*Note this document is a work in progress, we worked quickly to put the instagram graphic together in light of the spreading awareness of the #8CantWait proposal
*We are happy to receive feedback, critiques, corrections, etc. Feel free to DM either of us on Instagram:
@serenebeane
@gabe.slater
*We have not been personally affected by police violence. We are both non-black law students who are simply deeply passionate about the issue. We definitely have blind spots, biases, and limitations in the way we see these issues.
Why #8CantWait is NOT the solution, and 8 things to demand instead
Gabe Slater & Serena Patel
Over the past few days, many people have been sharing posts from Campaign
Zero’s #8CantWait campaign. If anyone has not seen it, a link to their site is here: https://8cantwait.org/.. #8CantWait’s basic argument is that we can reduce police killings by 72% through specific changes in police policy reform.
We are arguing that not only are these reforms insufficient, but that the #8CantWait is actively harmful to the goals of reducing police violence and achieving racial justice.
We are past the point of asking for police reform. It DOES NOT work without removing the legal structures that shield police officers from having to internalize accountability for violating policies in general. We are at the point of significantly taking power away from this unjust institution through meaningful defunding and the creation of alternative, community-based solutions. As long as the basic mission and institution of policing remains the same, we will never see meaningful results from police reform. Every time we ask for reform, we are once again looking to the police and prisons as key institutions for solving problems, reinforcing systems of oppression that are fundamentally unjust. The #8CantWait proposal would add funding to police departments, further empowering them and expanding their role in society. These reforms reinforce a FALSE sense of police legitimacy. They would allow white people and other privileged communities to enjoy the protections of the police they always have, while continuing to allow the police to disproportionately police and threaten black communities. Racial disparities in policing NEED TO BE ADDRESSED. We do not need to rely on an institution that is aggressive, invasive, and unjust to keep us safe. There are alternatives that would actively invest in communities and make them safer without relying on police or prisons. The momentum we have today needs to be used to do so much more than institute policy bandaids for an institutional problem. We need to actually address that institutional problem and break from these systems of oppression.
To those of you thinking that we can decrease funding to police departments while ALSO implementing these policies (or other “police reform”)… PLEASE READ THIS if nothing else:
After each widely known police shooting in the past 100 years, we have implemented internal policy reforms and funded police departments for training on those reforms. These reforms have done nothing meaningful to increase police accountability because police officers do not have to internalize ANY personal consequences for violating those new policies. Many police officers and departments also harbor attitudes that are actively hostile to reform. Fourth Amendment Law, police unions, indemnification provisions, etc. protect police from suffering any meaningful personal consequences, whether it be disciplinary measures taken within the department, civil liability (paying out damages), or being fired (usually police are just moved to desk duty for some time then moved back out into the field if they majorly violate policy or display egregious conduct). Police officers are not suffering employment consequences for violating internal policies (like use of force policies) that we think might provide significant deterrence to violations largely because of the power of police unions. This is the reason why we have so many police officers with long complaint histories who are still working and have never been disciplined.
You might be skeptical of this -- after all, even though it took several days to charge the officers who killed George Floyd, all of them were fired quickly. First, what has happened in Minneapolis is the exception, not the rule, it has taken monumental public pressure and activism to get the officers fired and charged. Even in the midst of mass protests across the country, the police officers in Louisville who killed Breonna Taylor still have not been fired or disciplined. Second, Derek Chauvin himself is an example of the problem. When Chauvin killed George Floyd, he had 18 prior civilian complaints filed against him. None of those complaints resulted in meaningful discipline and none of them got Chauvin fired. This inaction killed George Floyd. Finally, while police officers who kill people might be fired, killings are just the tip of the iceberg. Non-lethal forms of police brutality will almost never result in discipline of any kind. Most troubling, as is the case with Chauvin, the police officers who commit non-lethal brutality and misconduct today can become the killers of tomorrow.
