Ah, this I agree with. Qualified immunity has protected police in a few way-too-shady circumstances.
However, as a side effect, I think a lot of police would leave their jobs (or less people would join the police force in the future) without qualified immunity. In some cases this is good as it removes or prevents bad apples in the force, but in other cases I imagine perfectly good potential-cops are not going to put up with a dangerous, low-paid job that they can also be sued for doing at any time.
Sort of like aggressive medical malpractice lawsuits discouraging actually good/useful medical treatment as bycatch. Maybe there's some free-market equivalent of malpractice insurance for police (where the shadier they've acted, the more they'd have to pay for insurance)? Not sure the market is the right approach here, but I'm not familiar with any specific alternatives.
Or, to make everything a lot easier, just give every cop a bodycam and ~80% of the ambiguity disappears.
> * I think a lot of police would leave their jobs (or less people would join the police force in the future) without qualified immunity*
I'd rather have fewer police, even if that makes them dangerously understaffed, than the current situation where cops have very little accountability, and are unlikely to be punished when they break the law when interacting with non-cops.
Qualified immunity needs to go. Not just because it's a bad doctrine, but also because there's no basis for it in law; courts have just made it up with little legal justification.
> Or, to make everything a lot easier, just give every cop a bodycam and ~80% of the ambiguity disappears.
Body cameras are much less useful than we'd all like to believe. I think 80% is too optimistic. Cops can turn off the camera (or, "weird, it wasn't working"), and regular physical motion can easily blur the scene and make it impossible to know what's truly going on. I think cops should be required to wear them (and be auto-punished for turning them off), but I don't think they're the panacea many people think they are.
We might have a genuine disagreement then, because I have a very strong preference against police being "dangerously understaffed".
Given other societal forces (i.e. decreasing mental health care for those with the greatest need, since about the Reagan era), in my understanding we rely on cops to hold together denser areas. If policing were to substantially decrease, I'd want to be as suburban/rural as possible (whereas currently I'd like to be more urban). I might be in favor of less policing if it came after we had better services for the homeless & mentally ill.
Not claiming my viewpoint is morally or practically correct, only trying to give a better view of my perspective. I'm sure views on the police differ greatly by group membership (I am likely biased by police having low suspicion of me by default; I am also ~never going to "win" a physical interaction without backup.)
Qualified immunity as a concept is necessary in some cases. You don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. All you need is comprehensive and codified rules to prohibit certain police behaviors.
Miranda rights are a good example. Police don't get qualified immunity for violating Miranda Rights because they are codified.
Separating it Internal Affairs and police investigations under a different organization seems like a no-brainer. This would remove conflicts of interest.
The kind of person who is unwilling to be a cop without qualified immunity is 100% not the person who should be allowed to be a cop.
No other job in the US, including ones that can cause negligent death and send you to prison, has qualified immunity. If a cop can't do their job without breaking the law, something is very wrong with the law or their job description.
>dangerous, low-paid job
It is not even remotely either of these. Cops die less on the job than sanitation workers. Most cop deaths (excluding when covid was the primary cause) are caused by car accidents. Is the police union attempting to stop car chases which have shown to be dangerous and ineffective?
I think "the kind of person unwilling to be a doctor without [some level of] protection from medical malpractice lawsuits shouldn't be qualified to be a doctor" would be false - there's a lot of reasons someone might want protection from constant litigation in a high-stakes job, even if they are trying to do it well. What do you see as the key difference between doctors & cops here? Other jobs don't have qualified immunity per se (except other governmental jobs), but there are plenty of jobs with specific licensing/insurance that seems to be trying to do something similar.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Police and sheriff's patrol officers and transit and railroad police have some of the highest rates of injuries and illnesses of all occupations."[0] It's certainly not the deadliest job, but I'm guessing it is vastly overrepresented in deaths & injuries compared to most jobs (and many potential officers' next best option).
In 2021 police & detectives in the U.S. had a median wage of ~$66k[1], lower than the national median of ~$71k[2]. Again, not the worst paid by far, but below median.
Obviously a lot of this depends on location; different areas have vastly different crime rates, and police in a wealthy suburb probably are very well-off compared to the night shift in inner cities.
Police work is far from the worst job you can get, but it still seems harder than a lot of (most?) other work. Though I don't feel qualified to make a subjective comparison to other jobs of similar pay & starting requirements.
I'm not sure what you mean by police unions trying to stop car chases. Presumably chasing criminals through sometimes-dangerous situations so they don't get away is a core part of the job description?
However, as a side effect, I think a lot of police would leave their jobs (or less people would join the police force in the future) without qualified immunity. In some cases this is good as it removes or prevents bad apples in the force, but in other cases I imagine perfectly good potential-cops are not going to put up with a dangerous, low-paid job that they can also be sued for doing at any time.
Sort of like aggressive medical malpractice lawsuits discouraging actually good/useful medical treatment as bycatch. Maybe there's some free-market equivalent of malpractice insurance for police (where the shadier they've acted, the more they'd have to pay for insurance)? Not sure the market is the right approach here, but I'm not familiar with any specific alternatives.
Or, to make everything a lot easier, just give every cop a bodycam and ~80% of the ambiguity disappears.