Qualified immunity is a defense against standing in a civil trial, normally against police


Police Brutality/Racism Advantage



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Police Brutality/Racism Advantage


Police Not Held Accountable in Suits



Individual police not held responsible


Robert Hennelly, May 13, 2015, Slate, Poisonous Cops, Total Immunity: Why an epidemic of police abuse is actually going unpunished, http://www.salon.com/2015/05/13/poisonous_cops_total_immunity_why_an_epidemic_of_police_abuse_is_actually_going_unpunished/

No matter how big the settlement might be, Schwartz notes that police officers enjoy a qualified immunity that shields them from personal liability for whatever actions they take while on the job. Schwartz asked 70 of the nation’s largest police departments to submit the total amount they paid out to settle police misconduct cases from 2006 to 2011. Forty-four of the 70 agencies responded. All told, they paid out $730 million to settle 9,225 civil rights suits. Yet in just one half of one percent of those settlements were officers required to pay anything.


Police Brutality Widespread



Comprehensive statistics demonstrate that blacks and Latinos are targeted


Bonnie, Kristian, 2014, Seven Reasons Police Brutality is Systemic, Not Anecdotal, American Conservative, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/2014/07/02/seven-reasons-police-brutality-is-systematic-not-anecdotal/ Bonnie Kristian is a writer who lives in the Twin Cities. She is a communications consultant for Young Americans for Liberty and a graduate student at Bethel Seminary

“Simply put,” says University of Florida law professor Katheryn K. Russell, “the public face of a police brutality victim is a young man who is Black or Latino.” In this case, research suggests perception matches reality. To give a particularly striking example, one Florida city’s “stop and frisk” policy has been explicitly aimed at all black men. Since 2008, this has led to 99,980 stops which did not produce an arrest in a city with a population of just 110,000. One man alone was stopped 258 times at his job in four years, and arrested for trespassing while working on 62 occasions. Failure to address this issue communicates to police that minorities are a safe target for abuse.

Police acknowledge police brutality is widespread


Bonnie, Kristian, 2014, Seven Reasons Police Brutality is Systemic, Not Anecdotal, American Conservative, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/2014/07/02/seven-reasons-police-brutality-is-systematic-not-anecdotal/ Bonnie Kristian is a writer who lives in the Twin Cities. She is a communications consultant for Young Americans for Liberty and a graduate student at Bethel Seminary

Here’s the real clincher. A Department of Justice study revealed that a whopping 84 percent of police officers report that they’ve seen colleagues use excessive force on civilians, and 61 percent admit they don’t always report “even serious criminal violations that involve abuse of authority by fellow officers.” This self-reporting moves us well beyond anecdote into the realm of data: Police brutality is a pervasive problem, exacerbated by systemic failures to curb it. That’s not to say that every officer is ill-intentioned or abusive, but it is to suggest that the common assumption that police are generally using their authority in a trustworthy manner merits serious reconsideration. As John Adams wrote to Jefferson, “Power always thinks it has a great soul,” and it cannot be trusted if left unchecked.


1,100 people per year are killed by police


The Internationalist, Summer 2015, Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Talks Strike Black America, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html DOA: 10-2-16

As 2014 drew to a close, according to the most detailed account based on publicly published sources, a total of 1,100 people had been killed by the police in the United States.”4 The actual numbers may be much higher, and there are no official figures since the government relies on very partial voluntary reporting by police departments. But the stark reality is that at least three individuals a day had their lives terminated by the forces of “law and order.” The last to die that year was Kevin Davis, a 44-year-old black worker who lived on the outskirts of Decatur, Georgia. Davis had called the police after being stabbed with a knife by an assailant who fled. When the police arrived, first they shot Davis’ dog and then him. When he was taken to the hospital, police refused to let his family have contact with him until he “expired” two days later (Alternet, 27 January).


Racism in Police Brutality

Blacks disproportionately killed by police


The Internationalist, Summer 2015, Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Talks Strike Black America, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html DOA: 10-2-16

This tells us that 29% of those killed by police as of June 1 were black, although African Americans are only 13% of the U.S. population; that one-third of the black victims were unarmed, and two-thirds of unarmed people killed by police were members of minorities; that the average age of a person killed by police was 37, that 27% had mental health issues and 95% were men. One-third of the women were killed by police in their own home, as was Tanisha Anderson, killed by Cleveland cops only days before they shot Tamir Rice.

Massive police racism for which there is no accountability


Ta-Nehisi Coates, author, July 2015, Between the World and Me, Kindle edition, page number at end of card

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible. Coates, Ta-Nehisi (2015-07-14). Between the World and Me (p. 9). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


Law enforcement targeting blacks with no justification


Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me, October 2015, The Atlantic, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/ DOA: 9-15-15

But even in Giuliani’s hometown, the relationship between crime and policing is not as clear as the mayor would present it. After Giuliani became mayor, in 1994, his police commissioner William Bratton prioritized a strategy of “order maintenance” in city policing. As executed by Bratton, this strategy relied on a policy of stop-and-frisk, whereby police officers could stop pedestrians on vague premises such as “furtive movements” and then question them and search them for guns and drugs. Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University law professor, found that blacks and Hispanics were stopped significantly more often than whites even “after adjusting stop rates for the precinct crime rates” and “other social and economic factors predictive of police activity.” Despite Giuliani’s claim that aggressive policing is justified because blacks are “killing each other,” Fagan found that between 2004 and 2009, officers recovered weapons in less than 1 percent of all stops—and recovered them more frequently from whites than from blacks. Yet blacks were 14 percent more likely to be subjected to force. In 2013 the policy, as carried out under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, was ruled unconstitutional.

If policing in New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg was crime prevention tainted by racist presumptions, in other areas of the country ostensible crime prevention has mutated into little more than open pillage. When the Justice Department investigated the Ferguson police department in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, it found a police force that disproportionately ticketed and arrested blacks and viewed them “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” This was not because the police department was uniquely evil—it was because Ferguson was looking to make money. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report concluded. These findings had been augured by the reporting of The Washington Post , which had found a few months earlier that some small, cash-strapped municipalities in the St. Louis suburbs were deriving 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from various fines for traffic violations, loud music, uncut grass, and wearing “saggy pants,” among other infractions. This was not public safety driving policy—it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder.

Whites and Blacks use drugs at the same rates, but Blacks are more likely to be imprisoned


Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me, October 2015, The Atlantic, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/ DOA: 9-15-15

In 2013, the ACLU published a report noting a 10-year uptick in marijuana arrests. The uptick was largely explained as “a result of the increase in the arrest rates of Blacks.” To reiterate an important point: Surveys have concluded that blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. And yet by the close of the 20th century, prison was a more common experience for young black men than college graduation or military service.




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