You might think: “Okay maybe they don’t get disciplined or fired, but they will get sued for violating the law, so that should create accountability, right?” Wrong. Because of qualified immunity doctrine (explained in this document below), civil suits against officers for misconduct RARELY, IF EVER, get past the initial stages of litigation. This means that the litigation is decided in favor of officers BEFORE the actual substance of the person’s claim is even considered by the court. Even if you were to get past qualified immunity, juries are unlikely to award damages and find for plaintiffs because of the trust and legitimacy we have consistently reinforced in our country’s police officers. If the plaintiff does get a judgment in their favor and is awarded damages, which is INCREDIBLY difficult, officers do not even have to reach into their own pockets to pay the monetary damages. Indemnification provisions allow that the city (therefore the taxpayer) pays those damages and if not, the police department pays them. As just one example, in the fiscal year stretching from 2018-2019, New York city alone paid out $230 million dollars to settle police brutality lawsuits. The civil system is designed to deter people from harming other people. When wrongdoers have to pay money damages for hitting someone with their car, causing a dangerous accident, or assaulting someone, it deters those people in the future from doing those same harmful things. Because indemnity provisions mean police almost never have to pay their own damages, none of the deterrence the system is supposed to create is achieved. Additionally, police have union lawyers, so they do not even incur legal expenses when being sued.
Criminal liability is an entirely different matter, also laden with considerable obstacles to obtaining any meaningful liability. Obtaining criminal charges if a police officer’s conduct rises to the level of brutality is very difficult as we have seen through the delayed charging of the officers in the Floyd case and in several other instances of police killings and brutality. Prosecutors and police are coworkers, and work interdependently in their day to day lives. It is no mystery why prosecutors are so hesitant to charge police officers and so hesitant to file the appropriate and warranted charges against them. This is true while prosecutors are also heaping charges on black and brown men every single day throughout the country without giving a second thought to the evidence to support them and to the quality of the investigation on the crime. Police officers are given deadly weapons to yield and are supposedly trained to use only when appropriate, and yet are held to lower standards than regular civilians in their use of them.
These are just a FEW of the many legal shields police have to avoid personal responsibility for their misconduct, including so many more that are written into collective bargaining agreements by police unions. As a result of all of these legal shields, police are never internalizing the risk of misconduct and therefore adding internal policies to police departments, such as those #8CantWait proposes, does nothing to actually change officer conduct and therefore increase police accountability. We should not be spending money, even if it were at best marginal funds, on police departments to have them implement and train on these new policies. ANY extra funding we have that could possibly go to police departments needs to INSTEAD be used to dismantle the legal systems that allow police officers to consistently violate policy without consequence. Why implement new policies if officers will continue to be unaccountable for following them?
Another critical reason we should not be putting our advocacy behind these proposals or police reform in general is that we only have a limited amount of political capital. This moment is huge and incredibly powerful, and we must invest all of our political capital into the defunding of police departments and the diversion of those funds into black communities. #8CantWait is a politically palatable set of reforms that would be wasting our political capital and voice to get the bigger changes done. We are in a moment where ideas that have seemed radical in the past, especially defunding the police, have become very reasonable given the widespread reporting that has now been done on the true enormity of funds given to police departments in lieu of other essential causes (ex: protective gear for healthcare workers during COVID-19). We have to be extremely deliberate in what we advocate for, and use our political capital to finally defund police and delegitimize this truly corrupt institution. Adding funds to these police departments, even if marginal in sum, still acts as a symbol of trust and empowerment of an institution that does not function to “protect and serve” black communities. Let's put our voices behind defunding police and dismantling the legal barriers and police unions that have grown stronger over time to directly obstruct justice. If we do that, it is possible that in the future, for whatever size police force we have left (if any), that police will internalize accountability for their misconduct and deterrence will meaningfully work to ensure police officers act within department policy, at which point policy reform may be helpful.
At the end of the day, sharing a graphic with eight seemingly common sense reforms can feel harmless and like a positive step towards change, but it is in fact the very reason that it is such an easy thing to do that it is problematic. These posts are effectively diluting the very reasonable voices calling for the defunding of police. These reforms are in direct contravention of the goals we need to be working towards NOW while we have this long awaited momentum. If politicians catch onto the widespread support for #8CantWait, they will implement these policies and point to them as the change we were asking for when we inevitably see more tragic police killings and brutality. Politicians will be able to get away with simply chipping away at the edges while leaving the whole structure in place, and we will lose valuable political capital. We CANNOT let that happen. It is NOT that we disagree with incrementalism, it is that we truly believe these reforms cannot be meaningful and function how we hope they would until we do the very difficult structural and systemic work.Without personal accountability, policies on paper do absolutely nothing to change officer conduct. We need EVERY EXTRA DOLLAR and EVERY OUNCE OF POLITICAL CAPITAL to do that. It needs to be done first and foremost and with all of our energy and resources. Please consider this especially when you are advocating for both this proposal as a “quick fix” AND defunding the police. If you genuinely agree that defunding is the solution and end goal, don’t waste any of your voice or advocacy on “cheap and easy” solutions that will actually add funding to the police and increase their legitimacy. As a side note, if you disagree that these reforms will add funding to the police, it is true that it is costless for the police departments to adopt the policies on paper, but in order to implement them, there needs to be training which WILL REQUIRE FUNDING. We have all of the momentum and political capital we need to go for what you might consider the “long term goal” of defunding RIGHT NOW. Don’t give up any ground. Do not accept less than meaningful change. Use your voice and advocacy deliberately.
