I'm not sure what reasonably intelligent person would choose law enforcement as a career if he could be prosecuted for taking immediate action to save his own life or that of another. It's like an instant replay in football. Slow motion can be very revealing but real time is a different matter. Some form of qualified immunity is necessary. You can't allow Al Sharpton to be an instant replay judge.
Another question is what do you do with shoplifters or reckless drivers or bank robbers. Just let them do as they please if they become violent. Mistakes will happen. Tackling a perp may cause a fractured skull if he hits the curb. Restraining a criminal may cause a heart attack or a stroke or trigger some other reaction be cause he is high on drugs. If we decide to not arrest criminals, we are telling the citizenry to fend for them selves. I can't see that turning out better than the few overreactions by law enforcement officers. Look at the actual numbers. I just checked one (apparently biased) source that claimed most of the killings could have been avoided but the total number was 1126.
Because the officer's motives and inner thoughts can not be measured. There is no meter for that. Because we will have a thousand trials a year just like the Rittenhouse trial and most, if not all, will end the same way. The professional victims and their weak minded followers will be outraged and the chasm between them and normal society will widen.
Dude just admitted he would rather have police kill indiscriminately than have a black man able to question if the officers actions were justified. I don't think there is much else to say after that.
Exactly, black people are okay as long as they come to the same conclusions you do. Although Terrell has multiple times in his life called for police investigations but that was before he went full Trumper.
Sure, and let that be at the discretion of a jury of the officer's community peers, who will be empowered with both the necessary facts to determine whether an officer is acting reasonably or not.
We don't give doctors a free pass on medical malpractice - I don't see why cops should get the free pass that they have.
I let my professional engineering license lapse because I did not accept enough design jobs to pay for professional liability insurance. Doctors will never lack for revenue in their practice. Policemen will never have the opportunity to insure against malpractice at a rate they can afford. I doubt that you or anyone else commenting here has personal liability insurance beyond a $1,000,000 umbrella policy associated with their homeowners and auto policies. David, maybe. He is a pilot but is employed by a large (probably Fortune 500) corporation.
In my work with health care firms and research institutions engaged in healthcare research, I actually carry $2 million dollars in commercial liability insurance, as well as a variety of additional policies to supplement that for things like cybersecurity and workers compensation. (Three cheers for self employment.)
I do not enjoy any form of qualified immunity for doing my job poorly - hence the insurance - so I don't know why folks in positions to make mistakes that are more severe and consequential than those I could possibly commit get a free pass.
I applaud the self-employed. It involves many years of hard work and a lot of personal responsibility. Nearly all of my work was shielded by an outstanding law firm whose largest client was the Fortune 500 company I worked for. So I congratulate you for doing it on your own.
Your commercial liability insurance is most likely an operating expense. I did tax returns as a volunteer for the low income and elderly including the self-employed with small businesses and sheriffs deputies and city cops. I say again, law enforcement officers do not have this option. Without some form of qualified immunity they are left hanging - at the mercy of any race hustler politician and grifter and publicity seeking shyster (Is there a difference?). I do not believe my situation or yours compares to what they face.
Until some instance of us having to make a life or death decision and take action within five seconds, I will not acknowledge any similarity in our situation to what a law enforcement officer is likely to face in his career.
Well, some of the systems I do build are for people with severe depression, so making sure that I'm doing everything I can do to detect and report instances of demonstrated suicidal ideation, so there is some element of danger that I have to be prepared for with protocols to handle. (My systems have caught several such cases, and I'm happy to report that professional therapists were able to respond quickly enough to prevent a tragedy.)
Now, you're right that's not an apples-to-apples comparison (though you were the one who posed the original insurance challenge), and it's not feasible to ask each cop to structure themselves as a single-member LLC and provide policing consulting services to the local municipality. (They'd also run into the classification issues of contractors vs. employees, but let's not go down that rabbit hole.)
