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-Police don’t pay legal fees- doesn’t create reform. |
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-De Stefan 16 Lindsey de Stefan, JD Candidate, Seton Hall University School of Law, “No Man is Above the Law and No Man is Below It: How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct,” Seton Hall Law Student Scholarship, July 26, 2016 (2017 Academic Year) |
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-The Court specifically fears that financial liability, in the form of paying compensatory damages to victims whose constitutional rights an officer has violated, will be a vehicle of overdeterrence.97 But the widespread practice of indemnification means that individual officers are almost never financially responsible for civil judgments against them, practically eliminating any fiscal motivation for avoiding harmful conduct.98 In fact, in many instances, even the police department that employs the officer suffers no direct financial consequences because police litigation costs and damages awards are often paid from a city or insurer’s general budget.99 The police department is not financially penalized, and thus has no incentive to discipline the officer or attempt to prevent him from repeating the unconstitutional behavior in the future. And because law enforcement officials are often unaware of the allegations set forth in lawsuits filed against them or their employees, officers’ conduct often goes uninvestigated and undisciplined, and allegations of unconstitutional conduct do not affect performance reviews or opportunities for promotion. 100 Finally, although many law enforcement officers claim that the threat of incurring liability deters them from misconduct, studies contrarily indicate that potential liability does not actually alter most officers’ on-the-job actions.101 |
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-Turns case—excessive policing Kopf 16 Dan Kopf, data journalist. The Fining of Black America, Priceonomics, 6-24-2016, Accessible Online at https://priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-black-america/ SW 11-1-2016 |
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-In March 2010, years before Ferguson, Missouri, became known for sparking the Black Lives Matter movement, the city’s Finance Director contacted the Chief of Police with a solution to the city’s budget problems. ¶ The Finance Director wanted the If police to generate more revenues from fines — money paid for infractions like traffic violations and missing court appointments. He warned that the city would be in financial trouble “unless ramps up ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year.” “Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall,” he wrote, “it’s not an insignificant issue.”¶ The Finance Director’s request surfaced as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. The investigation was instigated by the civil unrest that followed the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old African American man named Michael Brown in August 2014. Its goal was to better understand why the citizens of Ferguson felt so at odds with the police department chartered to protect them.¶ The Justice Department concluded that the mistrust between the police and the community primarily resulted from excessive fining. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report read. The use of fines to fund the government undermined “law enforcement legitimacy among African Americans in particular.” ¶ Ferguson has a population of just over 20,000 that is 67 African American, and it raised over $2 million from fines and fees in 2012. This accounted for around 13 of all government revenue, and a disproportionate amount of this money came from the African American population.¶ Is Ferguson an anomaly?¶ Using the U.S. Census’s Survey of Local and State Finances, we investigated the proportion of revenues that cities typically receive from fines, as well as the characteristics of cities that rely on fines the most. What are these cities like? Are they rich or poor? In certain parts of the country? Heavily Black or White?¶ We found one demographic that was most characteristic of cities that levy large amounts of fines on their citizens: a large African American population. Among the fifty cities with the highest proportion of revenues from fines, the median size of the African American population—on a percentage basis—is more than five times greater than the national median.¶ Surprisingly, we found that income had very little connection to cities’ reliance on fines as a revenue source. Municipalities that are overwhelming White and non-Hispanic do not exhibit as much excessive fining, even if they are poor.¶ Our analysis indicates that the use of fines as a source of revenue is not a socioeconomic racial problem, but a racial one. The cities most likely to exploit residents for fine revenue are those with the most African Americans. |