The legal system is kind of like an evolutionary process. We try things, see if they work, and adjust over time. So far I think this has indeed led to a better legal system, but I can see why the set backs and injustices of the world make that difficult to assess.
Regulation also creates jobs, even bad regulation, so there's almost a Keynesian argument to be had about its relationship to our economic system.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think qualified immunity should not apply to constitutional violations. Giving an opt-out for those violations is antithetical to the very substance of our (US) constitution.
It literally is not supposed to. The ruling that is currently used for the precedent is Harlow v Fitzgerald, which states:
> The Court held that "government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known."
It seems to me that a reasonable person would know this violates constitutional rights if you arrest people that criticize the government.
It's weird to me that courts don't at-least attempt to review if the conduct was in good faith and plausibly reasonable given the facts know at the time.
The idea that officials aren't personally liable for mistakes made in good faith isn't bad.
But somehow the US tends to produce a lot of cases where good faith requires a lot of faith :)
Qualified immunity, as a concept, makes perfect sense. Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.
The issue isn't qualified immunity itself, but rather the maximalist interpretation that seems pervasive in the US justice system, and the overwhelmingly broad definition of "honest mistake" that seemingly applies to the police, and the police alone.
I think you would find that they would make far fewer illegal mistakes if they actually had to deal with the consequences of those mistakes.
Qualified Immunity didn't exist as a concept until the 1960s, and it was put in place to shield policemen enacting racist policies and corrupt cronies of Nixon.
I'm not necessarily opposed to requiring something like malpractice insurance for being a cop, but I'm genuinely not sure how that would affect the cost of policing compared to the status quo (and I'd be skeptical of any research attempt to estimate it without actually trying it). But I'm also not necessarily opposed to spending more taxpayer money on policing in return for better policing.
The doctor's own fees just rise. You, the patient pays for it. There's this 10-20% of revenue parasite on the entire industry, and you're paying that while complaining that prices are too high.
Now you'll do the same thing with police, as if police wages and salaries won't increase proportionally, but 20 years from now you'll wonder why that costs so much. It's bizarre how economically imperceptive everyone is.
No, the people who can't afford their insurance wouldn't be able to work as policemen. Ideally, they would also eventually lose a license of some sort-- just like the doctors who commit malpractice.
We are already paying increased taxes to deal with all the lawsuits we already incur because these people know they are above the law and they think it isn't their problem.
I explained the problem in very simple terms. But your rebuttal is "nuh uh, here are all the details that irrelevant that I think are really cool".
The people still pay for it. They pay for all the settlements, plus they pay another big slice on top for the insurance industry (since they do nothing for free). Then cops do the same thing, and lobbyists push on the insurance industry to allow them to keep breaking heads because "you can't do this job without breaking heads once in awhile". And nothing changes, except to get worse.
I'm sure the idea seems really clever to you. I mean, you invented it. Or maybe just read a blurb about it on reddit once.
In the medical world, insurance premiums have never forced an incompetent quack out of the field. They have their licenses pulled by the board (but only after some small number of tragedies). And you can't use that model on police either, because there's a big difference between a professional/academic who must study and train over a decade to even be able to operate independently, and grunts that you need in large numbers to go insert themselves into fights, troubles, and disputes. It's very likely that if there is a sophisticated, intelligent solution to our problems with police you wouldn't even like the proposal upon hearing it. I will search the rest of this thread for things you criticize, since that might be a good signal that it's worth reading.
The parent poster is suggesting the cop needs to pay for the insurance. Cop salaries aren't going to rise to meet the most uninsurable person, eventually a cop will be unable to afford their insurance based on their salary.
You, in fact, argue in support of their idea -- there's lots of people who want to be cops. That keeps salaries lower, making a ballooning insurance cost impossible for a bad cop to continue to pay.
>The parent poster is suggesting the cop needs to pay for the insurance.
If you told McDonald's that they had to pay a 10¢ tax on every cheeseburger, and then you turned around and told me "Hey, it's ok, McDonald's will pay the tax, you don't have to!" it'd mean that you were intellectually defective. You can see that right? That McDonald's would instantly raise the price of the burger not even 10¢ but probably 11¢ or 12¢. No one needs to be told this, of course, but I need to lay everything out perfectly clear because not everyone is a non-idiot.
If this is true of McDonald's, how do you think it's somehow not true of cops? Do you think they will just take a $20,000/year hit in their effective income? Do you think that there is some mechanism that will prevent them from forcing the prevailing salary/wages higher until the cost is born by taxpayers? If you think there is such a mechanism, please explain how you came up with that bizarre notion. If you don't think there is a particular mechanism that will do this, please tell me that you're not just assuming there must be one.
>You, in fact, argue in support of their idea -- there's lots of people who want to be cops. That keeps salaries lower
I have never implied, let alone argued, that there are people who "want to be cops". There is generally supply sufficient to meet the demand for that particular occupation. Even that might be a little strong, these are people who earn far more than most Americans would guess, and definitely more than you'd believe given that there is no dire shortage of potential recruits.
>That keeps salaries lower, making a ballooning insurance cost impossible for a bad cop to continue to pay.
All doctors pay hefty malpractice insurance premiums. It is not "bad doctors" who pay it. All pay it, bad ones too... assuming that "bad" does not sink so low that they lose their license (the bar is truly low here, people need to die or suffer really horrible outcomes in ways that they can't make excuses or find scapegoats).
All cops would (hypothetically) pay these hefty malpractice insurance premiums. Not just "bad cops". All. But they really wouldn't pay them, because their salaries just aren't as high as, say, a pediatric surgeon or an anesthesiologist. So their pay would balloon higher through well-understood and uncontroversial principles of economics. Enough that, after several years, we would expect the difference in average salaries between the two time periods to be roughly equal to the average insurance premium.
