Author Topic: Law Enforcement  (Read 68303 times)

ccp

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #200 on: January 31, 2023, 08:01:42 AM »
"https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/memphis-cops-in-tyre-nichols-murder-hired-after-pd-relaxed-job-standards/"

but who lowered standards ?

must be white supremacists .

if not it is all still racism
some way some how
has to be

the racism media political crump et al sharpton et al
 crowd insist it has to be

some way
some how

some lady was on Fox last night
I think Tucker who summarized this  whole business of racism and race  baiting
quite well

but I forgot her name

no matter how you dispute it , the woksters twist it around to say

see - you are racist . or a product of a racist world

and democrats seem to buy in to it since their party promotes it
and they follow along like zombies under it's religious dictates

two major religions in US now:

wokism
Democrat party

everyone else gets persecuted
taxed and hosed

ccp

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maybe correctional officers should be wearing body cams
« Reply #201 on: February 23, 2023, 08:55:04 AM »
otherwise it is one person's word against the other:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/justice-dept-struggles-carry-early-183418147.html
« Last Edit: February 23, 2023, 03:40:12 PM by Crafty_Dog »

G M

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Re: maybe correctional officers should be wearing body cams
« Reply #202 on: February 23, 2023, 09:47:42 AM »
otherwise it is one person's work against the other:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/justice-dept-struggles-carry-early-183418147.html

Some do, and it’s a good idea.



Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #204 on: March 02, 2023, 07:31:47 AM »
Off the top of my head, some of those seem to make sense, but others , , , not.

G M

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Body-by-Guinness

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Defund the Police Lite ...
« Reply #208 on: February 06, 2024, 09:47:54 AM »
... is no better than "lite" beer:

The Decadence of Identity Politics
Gender studies comes to policing.
/ Eye on the News / Public Safety, The Social Order, Politics and law
Feb 05 2024
/ Share
Among anti-cop legislators, “defund the police” may have lost some currency, but “demoralize the police” is doing just fine.

On January 30, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act, over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams. The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian. If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystander’s race, sex, and age. Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse? Too bad. Identity-based paperwork comes first.  (If an officer waits to the end of his shift to finish filling out the forms, he will still likely need to have made some contemporaneous record of his encounters.)

The department’s personnel will spend hundreds of hours a day cumulatively on this bureaucratic task—time diverted from bringing criminals to justice.

The rationale for this unnecessary bill, like almost everything encumbering policing today, is the council’s belief that the NYPD routinely harasses people of color, whether suspects or witnesses.  Never mind that civilians in these newly red-taped investigatory stops are free to ignore the officer’s questions, preserve their anonymity, and walk away.  The council still sees a bigoted purpose in an officer’s reaching out to the public for help in solving crime.

The How Many Stops Act is innocuous, however, compared with California’s data-collection requirements for police officers. New reporting obligations under the Racial & Identity Profiling Act require California officers to fill out an eight-page form (up from four pages last year) with nearly 200 fields when they make what is known as a custodial stop (meaning the civilian is not free to walk away).

The form, generated by the California Department of Justice, comes straight from race- and gender-studies classrooms. The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a “cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or nonbinary person.” To avoid placing a retrogressive “gender” straitjacket on the state’s public servants, the form allows an officer to check both “Nonbinary person” and one of the other categories, such as “Cisgender woman.”  “N/A” is not an option; the officer must list a sexual identity. Naturally, there is also an extensive “Officer race or ethnicity” section, asking whether the officer is “Asian, Hispanic/Latine(X), Black/African, Native American, Middle Eastern or South Asian, Pacific Islander, White,” or a combination of the above.

Then the officer documents the civilian’s “perceived sexual orientation: LGB+ or Straight/Heterosexual” and the civilian’s “perceived gender: Cisgender man/boy, Cisgender woman/girl, Transgender man/boy, transgender woman/girl, or nonbinary person.” Here, too, the discerning officer is allowed to surmise that the person stopped is both a “Transgender man/boy” and a “Nonbinary person.” How is the officer to make those judgments, without engaging in culpable “stereotyping”? Police academies across the state are going to have to contract with Judith Butler for a “gender theory” module. The civilian’s “perceived race or ethnicity” must be as narrowly described.