That said, my example isn't entirely useless either. In order to qualify for my insurance, I have to make truthful declarations about how my business is run in order to have the insurance company price the risk accordingly. I've learned that the best way to do that is to adopt industry-best practices and document that I'm doing my job in a reasonable manner that one would expect from a similar professional. That means a variety of processes and procedures to check of boxes. A police officer who can demonstrate that his actions are congruent with local department's standards should have nothing to worry about, even in the absence of qualified immunity.
The issue with qualified immunity as it stands today is that it's not there protecting cop in the zone where "reasonable" is debatable. It's protecting bad cops who know that they have carte blanche and qualified immunity to cover for their bad policing. All qualified immunity does is remove a vital feedback mechanism by which bad cops can be drummed out of the system and sent to find employment elsewhere.
I originally mentioned above, the best people to arbitrate whether a justice of the peace is serving their community faithfully would be a jury selected from that same community. Otherwise, there's no meaningful recourse should an office choose to abuse the civil rights of those he's there to serve.
It degenerates into always believe the accuser. Like sexual abuse accusations. I'm not sure how a cop demonstrates anything except by personal testimony. Unless he has a partner. Body cams might help but so far they don't seem to. You have idiots viewing the video and asking dumb questions like why didn't the cop just let an armed assailant go. Or why didn't the cop just shoot him in the leg. I have viewed these questions on TV. I think our idiot president asked one of them. Placing the burden of proof on a cop for five seconds of frantic activity is not the way to go.
As for bad cops getting away with something, that happens. It's like bad politicians getting away with stuff. As you and most others commenting here say, they have to police their own. But like politics, police departments can be rotten to the core.
I'm not sure what reasonably intelligent person would choose law enforcement as a career if he could be prosecuted for taking immediate action to save his own life or that of another. It's like an instant replay in football. Slow motion can be very revealing but real time is a different matter. Some form of qualified immunity is necessary. You can't allow Al Sharpton to be an instant replay judge.
Another question is what do you do with shoplifters or reckless drivers or bank robbers. Just let them do as they please if they become violent. Mistakes will happen. Tackling a perp may cause a fractured skull if he hits the curb. Restraining a criminal may cause a heart attack or a stroke or trigger some other reaction be cause he is high on drugs. If we decide to not arrest criminals, we are telling the citizenry to fend for them selves. I can't see that turning out better than the few overreactions by law enforcement officers. Look at the actual numbers. I just checked one (apparently biased) source that claimed most of the killings could have been avoided but the total number was 1126.
https://policeviolencereport.org/
'cause it's all or nothing in your book.
Why should an officer have immunity, rather than having to actually justify their actions and have them be judged as reasonable or not?
Because the officer's motives and inner thoughts can not be measured. There is no meter for that. Because we will have a thousand trials a year just like the Rittenhouse trial and most, if not all, will end the same way. The professional victims and their weak minded followers will be outraged and the chasm between them and normal society will widen.
Dude just admitted he would rather have police kill indiscriminately than have a black man able to question if the officers actions were justified. I don't think there is much else to say after that.
I would be happy to have Leo Terrell or Lee Elder doing the questioning instead of a professional race baiting con man.
Exactly, black people are okay as long as they come to the same conclusions you do. Although Terrell has multiple times in his life called for police investigations but that was before he went full Trumper.
Yep. You and I accept opinions we agree with. Other opinions, not so much
"Some form of qualified immunity is necessary."
Sure, and let that be at the discretion of a jury of the officer's community peers, who will be empowered with both the necessary facts to determine whether an officer is acting reasonably or not.
We don't give doctors a free pass on medical malpractice - I don't see why cops should get the free pass that they have.