The following summarizes the significant flaws of the #8CantWait proposal:
Don’t Trust #8CantWait’s “72%” figure
The most significant flaw in the project’s study is that it uses data from only a short window of time, January 2016 - July 2017 (about a year and a half). Data on police use of force is spotty to begin with, but using only one and a half years of data is a huge problem! While police shootings are far too common in the US, there are still relatively few of them in statistical terms, meaning year to year fluctuations can be huge and therefore lead to unreliable data.
Because the study only reviewed data from a short window of time to arrive at its conclusions, it cannot tell us whether these policies are actually causing police killings to decrease. Demonstrating causation is complicated to begin with, and it can certainly not be determined by reviewing such a small data set procured over such a short duration of time.
The problem with this approach can be seen by looking at one city included in the study: Louisville. In the only period the study looked at, January 2016 - July 2017, Louisville had 5 of the 8 policies #8CantWait recommends in place. That same period Louisville had 2 police killings, a relatively small number for a city of its size. #8CantWait uses this data to support their conclusion these policies are causing police shootings to go down.
But what happens when we look at subsequent years? If we expand the time window to all of 2017, Louisville police killed 8 people. In 2018, they killed 9 people. And in 2019 they killed 15 people. To put that number in perspective, using #8CantWait’s own data, 15 people killed by police is more people killed per capita than any other American city. Just by changing the year, Louisville goes from being one of the best cities in the country in terms of use of deadly force, to literally the worst city in the country.
Because of the short time window, the study also does nothing to measure what has happened in cities before vs. after they have implemented these policies. Think about all of the variables that could impact the number of shootings in a given city that have nothing to do with these 8 policies. We don’t doubt that some of these policies may have marginal impact -- but it is hard to take the 72% number seriously -- which is the basis of support for the entire project! Just a few months ago, Louisville Police murdered Breonna Taylor. None of the #8CantWait policy reforms would have saved her life.
The data behind #8CantWait is severely lacking, but you don’t just have to take our word for it. Jennifer Doleac a Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University and host of the popular “Probable Causation” podcast, has also come out against the “science” behind #8CantWait:
“#8CantWait is not evidence based. Their recs might be good steps, but please don’t pretend that the ‘data proves they work. We do not know if they work yet.”
She goes on to explain, “the ‘study’ appears to literally just compare places that have particular policies with places that don’t. Maybe there are other factors that explain differences between, say, San Francisco and Birmingham, AL….I think it is damaging, long-term, to pretend that we know more than we currently do about what will prove most effective.”
Link to the report:
Link to the full study:
Link to Jenifer Doleac’s Tweets: https://twitter.com/jenniferdoleac/status/1268608644481941505.
Even if you agree the data behind the proposal is suspect, you might think: “how could these reforms be harmful?”
This proposal is fundamentally inconsistent with defunding police, and will only lead cities to funnel MORE funds to police departments and INCREASE police’s claim to legitimacy.
It is true that it is costless for police departments to adopt these policies on paper. HOWEVER, new policies means more training, and more training means more money. Already, our police departments are massively over-invested when compared to other resources. Take Chicago for example: in 2020, the Chicago Police Department’s budget rose to over $1.7 billion. This is the eighth year in a row the budget has increased. The funds given to the Chicago Police Department account for roughly 18% of the city's budget while public health funds account for only 0.4%.
The more money we spend to train police on skills like intervention and mental health, the more we are creating space for police to TAKE EVEN MORE CONTROL over city budgets and public functions. That is money we are NOT spending on public education, public health, subsidizing community efforts to reduce violence, restorative justice, etc. The list of crucial causes to be investing this money in is endless.
https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/envisioning-abolition-democracy/
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/11/04/cpd-budget-to-swell-to-over-1-7-billion-in-2020-budget/
This does NOTHING to alter the fundamentally problematic police culture that permeates our society
Even if police use of force policies change - this does nothing to change the cancerous culture that infects police departments across America. Policing is a broken institution populated with many individuals who bring a “warrior mentality” to their job everyday. This is animated by an idea you might have heard of: “the thin blue line.” This is the concept that police are the only thing separating society from evil (and evil is defined in the metaphorical image as BLACKNESS, think about that).