California created this form, of course, to gin up antipolice narratives. Once an officer’s identity profile is merged with that of the person stopped, the possibilities of finding some form of identity oppression are virtually endless. (On January 23, a Superior Court judge in Sacramento, responding to a petition from California law-enforcement associations, temporarily enjoined the California attorney general from requiring officers to document their “gender” on the Racial Identity & Profiling Act stop form. The state of California must submit its opposing motion by February 27.)

California and New York remain racked by carjackings, looting, and gang shootings. Under the phony charge of racism, officers in both states have cut back on proactive policing, however essential such self-initiated activity is to solving crime. They will do even less proactive policing now, if any such discretionary activity saddles them with insultingly irrelevant forms. Police rushing from one call for help to another are not concerned with the hothouse niceties of distinguishing “nonbinary” from “cisgender.”

California’s Racial & Identity Profiling Act and New York City’s How Many Stops Act have nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with fealty to identity politics. Both are glaring examples of how profoundly Democratic elites misunderstand the challenges of maintaining law and order.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of When Race Trumps Merit.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-decadence-of-identity-politics

Body-by-Guinness

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Austin City Limits
« Reply #209 on: March 04, 2024, 03:29:43 PM »
A gent who considered me a high school chum—I considered him a nitwit back then—owns a pizza place in Austin. Back during the sundry BLM antecedents he made kindred noise and got pretty militant online, at one point making some inane “kill all Republicans” noise that lead me to toss him out the digital airlock.

I confess I’m tempted to check in with him to ask how that whole “defund the police” thing is working out for his business:

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/03/03/another-city-at-the-brink-of-disaster-after-defunding-police-n4926965

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #210 on: March 04, 2024, 03:49:57 PM »
What's the word?  Schaudenfraude? (sp?)

Body-by-Guinness

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Pittsburgh Reaps what the Defund the Police Movement has Sown
« Reply #211 on: April 11, 2024, 06:35:00 PM »
Substantial cuts to types of crimes responded to, number of officers on shift, etc.:

https://voz.us/pittsburgh-police-reduce-the-number-of-active-officers-in-the-early-morning/?lang=en

Body-by-Guinness

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Selective Law Enforcement & Campus Protests
« Reply #212 on: May 06, 2024, 10:13:31 PM »
Piece exploring selective enforcement of trespass and other statutes occurring on campuses currently. To my mind the most significant paragraph in the article is this final one:

From what I can gather, the problem in cities is usually not that the police department itself is unwilling to assist, but that they are under orders from the mayor, afraid of upsetting far left constituents, to stand down. This is going a bit beyond my expertise, but from what I understand the Justice Department could and should, but won't under the Biden administratio :-Dn, investigate whether these police departments are violating the terms of their federal funding, and also denying equal protection of the law, by refusing to enforce the law for ideological and political reasons. An added factor is that this lack of enforcement is to the specific detriment of Jewish students who have disproportionately faced threats, intimidation, and violence from people at the encampments.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/04/hans-bader-on-selective-law-enforcement/

Body-by-Guinness

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Qualified Immunity & Questionable Claims Thereof
« Reply #213 on: May 15, 2024, 12:47:32 PM »
LEOs have a tough job, but not so tough that they shouldn’t be accountable for misconduct or worse. And you know what? If malfeasant cops aren’t allowed to claim QI, then that ought to go double for malfeasant public officials, particularly in view of some of the absurdities we are currently witnessing:

The "Zombification" of Qualified Immunity?
Cato @ Liberty / by Clark Neily / May 15, 2024 at 2:03 PM
Clark Neily

zombie
“I have a theory: Qualified immunity has already been bitten by one of the walkers in the Walking Dead, and it’s in the zombification process.”

So said David French on last week’s episode of The Dispatch’s Advisory Opinions podcast while discussing a recent Fifth Circuit decision denying qualified immunity to a pair of Houston police officers in an utterly bizarre false‐​arrest case. Though he doesn’t elaborate, the idea seems to be that qualified immunity’s vital essence has been drained over the years, leaving the dead‐​on‐​its‐​feet doctrine to stagger around menacing victims of government misconduct and searching for brains to eat.

It’s a whimsical image, and I hope David’s right. But here’s an even simpler take: judicial enthusiasm for qualified immunity is starting to wain because not only is it a legal, practical, and moral failure that flies in the face of bedrock conservative convictions about limited government and personal responsibility, it’s an embarrassment to boot—as this latest Fifth Circuit case vividly illustrates. Here are the facts in a nutshell.

