New York City ends police officers' qualified immunity
It is the first jurisdiction anywhere in the U.S. to do so
The New York City Council acted Thursday to make it easier to sue the city’s police officers. The legislation limits what’s known as qualified immunity, which protected police officers from lawsuits that often falsely claim they violated the rights of those they arrested or otherwise confronted.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said he supports the bill.
“What we are doing is saying the police can’t walk into the courtroom and say, ‘The plaintiff has no right to bring me here because I am immune,’” said Democratic Brooklyn Councilman Stephen Levin, who sponsored the bill. “This is about giving people a right to protect the most fundamental rights in our democracy.”
The bill, which passed 37-11, creates protection for citizens against unreasonable searches and the use of excessive force. The law means that anyone wanting to sue a police officer can now do so under the local law, rather than under a federal or state law.
The City Council said qualified immunity was proposed as a shield against lawsuits in 180 cases over the past three years, and approved for use in approximately 100 of them.
Corey Johnson, the speaker of the City Council, said qualified immunity is “rooted in our system of systemic racism” and has been used to “deny justice to victims of police abuse for decades.”
Opponents of the bill said it might discourage some from getting into law enforcement. "Ending qualified immunity will prevent the best young men and women in our city from joining the police force," Councilman Robert F. Holden said as he voted “no.”
Holden also said it will make it harder for police officers to do their jobs.
“Ending qualified immunity will prevent the best young men and women in our city from joining the police force,” he added.
The Police Benevolent Association said the new bill would “chill the operations of law enforcement” and remove “longstanding safeguards protecting police officers.”
“New Yorkers are getting shot, and police officers are on the streets day and night, trying to stop the bloodshed,” PBA President Patrick J. Lynch, said in a statement.
According to the legal blog Lawfare, the Supreme Court justified qualified immunity by stating broadly that it gives government officials “breathing room” to avoid fear of being sued when performing public services, but in regards to police:
The court first articulated this idea in a pre-Harlow decision, stating that “[a] policeman’s lot is not so unhappy that he must choose between being charged with dereliction of duty if he does not arrest when he has probable cause, and being mulcted in damages if he does.” Then in Harlow, the court wrote: “If the law at that time was not clearly established, an official could not reasonably be expected to anticipate subsequent legal developments, nor could he fairly be said to ‘know’ that the law forbade conduct not previously identified as unlawful.” And a recent case described “the focus” of qualified immunity as “whether the officer had fair notice that her conduct was unlawful.”
Opponents of qualified immunity have long claimed that the principle allows police officers to violate the rights of defendents and witnesses alike. But in testimony before the U.S. Senate on June 16, 2020, Fraternal Order of Police President Patrick Yoes said that his organization, a lobbying group that represents 330,000 member police officers, is “strongly opposed” to any legislative effort to end qualified immunity, because in the field, police are often faced with a wide range of split-second decisions.
“Every single factual scenario an officer encounters is different and unknown,” Yoes said during his testimony. “It is extremely difficult for an officer to determine how a legal doctrine will apply to a split-second factual scenario that the officer confronts. Thus, unless there is existing precedent that squarely governs the facts … before the officer, the reasonable officer needs to be afforded a certain degree of discretion to make split-second decision in situations that could put lives, including their own, at risk. Officers should not be punished for doing so.”