Consider this: many police officers attend training sessions that go beyond officially approved curriculums through their departments. These training sessions commonly stress the idea of warrior policing, emphasize the need to use force, and promote a philosophy called “killology.” These private training sessions push the notion that if officers are not willing to kill they should not be police officers. Their existence is completely unaffected by reform proposals directed at police departments.
The Minneapolis police officer who was responsible for fatally shooting Philando Castille during a traffic stop in 2016 had attended one of these warrior-style private training sessions. The session he attended was called “The Bulletproof Warrior”, which is said to train officers to view everyone and everything as a potential threat. In response to this killing, Minneapolis decided to ban this kind of training in 2018. In spite of this ban, the police union decided to continue making these problematic training sessions available to officers for free.
For a truly disturbing example of how many police officers see themselves, the images included below display a few covers of prominent police magazines: POLICE and Police K-9 Magazine. These are the images the police use to represent themselves. An institution that is built to attract warriors is not an institution we want any part in expanding, but instead should work at dismantling.
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/bob-kroll-minneapolis-warrior-police-training/ https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-union-offers-free-warrior-training-in-defiance-of-mayor-s-ban/509025622/
Even if we were to implement these reforms in every police department, they do nothing to hold police personally accountable for misconduct
Qualified Immunity
This reform proposal does nothing to alter one of the key doctrines that allows police officers to violate the constitutional rights of citizens without suffering any meaningful consequences. Qualified immunity is a judge-made doctrine that gives police officers (and other government officials) broad, if not entirely limitless, protection against federal civil rights lawsuits. This immunity enjoyed by police officers shields them from lawsuits involving any conduct that did not violate a clearly established statutory or constitutional right of which a reasonable person would have known. In practice, this standard has served to protect the most egregious conduct. In order to get past qualified immunity and present a viable claim, you need to be able to prove that an officer has violated the law in an almost identical manner and context in a previous case.
For example: in West v. City of Caldwell a panel of judges determined that officers who trashed West’s home were entitled to qualified immunity because there was no previous case that SPECIFICALLY HELD that when a homeowner gives police consent to enter their house, that consent does not entitle police to smash windows or to fire chemical weapons into the home.
This doctrine has been called a “shoot first think later” approach to policing by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. It is a significant reason why police officers are able to kill and injure black civilians with relative impunity, and this doctrine remains untouched by the #8CantWait proposal.
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21277104/qualified-immunity-cops-constitution-shaniz-west-supreme-court
Prosecutor-Police Relationships
Police and prosecutors are essentially coworkers. They are extremely interdependent and rely on one another to perform their roles successfully. This means that it is entirely unreasonable to depend on prosecutors to charge police when they engage in police brutality and murder civilians. Prosecutors protect the police and are extremely hesitant to charge them because they are often friends! We need changes to the system that will either meaningfully disconnect these entities or bring in special prosecutors to review charging every time an instance of police brutality occurs. There is no impartiality or fairness in a justice system where prosecutors are required to charge and place their friends behind bars. We need officers to be held accountable, and these relationships are not allowing that.
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/amcrimlr13&div=18&id=&page=
This proposal does nothing to reduce police discretion in enforcement, one of the largest driving forces creating racial disparities in the criminal justice system
Discretionary stops (Terry stops)
These reforms do nothing to take away the discretion police have to conduct stops and interactions with whoever they choose, meaning police officers can freely continue to overpolice black communities without consequence. Contrary to what you might believe, America is still largely racially segregated, allowing police officers to focus their policing in black communities to the relative exclusion of white communities with ease. Terry v. Ohio authorizes police officers to conduct stops of individuals with only the justification of reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot.
This practice is disproportionately used in black communities, and reasonable suspicion is an incredibly low standard of justification, allowing for police officers to use racial profiling to justify these stops without accountability. The disproportionate use of these Terry stops in black communities contributes to the disparities in numbers of police-citizen interactions between racial groups. Police also have almost unlimited discretion to escalate a Terry stop into a frisk, which involves an intrusive and humiliating physical search. These interactions can lead to needless arrests and create countless opportunities for police misconduct.