The plaintiff, whom we’ll call GS for “Good Samaritan,” is an Uber driver and former police officer who sees a pickup truck careening across I‑610 in Houston in the wee hours of the morning, and suspects, correctly, that the driver is stinking drunk. Worried the other motorist might kill someone, GS calls 911, manages to get the truck stopped and performs a lawful citizen’s arrest when the driver tries to flee on foot across the highway. Two officers arrive at the scene and conduct separate interviews of GS and DD (“Drunk Driver”), while also administering a field sobriety test to DD, which he fails spectacularly.

The two officers then release both men, allowing the obviously intoxicated DD to drive home in his pickup truck. Two days later, the officers, Michael Garcia and Joshua Few, swear out a thoroughly rotten probable‐​cause affidavit in which they credit DD’s incoherent and contradiction‐​riddled story that GS impersonated a police officer during the encounter on the highway. Warrant in hand, they then go to GS’s house at 3 a.m., wake him up with a ruse, and arrest him for felony impersonation of a police officer—for which he is duly charged and prosecuted until the charges are quietly dropped a few months later.

GS sues a passel of defendants, including officers Garcia and Few, who promptly—and predictably (“How are we supposed to know you can’t make bogus arrests based on fraudulent warrant applications?”) assert qualified immunity. The district court rejects that defense, and, in a surprise twist, the Fifth Circuit (which is hands down the most QI‐​friendly court in the country) not only affirms the denial of qualified immunity but does so with an uncharacteristic tone of dismay and disdain for the officers’ unseemly attempt to avoid accountability for their blatant misconduct.

Indeed, the panel begins the opinion with a snarky parenthetical, noting that it affirms the district court’s denial of qualified immunity “(Obviously”), and concludes with a scathing critique of the officers and their counsel that is honestly a bit difficult to process for anyone familiar with the Fifth Circuit’s work in this area:

It is unclear which part of this case is more amazing: (1) That officers refused to charge a severely intoxicated driver and instead brought felony charges against the Good Samaritan who intervened to protect Houstonians; or (2) that the City of Houston continues to defend its officers’ conduct. Either way, the officers’ qualified immunity is denied, and the district court’s decision is AFFIRMED.

As noted, the panel’s indignant tone is striking, particularly in light of the extraordinary largesse routinely shown to members of law enforcement by the Fifth Circuit, including granting qualified immunity to cops who deliberately tased a gasoline‐​soaked man, burning him to death in front of his wife and son, and to guards who kept a prisoner in a frigid open sewer of a prison cell for nearly a week. (Notably, the grant of qualified immunity in the latter case was so egregious that the Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit without briefing or argument. Cato filed its famous cross‐​ideological amicus brief in support of that result.)

police
Where on earth could officers Garcia and Few and their lawyers have gotten the idea that even patently absurd assertions of qualified immunity in defense of breathtakingly unprofessional behavior by law enforcement might find receptive ears on the Fifth Circuit? It boggles the mind. (Not.)

So. What if anything does the Fifth Circuit’s remarkable volte‐​face in this recent case tell us about the status of qualified immunity: Has it really joined the ranks of the walking dead, “[like] some ghoul in a late‐​night horror movie”?

Unfortunately not. Despite constantly mounting evidence of qualified immunity’s utter jurisprudential illegitimacy—including recent scholarship that indicates the as‐​enacted (but subsequently bowdlerized) text of § 1983 explicitly rejected background immunity doctrines of any kind—and a growing chorus of academic and judicial critics, qualified immunity continues to fulfill its mission of letting rights‐​violating government officials off the hook for their misconduct and ensuring they never have to justify themselves to a jury of their fellow citizens.

But here’s the thing: Even though qualified immunity hasn’t been formally overruled or dialed back, one gets the distinct impression that it has fallen into disfavor among its berobed friends—that it has come to resemble not a zombie so much as the drunken guest at a party whose initially amusing antics are now causing the hosts to blush and wish they had never invited him to the party. If so, that would be progress. And if judges of the Fifth Circuit and other courts express contempt for government lawyers whose unseemly requests for qualified immunity underscore what a garbage policy it has always been—well, that too is progress.

