It is my understanding that though the officers that beat Rodney King were cleared of charges in a court of law, they lost a civil lawsuit. Or was it federal charges via double jeopardy. I forget which.
Jacob Sullum is part of the libertarian sellout to the left, mostly based on their cowardice. Does he have any articles about not fighting the police? Is he going to be the police after cops quit en masse over removing qualified immunity?
I would prefer a federal law that resisting arrest anywhere everywhere is a felony and can be mitigated by a sap blow to the head rendering the resister incapacitated.
Resisting endanger the cops lives and is a violation of cop civil rights to a safe work place
This is a true statement.
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.
QI is unamerican.
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?
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.
Why go after Chauvin when it's the Minneapolis Police Department that has the deep pockets? They should be good for seven figures while Chauvin probably has next to nothing.
I am all for qualified immunity. What I am not for is prosecutors and judges stretching beyond all recognition the standard of “qualified immunity”. It has gotten so bad that in only the most extreme cases of physical abuse does a cop of government get held accountable in either a criminal or civil case.
If a cop “knew or should have known” that his actions were a violation of the civil rights of an arrestee, qualified immunity is unavailable.
Prosecutors and judges to often fall back on the excuse that there is no other case that has the exact specific facts as the case being reviewed, and therefore the cop and the government is not liable. This is absurd.