This limitless discretion also exists in the vehicle context. As we all know, traffic violations are extremely common, and occur with similar frequency across racial and ethnic groups. Speeding, merging without signaling, failing to yield, driving with burned out headlights, the list is so extensive that drivers are often unaware they are even committing a traffic violation. The ubiquity of these violations mean they often go unenforced, police officers do not have the resources nor the desire to enforce them all. The decision to enforce rests entirely with individual police officers. These decisions about whether or not to enforce violations invite the individual implicit and explicit racial biases of officers. Officers therefore disproportionately enforce such harmless violations against black and brown drivers. These officers are commonly using such traffic stops as pretexts for more malicious purposes.
In Whren v. U.S., the Supreme Court held that a person who is subject to one of these pretextual stops cannot constitutionally challenge it even if they are able to present compelling statistical evidence that police disproportionately target an individual racial group for these harmless traffic stops. That means black drivers may be stopped, searched, and arrested, even if there is unequivocal evidence the police only conducted the stop because of the person’s race.
It is often these types of encounters which escalate into police violence, unnecessary arrest, and police killings of black people. This can be seen in the tragic 2016 shooting of Philando Castille, discussed above, and the arrest and subsequent death of Sandra Bland in 2015.
The disproportionate number of stops conducted in black communities leads to disproportionate opportunities for police harassment and non-lethal police brutality against black individuals. These instances of police abuse of power are not addressed by these reform proposals, and are the most common way in which police show they do not believe black lives matter. These reforms do nothing to address these incredibly harmful and problematic encounters between black citizens and police which contribute to the culture of occupation and mistrust.
This proposal serves to further empower the police when we should be empowering communities
Policing is so ingrained in American culture that it can be hard to seriously comprehend alternatives. In an emergency situation, resources do not always exist for people to receive support without resorting to calling 911 and the police being dispatched. However, communities across the country are working to establish alternatives to police control violence and protect lives.
Here are a few examples of organizations trying to achieve this kind of change OUTSIDE the police.
- Oakland Power Project
http://criticalresistance.org/chapters/cr-oakland/the-oakland-power-projects/
- Chicago’s Cure Violence
- White Bird Clinic’s Crisis assistance
https://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots/
If you are concerned that this seems unsafe -- think about what safety really means to you. American cities under the police are not safe for immigrants, for the homeless, and especially for black and brown people because of police.
Additionally, think about the fact that many of you have experienced first-hand systems that do not depend on police: colleges and universities. Think about all the policies and services that colleges provide to create safe systems allowing students to report health emergencies, mental health crises, and dangerous situations without involving police.* Think about all the crimes committed by college students which are dealt with through these kinds of systems without involving the criminal justice system AT ALL. What are these systems other than a community opting out of traditional policing and solving problems through other mechanisms?
(*This is not to say college police forces and reporting systems do not have their own problems and racial biases. We just mean to highlight the general concept.)
You might also be thinking that police are needed to stop truly violent acts and investigate serious crimes. But consider that as our system currently exists, the police often CANNOT EVEN DO THIS for communities most hard hit by violence. In Chicago, the clearance rate for murders (that is the percentage of murders that are solved) is only about 40%. Meaning 6 out of every 10 murders goes UNSOLVED. If the murder victim is Latinx, the clearance rate goes down to 33%. If the murder victim is black, the clearance rate drops down to an dismal 22%.
The #8CantWait proposal would allow police departments to make reforms on paper, but continue to terrorize black and brown communities across the country. Transformational change involves taking power away from police, and empowering communities to establish police alternatives to create true “safety” for everyone, regardless of color.
8 things to demand instead:
1. Defund the police
This starts at the state and local level. City police departments take HUGE percentages of city budgets, all the while creating disorder and violence in communities. NYPD’s budget is $6 billion, LAPD’s is nearly $2 billion and is set to eat up more than half of the general fund. Defunding the police means taking away resources from police -- weakening their ability to oppress communities -- and allocating those funds towards other goals. This can be done right NOW. Instead of writing emails to your mayor about #8CantWait, write to them to urge them to stop giving additional funds to the police and start reducing their funding! NOW.
