SHIELDED

A legal scholar examines how American police forces protect themselves from accountability in instances of abuse or misconduct.

Because police officers must make instant life-and-death decisions in the name of protecting the public from harm, mistakes are inevitable. However, police are rarely prosecuted as harshly, or even fairly, as everyday citizens. As UCLA law professor Schwartz shows in this accessible study, when police officers make decisions that lead to avoidable harm, “there should be meaningful accountability for law enforcement officers and officials, and justice for their victims.” Indeed, she adds, while those cases illustrate police overreach and undeniable abuse of power, it is qualified immunity—the ability to evade punishment through legal protections of any action committed in the line of duty—that “has come to represent all that is wrong with our system of police accountability.” An irony, perhaps, is that the policies and shields enacted by local governments—and there are thousands of them across the country—effectively keep those governments from controlling the police they employ. Those who resist calls for an end to qualified community, Schwartz notes, often claim that opening the police to lawsuits over misconduct or abuse would bankrupt communities. Yet, she adds, “it is indemnification rules, not qualified immunity, that shield officers’ bank accounts.” In this astute, well-researched account, the author establishes that such lawsuits account for less than 1% of the budgets of local governments, even as maintaining police forces accounts for 30%-40% of those budgets. Moreover, she adds, there are already safeguards against the misuse of the courts in such lawsuits, including established law that holds that “officers do not violate the Constitution if they act reasonably from the perspective of an officer on the scene,” which certainly would not have been the case in the matters of Trayvon Martin or Michael Floyd or George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or countless others.

A well-reasoned case for reforms to create a better system of police accountability.