Congress or the Supreme Court should formally rid us of this unjust, unlawful, and immoral doctrine. (Obviously.) And the more well‐​deserved scorn we heap upon it now, the sooner that day may come. (Hint, hint.)

https://www.cato.org/blog/zombification-qualified-immunity

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #214 on: May 15, 2024, 02:50:28 PM »
I get that, but OTOH false accusations are made against officers everg fg day.  Are they to pay for their legal fees?

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #215 on: May 15, 2024, 05:01:22 PM »
I get that, but OTOH false accusations are made against officers everg fg day.  Are they to pay for their legal fees?

Last thing I am or want to be is a credentialed second guesser, i.e. a lawyer, but I imagine it would be handled in a manner similar to other claims. Insurance companies aren’t expected to pay out when the arson their policy covers is set by the policy holder; concealed carry insurance companies don’t cover costs associated with the criminal use of firearms; the contracts I write and manage all have clauses rendering them null and void if specific requirements aren’t met; and qualified immunity does not attach to acts that are criminal, grossly negligent, our outside the bounds of department policy and academy training.

Hopefully there is a lawyer out there smart enough to create an employment agreement that makes clear that tasing a gasoline soaked suspect may void your qualified immunity if gross negligence can be proven, etc. And hey, I’m comfortable creating some sort of reciprocal requirement: if an action can be shown to be congruent with the training an LEO received then qualified immunity attaches and the department is required to cover all ensuing legal costs even if that’s not politically expedient, which would perhaps address some of the bad outcomes associated with the Floyd/LEO convictions.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #216 on: May 15, 2024, 07:18:25 PM »
" qualified immunity does not attach to acts that are criminal, grossly negligent, our outside the bounds of department policy and academy training."

Not sure I am following.  Forgive the smartassery, but guilt is established after a trial, yes?  So, does the officer get his lawyer paid for or not?

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #217 on: May 15, 2024, 11:16:52 PM »
" qualified immunity does not attach to acts that are criminal, grossly negligent, our outside the bounds of department policy and academy training."

Not sure I am following.  Forgive the smartassery, but guilt is established after a trial, yes?  So, does the officer get his lawyer paid for or not?

Well pardon the smartassery back at ya: in one of the instances cited the LEOs framed a Good Samaritan, stating he had impersonated a police officer thus throwing the gent’s life into a pretty scary place. We give these cops a walk, or do we establish some sort of procedure where qualified immunity is only granted to those qualified to receive it?

Far too many government employees do very shabby things that throw a citizen’s life into a tailspin for reasons that are difficult to defend, with those wretched acts occurring because the bad actors are insulated from the consequences of their actions. Are you arguing we should avert our gaze and not attach consequences to malfeasant acts because somewhere, sometime, a false claim might be made? Do we tell the relatively powerless to suck it up because the guy with the gun and all the armed companions might face a false claim if not insulated from the consequences of their unlawful actions?

As the original piece notes, the Fifth Circuit is notorious for leaving QI in place for acts that are difficult to justify. Are you arguing that even when this court is astounded by the actions of an LEO that they waive QI it should be nonetheless kept in place to dissuade others from making false claims? If so can the word “justice” be ascribed to choices like that?

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #218 on: May 16, 2024, 05:23:22 AM »
Nope, not arguing that at all AND my question remains  :-)

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #219 on: May 16, 2024, 08:58:04 PM »
Nope, not arguing that at all AND my question remains  :-)

Alrighty then. Yes the officer gets a lawyer. And should felonious actions be proven, the cop in question can pay those costs back as part of her/his punishment. At least in my non-lawyer it-ain’t-justice-if-taxpayers-foot-the-bill-for-wanton-criminal-behavior opinion. As someone far better acquainted with how these wheels turn feel free to suggest a method whereby felonious behavior isn’t underwritten and hence tacitly supported. I’m not a lawyer and hence don’t see a percentage in stating much beyond what ought to be acknowledged as a tautology: when criminal behavior is supported you get more criminal behavior, and that’s a bad thing.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #220 on: May 17, 2024, 11:49:28 AM »
Regarding paying for defense lawyers, we don't get to say the accused is guilty before he gets a trial and therefore the legal fees fall on him.

With regard to QI, as I understand it, the gist of QI theory is that by the nature of police work, an officer is abnormally likely to be accused by the people he is policing.  If he has to worry about getting sued all the fg time, we will not have many people willing to do the work.


Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #222 on: May 20, 2024, 04:40:59 AM »
Regarding paying for defense lawyers, we don't get to say the accused is guilty before he gets a trial and therefore the legal fees fall on him.

With regard to QI, as I understand it, the gist of QI theory is that by the nature of police work, an officer is abnormally likely to be accused by the people he is policing.  If he has to worry about getting sued all the fg time, we will not have many people willing to do the work.

Therefore you have no problem underwriting criminal behavior conducted by police officers, and the resulting damage done when it appears to citizens that police officers are above the law. I do, and believe a criminal justice system that can’t figure out a way to hold police accountable for their behavior as an ordinary citizen would be is a poor excuse for a “justice” system.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #223 on: May 20, 2024, 04:56:10 AM »
A bit of a personal attack saying "I have no problem etc". 

I'm well aware that police sometimes act quite badly; indeed many years ago I was arrested and the officers lied on the stand but my attorney was able to put doubt as to their testimony in the judge's mind.   As the only white member of a nine man band, I''ve been roused roughly by police etc.

Your passion on this issues seems to not notice the word "qualified"-- so far neither of us have engaged on the parameters of that qualification.   

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #224 on: May 20, 2024, 09:05:02 AM »
A bit of a personal attack saying "I have no problem etc". 

I'm well aware that police sometimes act quite badly; indeed many years ago I was arrested and the officers lied on the stand but my attorney was able to put doubt as to their testimony in the judge's mind.   As the only white member of a nine man band, I''ve been roused roughly by police etc.

Your passion on this issues seems to not notice the word "qualified"-- so far neither of us have engaged on the parameters of that qualification.

Hmm, the "personal attack" feels two edged on my end. Having confessed I don't have the legal background required to formulate an elegant system for ensuring that malfeasant and/or illegal acts by police officers are not underwritten--when something is underwritten you tend to get more of it, don'tcha know--by the state/feds/whomever, you persists in implying the wheels on the law enforcement bus will fall off unless we continue to do just that, even in the face of examples I've provided, examples you have not spoken to where the "Q" is indeed a factor, labeling comments that I view as staying in my lane as "unresponsive," acting as though I don't understand guilt or innocence needs to be established before a penalty phase is entered into, and generally persisting in asking me to provide a solution in a complex area in which I've no expertise, though you do.

So yes, penalties can't be assigned in advance of a trial, but once guilt is established and we get to the penalty portion of the trial financial penalties such as court costs can be assigned, yes? Perhaps if LEOs know they will have to bear those costs if found guilty that may inspire the benefits and costs of illicit behavior to be weighed differently, at least if one assumes, as the criminal justice system does, that assigning accountable costs to crime has an impact on criminal behavior.

At the end of the day a system of justice that appears to support official misconduct that a citizen would undoubtedly be penalized for has its share of downsides and can be used by agitators to inspire conflagrations as we saw occur across the country in the wake of the George Floyd incident and subsequent gross exaggeration and sacrifice on the SJW altar, as I feel was the case, where Thomas Lane in particular is concerned. QI and spineless LEO administrators ought to bear that onus IMO, and I also have no problem in my lay view with coming up with a means of ensuring those types of expedient metaphorical defenestrations don't occur, or at least the officer(s) involved have access to the sorts of resources to counter the weight of political expediency, something I feel would have far more bearing on LEO retention and willingness to engage in proactive law enforcement than modifying QI to disincentivize illegal behavior in an official capacity.

Again as noted, I view my perspective as something of a tautology: bad motivating factors lead to bad outcomes. I assume you don't take issue with that statement, leaving me to wonder what you are arguing for? The status quo? Increasing the protections offered by QI? As it stands I'm left making a point I feel is an obvious one while be asked to offer a solution I don't have the training or background to intelligently craft while you defend ... I'm not sure exactly what, though you've the ol' Esq. to fall back on as the issue is discussed.

This is hardly the first time someone on this list has tried to drag me into their area of expertise, whereupon they can showcase my admitted ignorance, but it's the first time you have done so, and I'm not sure to what end.
« Last Edit: May 20, 2024, 09:20:20 AM by Body-by-Guinness »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #225 on: May 20, 2024, 03:56:16 PM »

I draw your attention to this:

"Your passion on this issues seems to not notice the word "qualified"-- so far neither of us have engaged on the parameters of that qualification."

In other words, I am not holding myself out as better than you. 

I do not propose a definitive answer precisely because IMHO one is not possible. 

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #226 on: May 21, 2024, 05:01:16 AM »

I draw your attention to this:

"Your passion on this issues seems to not notice the word "qualified"-- so far neither of us have engaged on the parameters of that qualification."

In other words, I am not holding myself out as better than you. 

I do not propose a definitive answer precisely because IMHO one is not possible.

Okay, so the point of this less than Socratic exercise is…?

Again, I’ve provided specific examples where the “Q” in ‘QI lead to outcomes that don’t appear just to me. Are my breadcrumbs not leaving a distinct enough trail?

And yes, I am passionate about this. Growing up my brother was considered the teenage mastermind of area crime and hence we were subject to all manner of rousts, with numerous post facto LEO lies being part of it. My late brother developed a deep hatred of the police due to this, and took to harassing them as he felt he was being harassed. In one case he broke into an LEOs car and stole a bunch of vending machine tins filled with change. He insisted this proved the LEO was involved in a rash of burglaries that he was forever being pulled in for … which proved correct, eventually at least, with the officer eventually being convicted and jailed. I won’t even get started regarding what was then called the Metropolitan Enforcement Group’s tactics back in my telephone hotline days. Suffice to say they weren’t shy about ignoring search and seizure rules and then lying about it in pursuit of what they considered justice.

So yeah, I’m a fan of accountability generally—my brother did his share of prison time and deserved it—and don’t much like incentives that have perverse outcomes, with the piece I posted documenting one such instance and inspiring you to initiate this exchange. I dunno, perhaps this is a once burnt reaction on my end as there was a time when posting about police misconduct or the utter failure of current drug laws would result in endless badgering and little illumination and I’m not finding any light shone here.

As that may be, if there is a specific element of the Q you’d like non-lawyer me to speak to feel free to spell it out and if I feel I can engage intelligently I will.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #227 on: May 21, 2024, 10:26:18 AM »
Quite the tale!

And yes I sometimes forget how annoying many non-lawyers find being subjected to Socratic lines of questioning whereas for me it is simply a search for getting to definition of terms and clarity in what is being asserted.

In addition to my various misadventures in interaction with law enforcement (nowhere near those of your brother!) I regularly work with law enforcement during which I am exposed quite a bit to what the world looks like from an LEO perspective.

I do not deny the potency of your argument, but in equal measure as a general principle I find it quite implausible to suggest that police need to be as subject to lawsuits as anyone just walking around.  I could be mistaken, but it seems like that is where you are or are heading.

It's not a justice system, it is a legal system. 

Even when one "wins" litigation is a significant emotional event with high costs in emotion, time, energy, and money.   The plaintiff gets his lawyer with a contingency agreement, but someone must pay for the defendant's representation.

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #228 on: May 21, 2024, 12:17:31 PM »
Quite the tale!

And yes I sometimes forget how annoying many non-lawyers find being subjected to Socratic lines of questioning whereas for me it is simply a search for getting to definition of terms and clarity in what is being asserted.

In addition to my various misadventures in interaction with law enforcement (nowhere near those of your brother!) I regularly work with law enforcement during which I am exposed quite a bit to what the world looks like from an LEO perspective.

I do not deny the potency of your argument, but in equal measure as a general principle I find it quite implausible to suggest that police need to be as subject to lawsuits as anyone just walking around.  I could be mistaken, but it seems like that is where you are or are heading.

It's not a justice system, it is a legal system. 

Even when one "wins" litigation is a significant emotional event with high costs in emotion, time, energy, and money.   The plaintiff gets his lawyer with a contingency agreement, but someone must pay for the defendant's representation.

Yes it had our little burg north of Chicago all aflutter back in the 1970's. Cop had a last name of Bruce, but my google-fu isn't letting me pull anything up. It was reported in the Chicago Tribune IIRC, but they won't let you search their archives for free.

These misadentures drove my brother Randy into basically an outlaw biker lifestyle, an element I believe in his premature death due to all his motorcycle crashes, bar fights, and general hard living. Some of the stupidest things I ever did involved hanging with him at the Kenosha biker bar he favored as aggravated assualt seemed the hobby of many there, while the rules that crowd lived by were quite difficult to discern though unwitting violations of 'em had ugly, even fatal, consequences.

