We need to educate the public about qualified immunity from suit that the police enjoy. The difficulty is that there are some good reasons why the police enjoy qualified immunity. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, the police used to behave decently and it was fair to give a police officer immunity when he made an innocent mistake and deprived you of your rights through inadvertance or ignorance. Nowadays, we hire people and train them to obey the orders of their superiors to disregard your rights. We need to change police culture. But it goes hand in hand with the fact that we also live in a military culture and more cops these days are former military. Our military come back from modern wars desensitized to barbarism and extreme violence. Then we recruit them to work on our police forces and equip them with all the latest military surplus items. The next thing you know Americans are being treated the same way our soldiers treat most Iraqis, Afghanis, and Pakistanis.
The way it works in this country is that we love to have fascists running our police departments. Then when they deprive people of their constitutional rights and/or commit viscious acts of police brutality we act shocked. So for example, in NYC, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly gets high marks for job performance in many public opinion polls. Yet when his minions and NYC are sued for the way they do their job, the city's lawyers delay the case for at least six years until all the politicians are out of office so that when the bill comes due and the citizens have to pay it, the politicians that appointed the police commissioner are long gone and/or the police commissioner is serving his last term in office and doesn't care. The solution is to end police officer's individual immunities from lawsuits so that if they act like animals they become personally responsible for picking up the tab.
