Why is the US unique in giving police qualified immunity?

[phoenix2020]

Thinking about some of the recent threads here -- the LAPD officer shooting the Aussie reporter, the NYPD officer basically kidnapping a woman here on vacation while leaving her 12 year old child alone and unaccompanied on the street -- and how these issues persist because the only closed loop corrective action is to sue and win a taxpayer-funded judgment, I started looking into the idea of qualified immunity and how prevalent it is.

As it turns out, it's almost unique to the United States.

Canada? UK? No qualified immunity. Officers can be personally sued.

Germany? No qualified immunity. Officers are personally liable for their actions.

Japan? No qualified immunity. Officers are accountable under civil and criminal law, exactly the same as anybody else.

In fact, amongst democracies, the concept by and large doesn't exist. Nobody does it.

But here, and seemingly uniquely here at least amongst democracies, police have broad immunity and protection against civil claims individuals usually have no resource against the officer himself/herself and are left only to litigate the government, be it city, state or federal.

I don't understand this. I can imagine theoretical arguments in favor of qualified immunity aka it encourages decisive action when it's needed, but I'm not convinced there is evidence to show that our police forces are in fact more expeditious or decisive than those in other advanced democracies. Certainly our track record w.r.t. things like school shootings isn't exactly amazing.

So, is anybody here actually in favor of us maintaining this unique broad immunity power for police officers? If so, why?

 

[noonereal]

, is anybody here actually in favor of us maintaining this unique broad immunity power for police officers?

No

 

[Ishm]

One thing I know for sure is that the type of behaviour that our American police get away with on a pretty regular basis, even before applying qualified immunity, would see many of them fired and doing penal time here in New Zealand. People here hold their police much more accountable than many US states/cities etc. The really questionable stuff doesn't happen often here because the police have a different mindset about community relations, but I have seen cases where police officers have been prosecuted by their own management for stuff that I don't think many American police units would even consider worth talking about. My feeling is that the heavy presence of guns among US criminals means that US police often end up having a more confrontational and sometimes aggressive approach towards the community, and that affects how many interactions go. Of course there are many many US police who have a great attitude and do wonderful work in a challenging role, but there also seems to be a pretty large presence of officers who have a very bad attitude and a lack of accountability being applied to them. Qualified immunity is just a horrible extension of an already bad situation.

 

[Individual]

Thinking about some of the recent threads here -- the LAPD officer shooting the Aussie reporter, the NYPD officer basically kidnapping a woman here on vacation while leaving her 12 year old child alone and unaccompanied on the street -- and how these issues persist because the only closed loop corrective action is to sue and win a taxpayer-funded judgment, I started looking into the idea of qualified immunity and how prevalent it is.

As it turns out, it's almost unique to the United States.

Canada? UK? No qualified immunity. Officers can be personally sued.

Germany? No qualified immunity. Officers are personally liable for their actions.

Japan? No qualified immunity. Officers are accountable under civil and criminal law, exactly the same as anybody else.

In fact, amongst democracies, the concept by and large doesn't exist. Nobody does it.

But here, and seemingly uniquely here at least amongst democracies, police have broad immunity and protection against civil claims individuals usually have no resource against the officer himself/herself and are left only to litigate the government, be it city, state or federal.

I don't understand this. I can imagine theoretical arguments in favor of qualified immunity aka it encourages decisive action when it's needed, but I'm not convinced there is evidence to show that our police forces are in fact more expeditious or decisive than those in other advanced democracies. Certainly our track record w.r.t. things like school shootings isn't exactly amazing.

So, is anybody here actually in favor of us maintaining this unique broad immunity power for police officers? If so, why?

Who has the deeper pockets, individual officers or city, state, and federal government?

 

[StillBallin75]

Because we are a nation of authoritarian bootlickers. Land of the free my ass.

Only thing we do that's freer than others is open air gun ranges and little else.

 

[Safiel]

As with Presidential immunity, qualified immunity is a concept the Supreme Court pulled out of its ass in 1967.

There is no constitutional or other basis for qualified immunity and it should not exist.