The Supreme Court has, for example, applied qualified immunity in a case where an officer standing on an interstate overpass shot at a fleeing vehicle, something that not only contravenes best practices, but that the officer was not trained to do, a supervisor had explicitly instructed him not to do, and was unnecessary because officers under the overpass had set up stop strips and then taken appropriate cover.Roth Whats So Great About a Written Constitution Brian Christopher Jones Courts Are Taking Away One of Americans Best Options for Fixing Voting David Daley The Man Who Wanted to Save the First Amendment by Inverting It Stephen Bates Ideas How to Actually Fix Americas Police Elected officials need to do more than throw good reform dollars at bad agencies.Stoughton Professor of law at the University of South Carolina Jeffrey J.Noble Former deputy chief of police at the Irvine Police Department in California Geoffrey P.
Fix Apipa Series Of BrutalAlpert Criminology professor at the University of South Carolina The Atlantic Link Copied G eorge Floyds death is the latest in a long series of brutal encounters between the police and the people they are supposed to serve. ![]() Prior tragedies have resulted in a string of independent, blue-ribbon commissionsWickersham (1929), Kerner (1967), Knapp (1970), Overtown (1980), Christopher (1991), Kolts (1991), Mollen (1992), and the Presidents Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2014)to make recommendations for meaningful change that could address police misconduct. These groups have developed well-reasoned conclusions and pointed suggestions that are widely discussed and enthusiastically implementedbut only for a time. As public attention shifts, politics moves on and police-reform efforts wane. As an industry, American policing knows how to create systems that prevent, identify, and address abuses of power. It knows how to provide police services in a constitutionally lawful and morally upright way. And across the country, most officers are well intentioned, receive good training, and work at agencies that have good policies on the books. But knowledge and good intentions are not nearly sufficient. David A. Graham: The police can still choose nonviolence The hyperlocalized nature of policing in the United States is one factor here; the country has more than 18,000 police agencies, the majority of which (more than 15,000) are organized at the city or county level. But it is not just the Minneapolis Police Department that needs reform; it is American policing as a whole. What we desperately need, but have so far lacked, is political will. America needs to do more than throw good reform dollars at bad agencies. Elected officials at all levelsfederal, state, and localneed to commit attention and public resources to changing the legal, administrative, and social frameworks that contribute to officer misconduct. As the University of Colorado law professor Ben Levin recently wrote, Feigned powerlessness by lawmakers is common frustrating. It reflects political cowardice or actual acquiescence in the violence of policing. Federal Intervention At the federal level, Congress should focus on three objectives. Qualified immunity is a judicial doctrine that protects officers who violate someones constitutional rights from civil-rights lawsuits unless the officers actions were clearly established as unconstitutional at the time. As the University of Chicago legal scholar William Baude has persuasively argued, the Supreme Court has provided multiple justifications for qualified immunityincluding that it is the modern evolution of a common-law good faith defense, and that it ensures that government officials are not exposed to liability without fair warning that their actions are wrongbut neither the Courts historical nor doctrinal justifications can bear the burden of scrutiny. Nevertheless, as the Court has described it, qualified immunity provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law. Graeme Wood: How do you kneel on someones neck for nine minutes The problem is that the Court has taken an inappropriately narrow view of what it means for a constitutional violation to be clearly established. Essentially, a constitutional violation is clear only if a court in the relevant jurisdiction has previously concluded that very similar police conduct occurring under very similar circumstances was unconstitutional.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |