Posted on 07/08/2020 7:24:01 AM PDT by Kaslin
***the officers that beat Rodney King ***
From what I read years ago, Rodney King failed to respond to tasers so the cops knew that they would have to beat him down as he was believed to be on Angel dust. “Dusted”, they called it.
To remove qualified immunity is not to remove sovereign immunity.
Instead, a government would have every reason to contract their police work out to security firms like Blackwater. Does that sound like a scenario you’d recommend?
It sure does. They can be sued civilly and prosecuted criminally so I dont see a problem with it.
L
Well you are in full agreement with BLM. No one is going to become an officer if they can be sued into oblivion simply based on a allegation.
The vast number of allegations against cops are found to be baseless. They would all go broke if they had to lawyer up every time someone made a complaint.
And you can bet the number of allegations will skyrocket if this happens.
Removing this protection means every cop can be personally sued by every idiot with a grudge. They’ll be in court 100% of their time because of personal lawsuits.
Colorado just passed their law Removing qualified Immunity. It limits damages to $25,000 paid by the employer but it has all kinds of loopholes where the employer can claim the cop didn’t act within department policy and is no longer under the employer’s protection, which means that $25 limit is gone and the cops pays out of pocket.
The vast number of allegations against cops are found to be baseless. They would all go broke if they had to lawyer up every time someone made a complaint.
Their unions or employers can provide attorneys as a condition of employment.
Next objection?
L
QI is unamerican.
I agree.
For those that support qualified immunity. Please contrast qualified immunity with "no one is above the law". So which is it?
Have you seen the number of frivolous civil rights complaints that get filed against even the good cops who follow all the rules?
It's staggering. Take away their qualified immunity and we won't have to worry about the efforts to defund the police, there won't be any.
Loser pays legal fees should remedy this.
“Why would cops quit en made? Its not that cops ever end up personally liable for those judgments. The municipality indemnifies then whether or not QI is a defense. It will just incentivize cities to hire cops less prone to gratuitous violence.”
Making Police Chiefs personally liable and the Mayors who appoint them and the union bosses who protect violent officers would accomplish more than going after the officers.
I am OK with that as long as the agency pays for it. But then whats the point. The city already has attorneys siting around on their hands, but if they want to contract for outside counsel fine probably better attorneys anyway.
But no city would agree to this. The qualified immunity enjoyed by the officers does not extend to the city, they are still on the hook for damages done by their employee.
This is countered by police body cameras quite nicely. Successful claims against departments that properly use cameras, especially departments that do *not* allow officers to switch off their cameras, have plummeted with the advent of this technology.
In practice, when properly administered, it’s only the bad cops that have problems with camera systems.
Qualified immunity is an extension of sovereign immunity, so that may just be a matter of semantics.
I would prefer to have no police officers at all — period.
Great. Get that passed into law, and then come back and peddle this anti-QI line to us.
A tragedy.
One that will continue to happen.
The police arrests a dangerously agitated man, that resists arrest. Being Muscular and 6’7” several police wrestle with him for over ten minutes and are unable to put him in the police vehicle as he is agitated and high on amphetamines.
Their only choice is to bring him to ground, where he continues to resist, eventually held and immobilized for an additional nine minutes with a knee to the neck at which point he dies.
The knee to the neck is an approved method for immobilization of a resisting subject included in the training manual for that department. No choke hold was applied. The cop, however ignored the pleas of the subject that he could not breathe.
How is the police supposed to know that he was infected with COVID-19 and thus had respiratory problems?
How is the police supposed to know that he had as much Fentanyl in his bloodstream as the dosage they give terminal patients (drugged out of his mind)?. Fentanyl depresses the respiratory system and causes death.
How is the police supposed to know that he had an enlarged heart and suffered from heart problems? The autopsy indicated a heart attack as cause of death (not asphyxiation, not choking).
So a man struggles for over twenty minutes and dies of a heart attack.. pretty common just like a man shoveling snow in winter and suffering the same fate.
What can the police do? What could they have done differently? Possibly handcuff him, and ankle cuff him and leave him alone in the ground..
But it will happen again.
I think the solution is to inform people not to resist arrest. Not to fight the police.
If Floyd had sat on the police cruiser he would still be alive and the lives of four cops would not have been destroyed.
A tragedy.
And why are racist people assume there was racial bias in this arrest? What does it have to do with the color of anybody’s skin?
And to add to all of that...
If you remove immunity from the police, why would any person work for the police department?
As long as people resists arrest tragedies like this will continue to happen.
The same should apply to anyone involved in a ‘no knock’ raid that is at the wrong house; the judge, the cops, anyone who approved. Uniform or no, job assignment or no, kicking in a door with no warning and shooting anyone who resists is a crime, end of subject, ‘doing my job as ordered’ should never be an excuse; if you’re too much of a fascist to see that busting through a door and shooting someone sleeping is wrong, regardless of what your captain or a judge says, your ass should be breaking rocks in jail. It should be in the back of every cop’s head “what if the person on the other side of the door is innocent and somebody set up a SWATTING”.
We are *ALWAYS* responsible for any and all of our own actions, notwithstanding orders from superiors or the laws we are supposed to obey.
And the judges that sign off on ‘no knock’ warrants- if they aren’t 100% sure there is enough information to potentially kill everyone in the house (wrong house with an armed citizen residing in it and responding appropriately to such a raid) then that judge should be at risk of losing everything just as if they pulled the trigger on a sleeping, innocent Citizen themselves. Same with any upper officers.
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