With a new video released showing George Floyd’s death at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, we now know that a white police officer was pinning Floyd’s legs to the ground, a white police officer had his knee on Floyd’s neck, and a black police officer had both of his knees on Floyd’s back.
Does this change your perception of the death? Of the four officers fired over Floyd’s death, two were white, one was black, and one was Asian. With every day that passes, we learn more, and it looks less and less like a racially motivated incident. It looks like bad policing.
Unfortunately, America is going to be subjected to a second round of these race riots at some point in the future, when a jury finds former police officer Derek Chauvin “not guilty” on charges of murdering George Floyd. (Floyd’s autopsy showed that he didn’t die of asphyxiation, but probably from some sort of heart-related issue. The cops’ actions against Floyd very well may have contributed to his death, but we don’t know that yet.)
Aside from all of that, how does America as a nation prevent bad policing like we see in the George Floyd video, so that we no longer have to go through these seven-days-of-burning-and-looting race riots? If we could prevent that sort of bad policing, which is at the root of these riots, we’d be a lot less likely to have these incidents blowing up our cities.
To prevent bad policing, we have to do away with the “qualified immunity” protection that public officials and employees enjoy. The labor unions won’t like it, but this would put a stop to all sorts of bad policing incidents like the George Floyd situation.
The legal doctrine of qualified immunity asserts that if a public official, such as your local mayor or a police officer, cannot be held personally liable if they do something awful that harms you. For example, if you own a paint store in Michigan and your livelihood has been destroyed because Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is a lunatic with some sort of personal phobia against paint, you cannot sue the governor directly. Even though it’s totally her fault that your business was destroyed, you can’t sue her because of qualified immunity.
The same holds true for police officers who do stupid things like kneel on the neck of a person for eight minutes until they die. Derek Chauvin and the other three officers in that video cannot be personally sued by George Floyd’s family in civil court.
If you want to discourage bad behavior, then there have to be consequences for bad behavior. Since there are no personal consequences for police when their bad policing results in your death, bad police have no real incentive to change their behavior. Doing away with qualified immunity would put an end to incidents like this within a few years.
Think of it in terms of the Americans with Disability Act. Everyone complies with the ADA, despite the fact that there is no federal taxpayer money spent on enforcing it. Bill Barr and a hundred G-men aren’t going to swoop into your business and arrest you for failing to put in a wheelchair ramp. They don’t have to, because there is a far more sinister and eviler, non-taxpayer funded sort-of life form that enforces the ADA:
Greedy ambulance-chasing trial lawyers.
No sane business owner would dare to open a new business that was not fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, because there is a 100% certainty that they would be sued into bankruptcy by one of those lawyers with a billboard along the interstate. People in wheelchairs make really sympathetic witnesses for juries.
If you’re a terrible police officer and you face the very real threat of losing your house, your retirement pension and your life savings because you mistreat a suspect, you are going to reform your casually terrible policing methods in a hurry. It would only take two or three high-profile lawsuits against cops in cases like this before we would suddenly have much politer police forces.
That’ what doing away with qualified immunity could do. Meanwhile, we as a society should make this a double-edge deal. People can sue cops for outrageous behavior, but on the flip side – cops get full immunity if they have to step into harm’s way to stop idiots from rioting. I’m also open to letting good cops wear brass knuckles for riot prevention measures.
