[There will be no fixing public trust – or the law enforcement
system – without ending the legal doctrine known as qualified
immunity that protects government employees from being taken to task
for assaults on your constitutional rights.] [[link removed]]

WE MUST END ‘QUALIFIED IMMUNITY’ FOR POLICE. IT MIGHT SAVE THE
NEXT GEORGE FLOYD  
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Killer Mike
April 20, 2021
Guardian
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_ There will be no fixing public trust – or the law enforcement
system – without ending the legal doctrine known as qualified
immunity that protects government employees from being taken to task
for assaults on your constitutional rights. _

"Black Lives Matter" by Fibonacci Blue, licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

On the night of 30 May last year, I was standing at the mayor of
Atlanta’s podium, wondering what I might say to keep my home town
from burning itself to the ground before the sun came up in the
morning.

The fury erupting in the streets of Atlanta in George Floyd’s name
that night was the cry of generations, and it was a righteous cry, and
it was justified. Standing there before those TV cameras, I thought of
Mr Floyd in his last moments on Earth, his neck crushed under the knee
of a cop who once took an oath to serve and protect his community, his
partner standing watch while Mr Floyd cried out for his mother in
heaven and died.

I thought of the next generation of Black boys and girls across
America who watched that horrible lynching on their phones and I
wondered how many of them were no longer surprised by what they saw. I
wondered how many would go on themselves to die at the hands of a
racist law enforcement system not far removed from slave patrols of
the antebellum south or the decades of Jim Crow oppression that
haunted my people afterward. I felt the old rage rising in my own
heart and burning in my own eyes, too.

Looking back on that night, I know that a part of me wanted to watch
the world burn, as well. A part of me wondered if it wouldn’t be
better than the alternative, of living in a world like this one, where
every day it seems I am waking up to watch another Black person die.

At the same time, I knew burning ourselves down was not the way.
Atlanta is the homeland. Atlanta is to the Black diaspora, in my mind,
every bit as significant as Israel is to the Jewish community, as
Brazil is to the pan-African community. One hundred and twenty years
of economic opportunity for Black Americans like my grandmother, who
moved here in 1952, or my grandfather, who arrived 10 years earlier.
Fifty years of Black mayoral leadership. A city that is thriving, even
if it ain’t perfect. A city with the third-most Fortune 500
companies in the nation. A city home to the “Atlanta Conference of
Negro Problems”, hosted by Booker T Washington and WEB Du Bois each
year from 1896 to 1914. A city where more than 50 restaurants are now
owned by Black people, and in particular Black women. Atlanta could
not fall, not like this, not right now. We had to fortify.

I was duty-bound to speak directly to Atlanta at that moment – to
remind everyone, including myself, that we must remain a fortress in a
sea of chaos. We do not have to destroy our homes, our neighborhoods,
our businesses. We do not have to give in to despair the way they want
us to. We do not have to live our lives in grief and anguish that
spans the days between one martyred hashtag and the next. We do not
have to hang our hopes on some damn prosecutor to “do the right
thing” after they stood by and let the wrong thing happen, again and
again.

So I swallowed down my anger, and I opened my remarks by laying down
the truest line I knew: “I didn’t want to come,” I said. “And
I don’t want to be here.”

First, before we talk about qualified immunity, let me say something
about cops that needs to be said. I am the proud son of a former
officer of the Atlanta police department. Two of my cousins are police
officers right now. Based on what I experienced growing up here in
Atlanta, I believe that there are cops who are not inherently bad or
evil people, who want to keep our communities safe and who work hard
to do so. One example right off the bat is Officer Tommy Norman out in
North Little Rock, Arkansas, a guy I’ve thrown some shine to before
on my podcast. Maybe you’ve seen Tommy on his social media accounts
– if not, look him up sometime. Tommy doesn’t live in his patrol
car, looking to hit some arrest quota by the end of the month.
He _knows _the people on his beat, and they know him back. North
Little Rock ain’t an easy place to be a cop, but even still, people
in the community don’t fear for their lives the second they see
Tommy’s squad car roll up. That’s a testament to him. That’s
because he does it _right_.

