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| ▲ | Jtsummers 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That may protect them personally, but not the city and the department itself from being sued. | | |
| ▲ | blagie 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nope. https://abovethelaw.com/2016/02/criminally-yours-indicting-a... You can be arrested, indicted, and held in jail on pretrial, and there is literally no recourse. There are many other ways jail can happen without due process. Where I live: * Civil contempt. Absolutely immunity. No due process. Record is about 16 years. Having a bad day? Judge can toss you in jail. * "Dangerous." Half a year. No due process. He-said she-said. * "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you. Absolutely no recourse. You come out with a gap in income, employment, and, if you missed rent/mortgage, no home. Landlords will simply throw your stuff away too. You're also basically damned if things do move forward, since from jail, you have no access to evidence, to internet (for legal research), and no reasonable way to recruit a lawyer (and, for most people, pay for one). Can happen to anyone. Less common if you're rich and can afford a good lawyer, but far from uncommon. | | |
| ▲ | Jtsummers 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't know what you're responding to, but I don't think it's my comment. Qualified immunity protects individuals, not departments, from liability. The particular thread (in this thread) that I was responding to: >> I hope she wrings at least several million dollars out of the government. > With all the lovely qualified immunity doctrine? That's wishful thinking. I was responding to the claim that qualified immunity protected the government, it does not. | | |
| ▲ | kelnos 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The GP seems to be suggesting that there's no recourse at all, usually. You might bring suit against a police department or LE agency, but you'll fail to find any relief there. True that qualified immunity only protects individuals, but there's a raft of other things that makes it hard to get a judgement against a police department, too. I think there's probably one major exception: civil rights violation investigations. But even then, the people doing the investigating seem to be biased toward the LEOs. The GP's linked article doesn't seem to even talk about this, so not sure why that's there. | | |
| ▲ | dolebirchwood 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You might bring suit against a police department or LE agency, but you'll fail to find any relief there. I don't know if I'd go so far to say she won't find any relief, but it probably still could be a pretty tough Monell claim against the department (although it's hard to tell from the sparse details in the article): "[A] local government may not be sued under [42 U.S.C.] § 1983 for an injury inflicted solely by its employees or agents. Instead, it is when execution of a government's policy or custom, whether made by its lawmakers or by those whose edicts or acts may fairly be said to represent official policy, inflicts the injury that the government, as an entity, is responsible under § 1983." [1] I could see a problem if there was a policy/custom of relying on AI facial recognition alone without any other corroborating evidence (would be a really stupid practice, but I'm sure stupider things have become part of a police department's systemic practices). Or if there was a failure to sufficiently train detectives about the erroneous tendencies of this technology. Maybe the needlessly prolonged detention without bail could be an issue if there was a lack of adequate protocols to expedite in a reasonable amount of time. Either way, still seems hard to say this a slam dunk case for her, unfortunately. But also seems too risky for the city of Fargo to not settle, at least nominally. [1] Monell v. Department of Soc. Svcs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/436/658/ |
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| ▲ | mothballed 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >* "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you. A friend of mine was committed longer than 3 days without council or the ability to represent themselves in the hearing. Apparently the whole process of being committed is ex parte in practice in some states. | |
| ▲ | abduhl 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a bit hyperbolic and the exaggerations really undermine what I think is your broader point (that there is rarely recourse when you're held for short to moderate amounts of time). It is hard for me to believe that someone was held for 16 years on civil contempt without due process or that someone was held for half a year without due process after being deemed dangerous. The reason that is hard for me to believe is that the due process is implicit in the action you describe. Civil contempt is from a judge which implies that you're already in court - that's due process. Someone being labeled "dangerous" implies that a finding was made by a neutral party - that's due process. Just because you disagree with the outcome doesn't mean that due process wasn't given. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah it's "due process." In civil contempt the judge is a witness and prosecutor in the very "process" they're judging. That's the most perverted form of due process imaginable. A judge should have to recuse themselves if they are acting as witness to the supposed infraction. | | |
| ▲ | abduhl 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Civil contempt isn't some roving criminal charge that jumps out of the jury box randomly. It's meant to make somebody comply with a court order. Anybody in civil contempt holds the keys to the jailhouse door in their own hands, all they have to do is comply. This statement should make you uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it is a pure expression of the power of the state. But it's still due process. | | |
