The battle over the right to record police is far from over. That’s because a case pending over a routine traffic stop in Lakewood, Colorado, where police interfered with a citizen journalist recording, could have a huge impact on a controversial legal precedent which shields cops from legal liability.
End Qulified Immunity Protections, & Civil Asset Forfeiture. Hold Cops Accountable.
Cops who break the law must be held accountable for their illegal actions !!!
This is also why you need to tell the cop that he is about to violate your rights and will lose his qualified immunity. Otherwise he can claim he didn’t know that law or right and use the qualified immunity as a defense.
Get it right in your heads people. “To protect and serve” means themselves.
Qualified immunity isn’t a matter that will be addressed by police reform. It’s part of the holding accountable of elected officials.
If cops didn’t break the law. These people who record them would not need to record the cops
In “this day and age…” Why do cops NOT know the law?
That cop who try to obstruct them from recording definitely has more issues under the radar and he’s a ticking bomb.
this is America cops should lose their pensions three strikes and they’re out!!😎
That would be three justice systems.
One for police, one for the wealthy, one for the rest of us.And PlEASE leave a comment for copwatcher Abade aka Liberty Freak, his law suit may become case law that protects your right to record the police! So make sure to give him some kindness and support as he will be turning himself into law enforcement and will be incarcerated for a few months. So this is your chance to share your thoughts with him before he goes inside. Thank you! -taya
What an incredible episode!!! I especially love it when you break things down and illustrate clearly how our system has “run amuck” and been abused to undermine & sabotage itself.
“Qualified Impunity” is such a clever, creative and accurate play on words. I would love to see that term widely adopted because I would hope that this shift might become a catalyst for reform by bringing a better understanding of just how broken our system is; and how close we may be to losing our democracy itself! It is being attacked and undermined in so many ways right now from so many sides…
If ignorance of the law is no excuse for civilians ignorance of our rights should be no excuse for the law!
Since this video was from Colorado it would make sense to mention that, at the time of this report, a new police accountability law was about to go into effect. Since then several cops, notably Loveland PD, have been held accountable with this law. As for my opinion I would like to say, no one has done more to end qualified immunity than corrupt cops all over the US.
If cleaning up neighborhoods changes the culture by changing the way people feel, then cities have an interest in leaving them neglected to justify dumping more money into police presence. It’s business as usual.
There are three types of versions of laws, the one for the poor aka the “criminal class” and then the one for government officials/LEOs, and finally the one for the elites/the rich who line the pockets of said govt officials & LEOs
I think we now know why the police are no longer required to learn the law before claiming to “enforce the law”.
Not knowing the law lets the police officers claim “I didn’t know the law” and the courts say it was an “honest mistake” and let them off with a warning to do better.Oh and…….”qualified immunity” sounds like a “Jim Crow” law. It’s sickening that such a perversion of our Constitutional Rights is allowed!
Something to keep in mind. Until privatized, for profit, publicly traded prisons are done away with none of this tyranny will end.
I’ve always said that one of the main goals of 1st Amendment auditor’s is to remove the sovereign from the state 👍💯👍
Driver: I’m just defending myself here. You really have nothing to fear from me. I’m not out to get you. So can you kindly just cite or warn me and we can go on our way?
Wait, qualified immunity gets it’s power by proving that the law enforcement officer was ignorant of the law? Make it make sense somebody please.
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Writer Anand Giridharadas joins Mehdi Hasan to argue for a redistribution of second chances after Kellyanne Conway made a cameo on American Idol.