With that said, I don't think I've argued for setting LEOs up for more lawsuits, but do feel when they cross the line as noted in the piece I posted:

"The two officers then release both men, allowing the obviously intoxicated DD to drive home in his pickup truck. Two days later, the officers, Michael Garcia and Joshua Few, swear out a thoroughly rotten probable‐​cause affidavit in which they credit DD’s incoherent and contradiction‐​riddled story that GS impersonated a police officer during the encounter on the highway. Warrant in hand, they then go to GS’s house at 3 a.m., wake him up with a ruse, and arrest him for felony impersonation of a police officer—for which he is duly charged and prosecuted until the charges are quietly dropped a few months later."

... thus forcing a law abiding citizens to stare down the barrel of felony charges and attendant huge legal bills. Those officers ought not be able to cite QI as a reason they aren't taken to task for their crimes or don't have to endure what the Samaritan did. Sure, it's a legal system, one that was weaponized via QI against a law abiding citizen and Good Samaritan, something that is neither just or legal and hence ought not incentivize so perverse an outcome IMO.

Body-by-Guinness

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An Unqualified Disaster
« Reply #229 on: May 30, 2024, 05:43:02 PM »
Given the exchanges the last time around I hesitate to post this, but I find the arguments compelling and the provided examples more than perplexing:

Qualified Immunity Is an Unqualified Disaster
Cato Recent Op-eds / by Clark Neily / May 29, 2024 at 3:12 PM
Clark Neily

District court judges occupy the bottom rung of the federal judicial hierarchy. They hold hearings, decide motions, and preside over trials. They do not make precedent; they apply it. It is therefore highly unusual for district court judges to publicly criticize appellate‐​court decisions they are bound to apply, much less rulings of the Supreme Court. But that’s precisely what happened last week when Mississippi Judge Carlton Reeves called for the eradication of qualified immunity.

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In a nutshell, qualified immunity is a legal defense that police and other government officials can assert in civil rights cases to defeat otherwise meritorious claims by arguing that it was not yet “clearly established” that the particular thing they did—whether shooting a fleeing suspect in the back or stealing $225,000 worth of cash and rare coins while executing a search warrant—was unconstitutional.

As Judge Reeves explains in his May 20 opinion denying qualified immunity to a Jackson, Mississippi detective who helped frame an innocent man for murder, there are so many problems with that doctrine that it’s hard to know where to start.

First and most fundamentally, the judiciary’s job is to apply law, not make it. And yet, in a blatant act of judicial policymaking, the U.S. Supreme Court read into the nation’s premier civil rights law, 42 U.S.C. §1983, the defense of qualified immunity despite the fact that the statute itself makes no mention of any immunities whatsoever. Judge Reeves notes how absurd it is to suppose that the 1871 law, which was designed to protect newly freed African Americans in particular from the predations of badge‐​wearing Klansmen and other tyrannical government officials, would have included a defense so broad as to entirely defeat the law’s unambiguous purpose. It makes no sense.

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The police‐​protecting doctrine is legally baseless, costly, and liberty‐​eroding.

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Second, Judge Reeves notes the practical consequences of qualified immunity, which include a free pass for a cop who shot an innocent boy in the leg from eighteen inches away while blazing away at a non‐​threatening family dog; letting a jailer off the hook who stood and watched without calling 911 as a suicidal prisoner hanged himself with a telephone cord inside his own cell; and finding no “clearly established” right not to be locked up “in a frigid cell, covered in other persons’ feces and forced to sleep naked in sewage” for six days because the only case on point held that “prisoners couldn’t be housed in cells teeming with human waste for months on end.” (The latter case was so obviously wrong that the Supreme Court summarily reversed without briefing or argument.) Another practical consequence according to Judge Reeves is the perpetuation of racial inequality. He notes that black Americans are more frequently subjected to stops, searches, arrests, and lethal force than other Americans, and “qualified immunity then bars many of these individuals from securing justice” when their rights are violated.

In what may be the most powerful part of his opinion, Judge Reeves reviews the policy justifications for qualified immunity and shows how each of them is completely baseless. Thus, qualified immunity does not promote fairness by putting police on notice of what they may and may not do for the simple reason that they neither read nor receive training on relevant court decisions beyond some rudimentary instruction at the police academy. Nor do police face financial ruin from damage awards—almost without exception, they are indemnified by their employers, which means the costs are passed along to taxpayers. And research by Joanna C. Schwartz, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, indicates that far from streamlining litigation and eliminating unmeritorious cases, qualified immunity “may, in fact, increase the costs and delays associated with constitutional litigation.” The list of baseless assumptions and judicial wishcasting goes on and on.