| ▲ | FpUser 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | In Criminal Contempt max duration of imprisonment is limited. In civil it is not until somebody decides that one never complies. You may call it due process. I call it for what it is - A torture and fucking crime against humanity. Judge that holds person for years for being stubborn deserves nothing more than walk the plank |
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| ▲ | djfobbz 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Criminal immunity? Sure. Civil immunity? Nope! She could definitely make a nice buck. | | |
| ▲ | opo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Qualified immunity doesn't apply to criminal cases. It is used to defend against civil suits. It is unfortunately very easy to find many cases where it leads to injustice. For example: >...Abby Tiscareno, a licensed daycare provider in Utah, was wrongfully convicted of felony child abuse when a child under her care suffered brain hemorrhaging. After calling emergency services, subsequent medical tests supported these findings. However, during her trial, requested medical records from the Utah Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) were not provided. It wasn’t until a civil suit that Ms. Tiscareno saw pathology reports suggesting the injury could have occurred outside of her care. She was granted a new trial and acquitted. Her subsequent lawsuit for due process violations, alleging that DCFS failed to provide exculpatory evidence, was dismissed due to lack of precedent indicating DCFS’s obligation to produce such evidence. https://innocenceproject.org/news/what-you-need-to-know-abou... | |
| ▲ | theLiminator 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Off of taxpayer money sadly. Imo we really need a fix for this. When cops are grossly negligent the money should come out of their aggregate pension fund (or at least partially). | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > we really need a fix for this. When cops are grossly negligent the money should come out of their aggregate pension fund This is on us as voters. If we didn’t piss our pants every time a police union sneezed, we’d realize wholesale restarting police departments is precedents in even our largest cities. | |
| ▲ | SunshineTheCat 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, this is the key point. Tax payers get a nice big bill while the people who caused the problem get a nice paid vacation while they conduct an internal "investigation" that typically finds they did nothing wrong. | |
| ▲ | vkou 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is a fix to it. Elect people who will hold them accountable. As long as you keep electing clowns that let the police do whatever they want, the police will... Do whatever they want. | | |
| ▲ | theLiminator 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, of course they need to held accountable, and we need to vote in people who will do so. What I'm suggesting is an alignment of incentives that will ensure that police will try to do their best to not be negligent. Of course there's a balance that has to be struck so that police are empowered enough to act. So perhaps something like settlements against the police being 30% borne by the police pension fund and 70% by taxpayers is sufficient. I think this will also make police very enthusiastic about bodycams and holding each other accountable. | |
| ▲ | kelnos 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm usually a big supporter of labor unions, but police unions in the US generally have an outsized amount of power, and even when mayors etc. want to hold police accountable, the union ends up bending the mayor over a barrel. I'm not sure what the solution is here. Forbid police from unionizing? That would probably have some bad consequences too. | |
| ▲ | rectang 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “Tough on crime” -> lenient on police -> innocent grandmas in jail. | |
| ▲ | GuinansEyebrows 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | despite this being something practically everybody wants, the fact that it hasn't happened is not a coincidence and speaks to the power of police unions/guilds and their lobbying arms. outside a few toothless instances, those groups are extremely good at reframing these attempts and mobilizing their bases to vote against the broader public interest. it sucks. | | |
| ▲ | vkou 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > despite this being something practically everybody wants, No, everybody does not want police accountability. Half the population will fall on a grenade to prevent that. They know that the purpose of the police is to keep the undesirables in line, and they never envision that they will ever fall in that category. The brutality is the point for them. | | |
| ▲ | GuinansEyebrows 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | oh, i generally don't disagree with you on that point; i specifically meant that when presented with the question "do you want your tax dollars to pay for police liabilities?" the answer is probably almost always "no". | | |
| ▲ | vkou 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure. But when you ask "Do you want the police to be unable to do their job and live in a lawless hellscape ran by gangbangers and ISIS cartels?, the answer is also 'No.' The problem is that the mass media sets the framing of acceptable discourse, and that mass media is in large part an ideological monoculture. And even when it's not, it is happy to present absolutely insane batshit lunacy as 'one of the two sides' of an issue. |
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| ▲ | lotsofpulp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Almost all taxpayer funded pension funds are already underfunded. It makes no difference if the funding decreases or increases, the government employee will still get their benefit. The government would have to go through bankruptcy to get the benefit amount reduced. |
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