You'd think, but watching how many millions my local police department and city paid out every single year leads me to believe they just don't care.
1 - 38 million between 2017 and 2022.
2 - 29 million in 2023.
3 - 12 million in settlements in 2025.
Dare I keep going?
[1]https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/louisville-payouts-for-police-...
[2]https://www.aol.com/louisville-paid-least-29m-settle-1030450...
[3]https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2026/02/04/...
And the first article you link proves that people are already worried about it. You think they can safely 10x that?
It's a fair point and easy to handwave away "it's only $100 per resident." But it's a lot of money still. And yet that city is shutting down schools and selling off school properties to make budget this year. I bet they'd love to have those wasted millions.
> You think they can safely 10x that?
I have no idea the reason for this question. The OP said cities learn after a couple million dollar suits. I'm showing that no, they do not. If anything suits are increasing.
Well it does make sense, in the full context of the thread. I'll let future readers decide.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
If a few cities/states were to default due to debts coming from such cases, the others would start to take notice...
Edit: wording, formatting
What if no one would want to work as a policemen and you end up alone against local gang?
This is by far the worst argument. What if we held doctors accountable for malpractice and no one wanted to be a doctor? What if we held engineers liable for faulty designs that break and kill people and no one wanted to be an engineer? What if we held OCCUPATION accountable for DOING JOB BADLY / BREAKING THE LAW? Its a nonsense argument.
What would happen is that only the people that intended to be bad police would not want to the job and/or the people that were bad police (intentional or otherwise) get kicked out of the police force. Same as with every other profession. This is a fantastic outcome and we should do it immediately.
https://abovethelaw.com/2016/02/criminally-yours-indicting-a...
You can be arrested, indicted, and held in jail on pretrial, and there is literally no recourse. There are many other ways jail can happen without due process. Where I live:
* Civil contempt. Absolutely immunity. No due process. Record is about 16 years. Having a bad day? Judge can toss you in jail.
* "Dangerous." Half a year. No due process. He-said she-said.
* "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.
Absolutely no recourse. You come out with a gap in income, employment, and, if you missed rent/mortgage, no home. Landlords will simply throw your stuff away too.
You're also basically damned if things do move forward, since from jail, you have no access to evidence, to internet (for legal research), and no reasonable way to recruit a lawyer (and, for most people, pay for one).
Can happen to anyone. Less common if you're rich and can afford a good lawyer, but far from uncommon.
A friend of mine was committed longer than 3 days without council or the ability to represent themselves in the hearing. Apparently the whole process of being committed is ex parte in practice in some states.
Just because you disagree with the outcome doesn't mean that due process wasn't given.
A judge should have to recuse themselves if they are acting as witness to the supposed infraction.
This statement should make you uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it is a pure expression of the power of the state. But it's still due process.
Qualified immunity protects individuals, not departments, from liability.
The particular thread (in this thread) that I was responding to:
>> I hope she wrings at least several million dollars out of the government.
> With all the lovely qualified immunity doctrine? That's wishful thinking.
I was responding to the claim that qualified immunity protected the government, it does not.
I think there's probably one major exception: civil rights violation investigations. But even then, the people doing the investigating seem to be biased toward the LEOs.
The GP's linked article doesn't seem to even talk about this, so not sure why that's there.
I don't know if I'd go so far to say she won't find any relief, but it probably still could be a pretty tough Monell claim against the department (although it's hard to tell from the sparse details in the article):
"[A] local government may not be sued under [42 U.S.C.] § 1983 for an injury inflicted solely by its employees or agents. Instead, it is when execution of a government's policy or custom, whether made by its lawmakers or by those whose edicts or acts may fairly be said to represent official policy, inflicts the injury that the government, as an entity, is responsible under § 1983." [1]
I could see a problem if there was a policy/custom of relying on AI facial recognition alone without any other corroborating evidence (would be a really stupid practice, but I'm sure stupider things have become part of a police department's systemic practices). Or if there was a failure to sufficiently train detectives about the erroneous tendencies of this technology. Maybe the needlessly prolonged detention without bail could be an issue if there was a lack of adequate protocols to expedite in a reasonable amount of time.
Either way, still seems hard to say this a slam dunk case for her, unfortunately. But also seems too risky for the city of Fargo to not settle, at least nominally.
[1] Monell v. Department of Soc. Svcs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/436/658/
And there are definitely insane people who are a threat to themselves and others who wander around, making the streets and public transit systems unsafe and unpleasant, who need to be put into something like a psychiatric hold by something like the police.
And if you don't have police and a criminal justice system that are willing and able to impose psychiatric holds, you wind up with a bunch of incidents where a crazy mentally-ill vagrant kills someone in a public (the Iryna Zarutska murder, or any of the various cases where a homeless person randomly shoves someone into the path of an oncoming train at a public transit station); or incidents where someone else gets railroaded by the criminal justice system for intervening in a crazy mentally-ill person threatening people around them (the Daniel Penny incident - many people, even nominal anti-carceralists, are upset that he was not successfully convicted and incarcerated for murder). Not to mention all the less-newsworthy incidents where insane people walking the streets and public transit systems systematically ruin them for everyone else, either through vandalism or theft or simply screaming incoherently at people as they try to use the public commons.
It's certainly possible for the police to abuse psychiatric holds if they don't like you; on the other hand, the existence of large numbers of people who should be in some kind of psychiatric hold but aren't disrupting and vandalizing the public commons is one of the biggest quality of life and physical safety problems in my region and in many other American urban areas.
As long as you keep electing clowns that let the police do whatever they want, the police will... Do whatever they want.
Of course there's a balance that has to be struck so that police are empowered enough to act. So perhaps something like settlements against the police being 30% borne by the police pension fund and 70% by taxpayers is sufficient. I think this will also make police very enthusiastic about bodycams and holding each other accountable.
it sucks.
No, everybody does not want police accountability. Half the population will fall on a grenade to prevent that. They know that the purpose of the police is to keep the undesirables in line, and they never envision that they will ever fall in that category.
The brutality is the point for them.
The problem is that the mass media sets the framing of acceptable discourse, and that mass media is in large part an ideological monoculture. And even when it's not, it is happy to present absolutely insane batshit lunacy as 'one of the two sides' of an issue.
I'm not sure what the solution is here. Forbid police from unionizing? That would probably have some bad consequences too.
This is on us as voters. If we didn’t piss our pants every time a police union sneezed, we’d realize wholesale restarting police departments is precedents in even our largest cities.
>...Abby Tiscareno, a licensed daycare provider in Utah, was wrongfully convicted of felony child abuse when a child under her care suffered brain hemorrhaging. After calling emergency services, subsequent medical tests supported these findings. However, during her trial, requested medical records from the Utah Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) were not provided. It wasn’t until a civil suit that Ms. Tiscareno saw pathology reports suggesting the injury could have occurred outside of her care. She was granted a new trial and acquitted. Her subsequent lawsuit for due process violations, alleging that DCFS failed to provide exculpatory evidence, was dismissed due to lack of precedent indicating DCFS’s obligation to produce such evidence.
https://innocenceproject.org/news/what-you-need-to-know-abou...
Who stole her dog?!
which the citizens end up footing the bill for. yay.