Beyond local politics, there is a Federal angle to this demand. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids providing federal funding to state and local programs that engage in racial discrimination. The Department of Justice has never fully enforced this provision, yet provides over $2 billion in grant funding to police jurisdictions across the country that are actively engaging in racial discrimination. Every police department that is violating civil rights should be immediately stripped of federal funding under this provision.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/defund-the-police-1007254/
2. Disband police unions
Police unions are a major force in bargaining and creating rules for police. Research shows that police disciplinary procedures established through union contracts obstruct accountability, and collective bargaining for police officers appears to increase police misconduct. “Police unions demand protections from disciplinary procedures that would not otherwise be approved, oppose consent decrees and other measures to increase police accountability, and they receive relatively little pushback.” Police unions are also often responsible for working out deals with private companies to offer warrior training to officers. They also set up legal funds to defend officers sued for misconduct, another mechanism by which police are able to offset their personal responsibility for misconduct. Additionally, collective bargaining agreements We need to END the power these unions have over setting policy and protections in police departments.
https://reason.com/2020/05/30/police-unions-and-the-problem-of-police-misconduct/
3. End qualified immunity
There are several cases pending certiorari before the Supreme Court challenging qualified immunity, but Congress is able to act to end this judge-made doctrine and we should be actively pushing for it to do so. This doctrine significantly inhibits law to continue to be made in the space of police brutality and accountability and allows police officers to shield against civil liability in numerous cases.
4. Empower community alternatives to policing
There should be alternatives to policing for protecting our communities that should receive some of the significant funding we believe should be taken from police departments. Some of these organizations, many of which include trained as explained above, have been successful in cities across America. They need funding and resources to be successful. Additionally, we need to divert significant police department funding to schools, mental health resources, affordable housing, healthcare, restorative justice programs, etc. especially in black communities. Just because police have been the norm does NOT mean they need to remain so. We should determine the best alternatives to policing that will work to close racial gaps in income, wealth, health, and education in our country.
5. Reduce police discretion
We need to meaningfully remove the discretion police officers enjoy to enforce the law against certain individuals while not enforcing it against others. This discretion has resulted in dramatic racial disparities in enforcement of many crimes that there is substantial evidence to believe are committed at equal rates across racial lines. This graphic shows such a disparity with regards to drug use, demonstrating that the overpolicing of black communities is largely contributing to the mass incarceration of black bodies for drug crimes and NOT factual disparities in drug use by race. This needs to be meaningfully addressed by forcing police presence (hopefully meaningfully smaller overall), is evenly distributed across our communities and is not allowed to concentrate solely in black neighborhoods. This means we also need to end redlining, get rid of aldermanic prerogative (to allow affordable housing to be evenly distributed across our cities and states), and meaningfully work at desegregating our cities. Additionally, we need special prosecutors to be making charging decisions in instances of police misconduct. We cannot rely on prosecutors who have close personal relationships with the officers they are intended to impartially charge.
6. Fire police officers! AND don’t rehire them
Police departments across the country continue to hire officers that have been fired for significant misconduct at other police departments. This should NOT be permissible. We should require that if an officer commits a single act of misconduct they are immediately released from duty pending review of the incident, and if the incident is substantiated they should be fired (NOT placed on desk duty) and should not be able to be rehired by another department.
7. Get rid of police indemnification provisions
Oftentimes even if an individual is able to get past qualified immunity, unless the conduct is egregious the police officer is usually indemnified and will therefore not face any personal liability. Ultimately, this means that police officers do not face personal consequences for the low-level brutality they inflict on black communities everyday. Therefore, even successful civil lawsuits against individual police officers do not result in meaningful deterrence for the police not to engage in the behavior they were rightfully sued for. Perhaps we should force police officers to hold private liability insurance as a method of ensuring police internalize the costs of their actions. Additionally, eliminating qualified immunity will have limited effect on accountability if police departments continue to indemnify officers, so this is a necessary step.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/john-rappaport-police-liability-insurance
https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-89-number-3/police-indemnification/
8. Overturn Tennessee v. Garner (case that sets the standard for use of deadly force against fleeing felons)
This case presents the constitutional standard for a police officer using deadly force and states that to prevent a suspected felon’s escape where the police officer has probable cause to believe the individual has committed a violent felony, the police officer is authorized to use deadly force. This is incredibly problematic because police officers should not have authority to act as judge, jury, and executioner. All citizens are INNOCENT until proven guilty, and providing this large safeguard for officers to KILL individuals is incredibly dangerous to black lives. This is a situation where police are authorized to kill individuals without any threat of violence to themselves or anyone around them and this authority should be revoked IMMEDIATELY.
Additional Sources:
- The End of Policing - Alex S. Vitale
- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/police-reform-america-george-floyd.html
- https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/envisioning-abolition-democracy/
- https://invisible.institute/police-data