Judge Reeves’s final critique is perhaps the most morally devastating. Emphasizing the difference between civil and criminal cases, he explains how the Supreme Court manages to get the relevant calculus exactly backwards, creating a world in which it is very easy for the government to convict and imprison people for crimes they had no idea existed and conduct they never imagined might be illegal, but very difficult to subject a police officer or other government official to mere civil liability for conduct that everyone agrees was unconstitutional but in a serendipitously novel way. As he laments at the end of this trenchant discussion, “It cannot be true that in America, it is easier to take away one’s liberty than hold the government accountable for violating the very Constitution guaranteeing liberty.” But it absolutely is true, and we have the Supreme Court to thank for it.

Will Judge Reeves’s cri de coeur make any difference? Not by itself, perhaps. But it adds to a steadily growing drumbeat of dissent and disdain for a judicially confected, morally bankrupt, power‐​aggrandizing legal doctrine that the Supreme Court had no business inventing in the first place, and which it persistently refuses to defend on the merits or revisit despite seeing each of its shabby rationalizations torn to pieces by lawyers, academics, activists, and even fellow jurists like Carlton Reeves. An ostrich can only bury its head in the sand so deep and for so long. Or nine ostriches, as the case might be.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/qualified-immunity-unqualified-disaster

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #230 on: May 30, 2024, 07:13:16 PM »
No worries from me in making your case, and this article does a better job of that than you did the last time around  :-D 

BTW, the citation of Section 1983 reminded me of US v. Bivens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivens_v._Six_Unknown_Named_Agents

You may find some useful info here.

But more to the point is this article cited in your CATO piece:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/how-qualified-immunity-fails

Have you read  it?
« Last Edit: May 31, 2024, 05:34:24 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #231 on: May 30, 2024, 07:51:07 PM »
No worries from me in making your case, and this article does a better job of that than you did the last time around  :-D 

Jeepers, you mean the articles posted by people with expertise in the area did a better job of explication than little ol’ me that said from the outset he had no expertise? Standby as I fumble about for my shocked face….

But hey, isn’t the point of posting pieces here to assemble a body of information that can be referred to when the usual suspects make their usual noise, or am I missing something?

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #232 on: May 31, 2024, 05:36:05 AM »
Ummm , , , have I offended you again?

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Law Enforcement
« Reply #233 on: May 31, 2024, 06:41:01 AM »
Ummm , , , have I offended you again?

No, you have confused me. When I post a piece on emerging physics you don’t ask me to explain the quantum mechanics it is founded on. When I link to a newly published paper taking apart the science climate alarmism is based on you don’t expect me to opine on molecular chemistry. Yet twice now when I’ve posted pieces demonstrating in no uncertain terms the damage done to law abiding citizens under the aegis of qualified immunity I’m asked to address the legal implications of modifying QI or otherwise given grief while the strong arguments and stark examples in the pieces are not responded to or otherwise addressed.

Will there be a quiz? Should we not post pieces unless we are able to knock out a five paragraph theme in support of our decision to do so? Are there topics we should avoid speaking to lest we find ourselves embroiled in circular discussions? As noted, there was a time here when one could not post pieces critical of law enforcement or the WOD without being pulled into an argument generating heat rather than light as any damning fact or arguments in the original piece were circumlocuted to death if addressed at all. I derived no value from those exchanges and so am perhaps too sensitive when I see that pattern rearing its head. If that counts as sensitivity I suppose I’m guilty as charged.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2024, 09:48:40 AM by Body-by-Guinness »

Body-by-Guinness

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LEO on “Indefinite Leave” After Taking “Buy Back” Guns Home
« Reply #234 on: June 11, 2024, 04:35:18 PM »
Given the often hidebound perspective of LEO leadership—it’s likely safe to assume any jurisdiction that would sponsor something as silly and ineffective as a “buy back” would more than frown on the liberation of these “recovered” firearms—this was no doubt a bonehead move on the LEO’s part. With that said, if I knew some WWII bring back or other interesting firearm was headed for the smelter I’d be tempted to spare it that fate:

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2024/06/11/san-antonio-cop-gets-indefinate-suspension/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss