Qualified immunity “protects state and local officials, including law enforcement officers, from individual liability unless the official violated a clearly established constitutional right,” according to an explainer by the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police calls qualified immunity “an essential part of policing and American jurisprudence. It allows police officers to respond to incidents without pause, make split-second decisions, and rely on the current state of the law in making those decisions.”
Does qualified immunity protect police or give them too much power?
“Qualified immunity does not prevent individuals from recovering damages from police officers who knowingly violate an individual’s constitutional rights,” said The International Association of Chiefs of Police.
But it’s not quite that simple, according to Joanna Schwartz, a professor of law at UCLA and author of “Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.”
“Officers are entitled to qualified immunity even if they act in bad faith, so long as there is no prior court decision with nearly identical facts,” Schwartz wrote in Politico.
“The hairsplitting can be extreme,” she wrote, then cited an example from a case against officers accused of releasing a police dog on a burglary suspect who was not fleeing.
“Although a prior court decision had held that it was unconstitutional to release a police dog on a suspect who was lying down, the court in [this] case granted qualified immunity to the officers because, it held, the prior decision did not clearly establish the unconstitutionality of the officers’ decision to release a police dog on a person who was seated with his hands in the air.”
