Qualified Immunity is the protection against lawsuits that allows police to do their jobs. Problem is, it’s a blanket of immunity, protecting officers when mistakes or malfeasance takes place.
Now a state task force in Baton Rouge is looking at reforming qualified immunity.
WWL asked former New Orleans Police Chief Ronal Serpas for his thoughts:
“If an employee is not following the rules of his employer, then that’s a significant problem for the employee. And I think that matters in criminal court, in civil court, in federal court.”
Serpas says reforming qualified immunity involves removing it from covering officers found having made serious mistakes, malfeasance or misconduct.
“It’s when employees step outside the rules that these issues of qualified immunity are being discussed all around the country,” Serpas says. “Candidly, I’ve seen officers who were sanctioned severely for stepping outside of a department’s policies or practices and sometimes spending time in prison for it.”
The state's Police Training, Screening and De-escalation Task Force is looking into reforming qualified immunity--the blanket protection from lawsuits as a member of a governmental authority.
“If the policy of a department is being followed and it turned out it is wrong, it was because an investigation determined that in reasonably situated police departments or reasonably similar police officers don’t have those kinds of practices.”
But Serpas removing qualified immunity can lead to lawsuits against departments found to have wrong policies and practices. And from that can come reforms of policies.
“If they’re doing what everyone is supposed to be doing, in the proper fashion and a bad thing happens. Then we need to deal with that, not the officer who would be personally sanctioned because he didn’t step outside of the normal practice.”
Should the task force move ahead on reforming qualified immunity, a bill will be created and introduced during the April legislative session.
