Naturally, the solution to the problem of police abusing their authority is to hold them less accountable when they do exactly that.
Leave it to “law and order” Republicans such as Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe to evolve such logic. They have put forth the Black and Blue – whoops, Back the Blue – act (see here) which would make it harder to sue run-amok law enforcers in civil court to recover damages resulting from actions undeniably illegal – while at the same time imposing more severe penalties on Mundanes who affront the holy person of a law enforcer than those imposed on Mundanes who do exactly the same thing.
As regards the first:
So long as the victim – er, perp – was “engaged in felonies or crimes of violence” (how this it to be determined in the heat of the moment remains unclear) the law enforcer administering the wood shampoo or “directory assistance” (beating administered with a phone book in between the flesh and he nightstick, to keep the bruising down) or some other such informal technique, will be immunized from subsequent civil suit by his victim, provided the abuse suffered occurred while the enforcer was acting in a “judicial capacity.”
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Breathtaking.
It is obvious – or should be – that this only encourage more lawless “street justice” by the enforcers of the law. It will also encourage more generous application of the law – i.e., of bogus/trumped-up charges (such as felony “resisting”) in the immediate aftermath of an otherwise legally unjustifiable beatdown, to immunize the beaters from the legal consequences of said beatdown.
This GOP act of cop suckage is even better than a throw-away stiletto – which dirty cops used to keep on hand to leave adjacent to the bloodied corpse of their victim, so as to justify his aeration.
That was at least illegal.
Now, they won’t have to bother.
What these Republican brownshirts – and that term isn’t too strong; if anything, it is too soft – propose to do is legalize objectively criminal conduct, the conduct to be justified by eructing that the victim was a “lawbreaker” and so – presumably – deserved to have more than the legally prescribed justice meted out to him and – critically – before he has been duly convicted of anything at all.
Under the proposed Black and Blue lawlessness, law enforcement is to be given discretion to administer street justice, according to its lights – and the victim of this is to be rendered legally helpless. No damages are to be awarded for any violations of law that occurred during “any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in the judicial capacity of that officer.”
Hut!Hut! Hut! You will respect my authoritah!
At the same time, any assault upon the person of a law enforcer by a Mundane becomes a separate federal crime with a mandatory two-to-five-year stint in federal prison. Twenty if the accused was in possession of a weapon during the incident.
The legal definition of “assault” can be a trivial as jabbing a finger onto someone else’s chest. Or – in the case of law enforcement – defending oneself against an assault by a law enforcer. Attempt to ward off a wood shampoo – a reflex action that is almost impossible to suppress, and – to well-practiced cries of “stop resisting!” – you have just purchased a two-to-five-year ticket to the federal prison of their choice.
It goes without saying that a law enforcer who commits exactly the same offense – assuming he is even charged – will suffer nothing of the sort.
Cannot suffer anything of the sort, because the the law specifies more lenient treatment for assault-by-cop upon a Mundane.
And the lights just got a little dimmer.
