as they were becoming a little more fiery if your permit this little joke, my disposition started to change rather drastically. I am sympathetic, but there are limits and, to be perfectly honest, if you look at historical records, police is nowhere near as aggressive as they have once been ( for a good reason, as a society we see some things as not acceptable now ).

I dislike police having too much power ( but I dislike any group having too much power ). I want balance. It does mean some consequences, but it also does mean cops have the power to do what needs to be done when it is necessary ( one's definition of 'necessary' will differ.. and here likely we will disagree ).

edit: changed need to do

Quashing a riot and beating a detained suspect are drastically different exertions of police violence. Police should not mete out extra judicial punishment with impunity.

You need to take a look at who is in charge of the cities and states where these incidents happen most, and realize this is more than republicans.

I make no political judgments or make aspirations toward conservatives. It’s just that this case is an example of conflicting policy goals of a particular political movement. It is an interesting case for that reason (among others).

Regardless of cause or politics or any other consideration it is still true that qualified immunity is effectively tyrannical and therefore ought to be opposed. Police should not be immune to purposefully violating civil rights. Regardless of who is in power or control.

>They oddly hold the view that the EPA can’t regulate emissions that weren’t specifically legislated

>police can purposefully violate our civil rights with what is in effect impunity.

These are separate issues. Congress gives the legislative branch (EPA) certain powers and they cannot exceed those powers without additional power grant by congress. This applies to all 3 letter agencies. Imagine if the EPA decided computers were harmful and wanted to ban them. They don't have the power to do so because congress set limits to what they can do.

There is a doctrine of Chevron deference described here. This is probably what you are accustomed to.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/chevron_deference

>Their justices on the Supreme Court seem to be in favor of unrestricted government when it comes to the anything in the military/intelligence/police sphere.

The doctrine of qualified immunity states any government employee, when doing their job, cannot be sued individually. Judges have a similar protection. This was created from whole cloth and was never legislated. This is an example of "legislating from the bench."

Hope that clears it up. From a layperson, it seems strange, but the judicial system only interprets laws passed and determines of they fall in line with existing laws, particularly the constitution.

I think your interpretation is wrong. The EPA was given the power to regulate emissions but the court is going in the direction that Congress must be much more explicit and state exactly which emissions can be regulated. They are requiring a level of specificity that is impractical. But the NSA can warrant less wiretap on a grand scale without a similar level of specificity.

Of course qualified immunity applies to more than law enforcement. But where its application is especially dangerous and contrary to good governance is in its current application in law enforcement. Police can effectively with impunity violate your civil rights on purpose. This is a stupid state of affairs and it matters not what the legal justification is because the unintended (perhaps intended) consequence is that the state can deprive you of your civil rights.

BTW, your last paragraph is contradicted by the preceding paragraph. Maybe you meant to say, “the courts are supposed to interpret laws and not make them up”

I think this is the case you are referring to:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/the-supreme-court...

July 19, 2022 – In late June, the Supreme Court issued a ruling stating that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot put state-level caps on carbon emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act. Such authority would, in effect, steer states away from coal and toward other types of power sources that emit less carbon. The Court said that, instead, the authority to decide how power is created in the U.S. must come from Congress.

I personally find that reasonable.

>But the NSA can warrant less wiretap on a grand scale without a similar level of specificity.

They refused to hear it (didn't rule one way or the other and the lower courts are split) citing the state secrets privilege. I would have liked them to take the case too.

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

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-snubs-wikiped...

>Maybe you meant to say, “the courts are supposed to interpret laws and not make them up”

Yes.

>But where its application is especially dangerous and contrary to good governance is in its current application in law enforcement. Police can effectively with impunity violate your civil rights on purpose.

Forgot to comment on this. Yes, this is very dangerous and probably the biggest threat to our current stability. It's really getting out of hand and if there is no legal remedy, I'm afraid people will find their own, and it won't be good for anyone.

It's already starting to happen. Imagine if they really wanted to cause harm in a well organized manner.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/us/atlanta-cop-city-protests/...

I would expect this kind of police behavior from... oh I dunno... Russia?

Why? You should absolutely expect this behavior from America. Russia has a smaller prison population than America and spends much less than America on policing and prisons. America has more prisoners than than any other country in the world, and they aren't all there for good reasons. A lot of people are actually as a consequence of scenarios similar to this story, where police overextend their authority, intentionally create a "resisting arrest" or "obstructing official police business" scenario, and then trump up an arrest charge.

I mean, the biggest story about Russian prisons recently was that they had falsely imprisoned an American celebrity athlete over a trumped up marijuana charge. She is now free after a prisoner swap. And yet, there are tens of thousands of Americans in prison today for similarly trumped up marijuana offenses. You should absolutely expect this behavior in America, and if you don't it's time for a wakeup call.

Edit: I just checked and the most recent stats are better for America, we are now tied for top prison population with China, and we are now the 6th highest in rate. We no longer have a rate worse than such bastions of freedom as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. Unfortunately we are still behind the rest of the first, second, and third worlds. Progress, but still more people in American prisons/jails than most countries.

If you're looking for disagreement... you're not getting it from me :)

If the case really went down as described in the article, this country is really f...ed up if the cops get away with this.

>"this country is really f...ed up"

It is. You can console yourself with the thought that many countries are fucked up even more

Sovereign immunity needs to be rid off entirely.

This all stems from the idea that God anointed the king, therefore he can do no wrong.

Except we know that humans are corrupt, malevolent, etc.

All individuals/offices in government should be liable for their actions.

>police

I feel like the lede was a bit buried with this one because one of them was an FBI agent.

In common parlance “police” and “member of a law enforcement agency with powers of arrest” mean the same thing

Law enforcement. FBI are cops and the distinction is increasingly becoming political. Yes, one of them may not have a punisher decal on their compensationmobile.

I don't think the US has nearly enough court capacity to hear the sheer amount of cases this decision would give precedent to.

sounds like we need to dramatically increase court capacity then.

That's actually why Qualified Immunity was originally introduced: To prevent courts filling up with potentially spurious cases raised by defendants of other cases or participants of interactions with police.

It was originally conceived to have a much less heavy-handed scope though, but has been strengthened over time to something near-impossible to thwart.

Then maybe the police should stop brutally beating unarmed suspects?

That would be the better solution imo, but we got Qualified Immunity instead.

The main problem is the machine protects itself. Prosecutors won't prosecute because they work hand in hand with the police. The police feed prosecutors cases, the prosecutors prosecute and look good.

When the prosecutors refuse to bring charges against police, the only remedy is civil court, which QI forbids in most cases. There are exceptions, but there should be more.

Having said that, nothing prevents you from suing the police department, city or government. It's just that the people who commit these acts have no repercussions because the prosecutors don't bring charges and their superiors support that type of activity.

I can't overstate how dangerous and what a powder keg this is right now. If we ever had a hot civil war, I suspect it would be citizens vs police, not liberal vs conservative.

Lets expand the judiciary, then. We can shrink the TSA to offset.

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