I let my professional engineering license lapse because I did not accept enough design jobs to pay for professional liability insurance. Doctors will never lack for revenue in their practice. Policemen will never have the opportunity to insure against malpractice at a rate they can afford. I doubt that you or anyone else commenting here has personal liability insurance beyond a $1,000,000 umbrella policy associated with their homeowners and auto policies. David, maybe. He is a pilot but is employed by a large (probably Fortune 500) corporation.
In my work with health care firms and research institutions engaged in healthcare research, I actually carry $2 million dollars in commercial liability insurance, as well as a variety of additional policies to supplement that for things like cybersecurity and workers compensation. (Three cheers for self employment.)
I do not enjoy any form of qualified immunity for doing my job poorly - hence the insurance - so I don't know why folks in positions to make mistakes that are more severe and consequential than those I could possibly commit get a free pass.
I applaud the self-employed. It involves many years of hard work and a lot of personal responsibility. Nearly all of my work was shielded by an outstanding law firm whose largest client was the Fortune 500 company I worked for. So I congratulate you for doing it on your own.
Your commercial liability insurance is most likely an operating expense. I did tax returns as a volunteer for the low income and elderly including the self-employed with small businesses and sheriffs deputies and city cops. I say again, law enforcement officers do not have this option. Without some form of qualified immunity they are left hanging - at the mercy of any race hustler politician and grifter and publicity seeking shyster (Is there a difference?). I do not believe my situation or yours compares to what they face.
Until some instance of us having to make a life or death decision and take action within five seconds, I will not acknowledge any similarity in our situation to what a law enforcement officer is likely to face in his career.
Well, some of the systems I do build are for people with severe depression, so making sure that I'm doing everything I can do to detect and report instances of demonstrated suicidal ideation, so there is some element of danger that I have to be prepared for with protocols to handle. (My systems have caught several such cases, and I'm happy to report that professional therapists were able to respond quickly enough to prevent a tragedy.)
Now, you're right that's not an apples-to-apples comparison (though you were the one who posed the original insurance challenge), and it's not feasible to ask each cop to structure themselves as a single-member LLC and provide policing consulting services to the local municipality. (They'd also run into the classification issues of contractors vs. employees, but let's not go down that rabbit hole.)
That said, my example isn't entirely useless either. In order to qualify for my insurance, I have to make truthful declarations about how my business is run in order to have the insurance company price the risk accordingly. I've learned that the best way to do that is to adopt industry-best practices and document that I'm doing my job in a reasonable manner that one would expect from a similar professional. That means a variety of processes and procedures to check of boxes. A police officer who can demonstrate that his actions are congruent with local department's standards should have nothing to worry about, even in the absence of qualified immunity.
The issue with qualified immunity as it stands today is that it's not there protecting cop in the zone where "reasonable" is debatable. It's protecting bad cops who know that they have carte blanche and qualified immunity to cover for their bad policing. All qualified immunity does is remove a vital feedback mechanism by which bad cops can be drummed out of the system and sent to find employment elsewhere.
I originally mentioned above, the best people to arbitrate whether a justice of the peace is serving their community faithfully would be a jury selected from that same community. Otherwise, there's no meaningful recourse should an office choose to abuse the civil rights of those he's there to serve.
It degenerates into always believe the accuser. Like sexual abuse accusations. I'm not sure how a cop demonstrates anything except by personal testimony. Unless he has a partner. Body cams might help but so far they don't seem to. You have idiots viewing the video and asking dumb questions like why didn't the cop just let an armed assailant go. Or why didn't the cop just shoot him in the leg. I have viewed these questions on TV. I think our idiot president asked one of them. Placing the burden of proof on a cop for five seconds of frantic activity is not the way to go.
As for bad cops getting away with something, that happens. It's like bad politicians getting away with stuff. As you and most others commenting here say, they have to police their own. But like politics, police departments can be rotten to the core.
Police are employees of municipalities/counties/states: it ain't their personal insurance that's a problem.
We have civil rights, and police need to respect those as well. QI allows for violation of those rights.
QI should be abolished or heavily limited/reformed.