Cop Explains How It Feels To Live Every Day In Fear Someone Might Record You Brutalizing A Civilian
Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful? by William Baude
This inquiry is timely—perhaps even urgent. Over the past several decades, the Court has been slowly changing the doctrinal formula for qualified immunity. Most recently, it has begun to strengthen qualified immunity’s protection in another way: by giving qualified immunity cases pride of place on the Court’s docket. It exercises jurisdiction in cases that would not otherwise satisfy the certiorari criteria and reaches out to summarily reverse lower courts at an unusual pace. Essentially, the Court’s agenda is to especially ensure that lower courts do not improperly deny any immunity. This approach sends a strong signal to lower courts and elevates official-protective qualified immunity cases to a level of attention exceeded only by the Court’s state-protective habeas docket. While the Court doubles down on qualified immunity, the doctrine has also come under increasing outside criticism. Recently publicized episodes of police misconduct vividly illustrate the costs of unaccountability. Indeed, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has explicitly called for “re-examining the legal standards governing . . . qualified immunity.”10 The legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts has named the doctrine of qualified immunity as among the policing precedents that “we must seek to tear down.”11 Judge Jon Newman has argued that “the defense of qualified immunity should be abolished” by Congress.12 These calls make it all the more important to figure out whether the modern doctrine of qualified immunity has a legal basis in the first place.
THE LEGAL JUSTIFICATIONS FOR QUALIFIED IMMUNITY
The statute colloquially known as “Section 1983,” because it is codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1983, makes liable state actors who violate constitutional or other legal rights. It was first enacted during Reconstruction as a section of the 1871 Ku Klux Act, part of a suite of “Enforcement Acts” designed to help combat lawlessness and civil rights violations in the southern states. The statute originally provided: That any person who, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State, shall subject, or cause to be subjected, any person within the jurisdiction of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution of the United States, shall, any such law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of the State to the contrary notwithstanding, be liable to the party injured in any action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress; such proceeding to be prosecuted in the several district or circuit courts of the United States, with and subject to the same rights of appeal, review upon error, and other remedies provided in like cases in such courts, under theprovisions of the act of the ninth of April, eighteen hundred and sixty-six, entitled “An act to protect all persons in the United States in their civil rights, and to furnish the means of their vindication”; and the other remedial law of the United States which are in their nature applicable in such cases.13As currently codified in the U.S. Code, the statute provides: Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia.14
Neither version of the text, you will notice if you wade through them, makes any reference to immunity. (The reference to the “same rights” and “other remedies” in the original statute pointed to the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided broad federal remedial authority, Supreme Court review, and presidential authority to direct prosecutions and use the military to enforce the Act.)
50 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW[Vol. 106:45 shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia.14Neither version of the text, you will notice if you wade through them, makes any reference to immunity. (The reference to the “same rights” and “other remedies” in the original statute pointed to the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided broad federal remedial authority, Supreme Court review, and presidential authority to direct prosecutions and use the military to enforce the Act.)15Yet that is not the end of the matter. Legal texts that seem categorical on their faces are frequently “defeasible”—that is, they are subject to implicit exceptions made by other rules of law.16 “No vehicles in the park” might forbid ambulances from entering, but a separate rule of law may nonetheless provide an exception for government vehicles or for responses to an emergency.17Perhaps more to the point, legal provisions are often subject to defenses derived from common law. For example, the common-law rules of self-defense, duress, and necessity can all apply to criminal statutes that do not even mention them.18 Similarly, I have elsewhere defended the current doctrine of state sovereign immunity even though it, too, is an unwritten defense that goes almost unmentioned in the text of the Constitution.19 So perhaps Section 198320 permits such an unwritten immunity defense despite its seemingly categorical provisions for liability. To say that an unwritten defense can exist, however, is not to say that any particular unwritten defense is in fact legally justified. Such defenses come from other legal sources and must be justified on their own legal terms.
Section 1983 changed this framework. It created a direct cause of action against state officials for “the deprivation of any rights . . . secured by the Constitution”25 and thus eliminated the need to first allege a common-law claim or damages. In Hohfeld’s terms,26 most constitutional rights went from being treated as rules about power to being treated as duties.27 As a result, Section 1983 raised questions about how the new constitutional claims related to the old common-law claims, and whether the common law had any role to play in the new constitutional suits.