With that said, even good cops like Tommy Norman still operate inside
a larger system _that is itself _overly militarized, harshly
punitive (particularly against Black Americans), and absent of any
real legal accountability – as we continue to see, time and time
again, when cops kill people with impunity. As a result, bad cops are
allowed to make good cops like Tommy’s jobs even harder, because of
the public trust that has been broken. And there will be no fixing
that public trust – or the law enforcement system as a whole –
without first ending the legal doctrine known as qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity is the rule that protects government employees from
being taken to task for assaults on your constitutional rights – in
this instance, your eighth amendment right against cruel and unusual
punishment at the hands of the state – so long as those employees
did not violate “clearly established” law. Of all the predatory
elements of American policing (and there are many, from legal
chokeholds to monthly arrest quotas to the NYPD’s infamous
stop-and-frisk policy) the qualified immunity doctrine is perhaps the
single linchpin that holds the entire machine together. Without ending
qualified immunity, there’s no way to hold bad cops accountable for
their violent crimes against the American people. The system will
perpetuate itself largely undisturbed, the violence will rage on and
on, and Black communities all over the country will keep on living in
fear of the very people sworn allegedly to protect them.

We have to be honest with ourselves about how law enforcement has
taken hold in American society. What began as a slave-catcher’s role
eventually evolved into, after the 13th amendment technically
abolished chattel slavery, an agent of legally imposed Jim Crow
oppression on Black Americans. As the decades went on and various
important civil rights victories were achieved, police departments got
more creative. They began the practice we see today of hiring people
who _look like _oppressed groups, but are still forced to do the
bidding of a prison-industrial system that perpetuates those groups’
oppression each and every day.

How many people do cops kill annually in Denmark, Iceland and
Switzerland combined? Zero

What does that system look like now? It’s a system where a Black
person is five times more likely to be stopped by police without just
cause than a white person. It’s a system where between 900 and 1,100
people are shot and killed by police each year – with much higher
proportions in the Black community, when accounting for total
population. The United States is not first place in many categories
today, but our law enforcement system does lead the developed world in
terms of body count. In fact, we blow other nations out of the water.
It ain’t even a competition. How many people do cops kill annually
in Canada? Thirty-six. In France? Twenty-six. In Australia? Four. In
Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland combined? Zero.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that when a nation equips its police
departments with the gear, weaponry and mindset of occupying armies,
those departments come to see their communities as enemy combatants,
and the streets of America as a war zone. The doctrine of qualified
immunity for police officers more or less guarantees this will
continue to be the case, no matter what other reforms we try to pass
at the state or federal level.

As the calls to prosecute Officer Derek Chauvin grew louder in the
days following Mr Floyd’s death in Minneapolis – calls which
I _agreed _with – I couldn’t help but think of the futility of
the effort in the end. Prosecution was not going to bring that man
back from the dead. Prosecution is not going to bring Breonna Taylor
back, or Tamir Rice or Renisha McBride or Eric Garner or Rekia Boyd or
Philando Castile or Natasha McKenna or Michael Brown or anyone.
Prosecution is a hollow victory for communities racked by generations
of torment and rage. Prosecution does not excuse the system that
created the murderer and their victim, the master and his slave, the
occupier and the occupied. Anybody can do the right thing after the
wrong thing has happened. Anybody can punish individuals after the
fact. But what does that do for the next victim? What does that do for
the next Black family in America who will lose their child or father
or mother to martyrdom and does not know it yet? Legal actions that
don’t change the mechanics of the system are empty concessions to
disguise what those mechanics are all about. Policing in America today
is born out of the nucleus of authoritarianism, the mindset of: “I
can kill you, no matter the reason, and nothing will happen to me.”
As organizers and activists, we have got to go further than simply
seeking punishment for individual officers after they have ended a
life. We have to change the culture of policing itself, to _save the
next life_. We have to end qualified immunity.

The most important thing I have learned through my life and career is
that evil does not care who it collaborates with. Evil cooperates
better than good. Evil will collaborate with somebody good so long as
it will meet the ends of evil. What this means is that good people,
people married to principle and morals and a vision for a better
world, _have _to start looking past our differences. If not, we are
always going to always lose against evil.

Sometimes the fight against evil feels heavy and hopeless. But it’s
not hopeless. _Plot, plan, strategize, organize__ and
mobilize._ You start by yourself. You plot out what you want to see
in the world, you maybe do a little planning by yourself. But then you
begin to strategize with the others around you – in your building,
on your street, in your office. And then you organize with others. And
then, finally, you mobilize together. In that struggle, we discover
solidarity with other human beings – and that is something that no
evil can take from us.

It is not as lonely when you understand you ain’t alone.

_Michael Render, also known as Killer Mike, is a rapper and activist_

_This essay is adapted from the preface to Above the Law: How
‘Qualified Immunity’ Protects Violent Police by Ben Cohen,
co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, and forthcoming
[[link removed]] from OR Books_

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