You already posit that bad cops would be forced out because they can't afford insurance. This means that the burden of the payouts for settlements plus the burden of the value extracted by the insurance industry will be born entirely by non-bad cops. These cops won't just take a $20,000/year hit to their incomes. The candidate pool will shrink, making it more difficult to hire, and municipalities will be forced to raise their offers until they are able to hire to whatever level they had already decided upon.
Bad cops will be hired too (remember, the mechanism you are proposing is that bad cops will be forced out after being bad, because insurance will drop them). So we don't see an improvement in outcomes... bad cops do what they do until they are forced out (just as now). And we won't see an improvement in taxpayers footing the bill for their abuse, instead of paying directly, there will be another layer of indirection where the cops pay for the insurance company to do it (and the insurance company adding a fee on top for all their "work"), but then turn around and tell us to pay them more so they can afford the insurance. And you won't get to say "nope, not paying more", because you only make decisions indirectly, by voting every few years.
All human beings over the age of 11 and iq 95 should be able to reason this out from first principles.
As it currently stands the police already do almost nothing. Any kind of push back or critique of the police leads to inaction by the union. Meaning, police twiddle their thumbs and take your tax money because they can. It's a very effective technique from them to get what they want, because ultimately we need them and we can't actually force them to work.
I agree with voidfunc. A lot of what police do could be offloaded to other occupations. A lot of needless deaths could be prevented if there were more rungs on the escalation ladder between "do nothing" and "folks with guns show up". Like the same vibe as firefighters and EMS but just like for mild social disruption.
"Doctors and nurses will make mistakes in performing medicine. Making those doctors and nurses personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive."
AFAIK the IRS has historically been more, er, disinterestedly nitpicky as opposed to disproportionately vindictive.
More "you say X we say Y here's your options you are Z days over with a W% rate", rather than "Ah hah! $50 dollars error, time to make an example outta this poor bastard."
Generally, yes. If you make a mistake in your return, the IRS is perfectly happy to accept an amended return, and you pay (or get paid) the difference (perhaps with a penalty fee). They usually only go after you criminally if they think you committed fraud.
Where I work, we follow quality management systems to ensure mistakes don't happen. Of course they do, people are human, but the point is to find why something happened and enact a corrective action to ensure it doesn't happen again. Is it a personnel problem that requires more training? Do procedures need to be updated to cover something new? Do we need new tools? Sometimes it really does boil down to a personnel issue where someone has been instructed, trained, and given all of the tools they need yet they still error. That's when management steps in and either transfers or fires them. That same system needs to be applied to police. When camera phones came out, suddenly cops were faced with people recording them. We have had many lawsuits where the cops have been told that people are allowed to film them and there are plenty of department manuals that state the same. At this point, a cop should never have the excuse of qualified immunity for violating someone's right to film because how much it's been harped on and any that do should be personally liable.
Qualified immunity, as a concept, makes perfect sense. Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.
Your own usage of "honest mistake" is overwhelmingly broad, so it's not at all clear what alternative definition of qualified immunity you are advocating.
> Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.
Or maybe police training should be longer than a coding bootcamp... in some countries, police work is an undergraduate major and the programs are quite competitive. Similarly, there are countries without qualified immunity as a policy, and it doesn't seem to fundamentally undermine policework there.
yup, i think a majority of people would agree with you, so why hasn't it happened? I think the answer is that elected representatives are more beholden to public sector unions than their constituents.
yeah texas is definitely not pro-union - except that the only public sector unions that are allowed are for police and firemen... with Texas police unions contributing the the 3rd highest amount to politicians (behind CA and NY) - so its a real thing.
The problem with that is sometimes it's not clear if something is a constitutional violation. Here, it was clear, but in general you don't want to do that.
Something that should be exempt from qualified immunity are actions that go against court orders.
I agree, and I'd like to point out that this problem isn't unique to AI driven projects. I think much, if not all, of what Mitchell has been observing can readily happen without AI in the mix.
For me, whether it's AI or my own handcrafted artisanal code, the choice of language comes down to what has the least friction. This means I turn to vite/react for a lot of frontend requirements, and that the backend will be in nodejs or python, because those are easier for me to debug than writing an equivalent application in C++ or Rust.
The average person is slightly more female than male and has 2.1 children, but they do benefit from defense contracts since it makes up a small percentage of their salary.
I see OpenAI making a significantly larger amount from defense contracts than from advertisements pumped into chats. So I wonder whose bright idea it was to create a public perception risk.
Every single MBA can show for at least one quarter revenue is up after they introduced ads. They do not care what happens after if they can plan their career around that.
I wish I had the optimism that you did about companies being willing to stop at just doing one dubious thing or another for money when there's nothing stopping them from doing both.
I mean Palantir’s targeting product led to EXACTLY that outcome and it seems to have been largely forgotten already, and they managed to avoid a lot of bad press about it.
There's no evidence that it wasn't one of those Iranian generic Tomahawk™ missiles!
When Germany last cooked 150 civilians we also investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong (could happen to anyone, really), but at least some minister had the decency to retire afterwards.
Yes but that's "normal", _we_ all know that palantir is evil, so this is _normal_ for them. My extended family has never heard of palantir, and frankly this is the first time I've heard of them being linked to the horrific tragedy in Iran[0].
My entire extended family uses chatgpt. It would be a much juicier news wave if they were responsible.
Regulation also creates jobs, even bad regulation, so there's almost a Keynesian argument to be had about its relationship to our economic system.
reply