End Qualified Immunity
What it is
Qualified immunity is a legal principle that gives police officers immunity from a civil suit unless the officer violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
This means that even when a police officer clearly hurts you and violates your constitutional rights, they are protected from being held accountable in a civil suit because of qualified immunity.
What it isn’t
Qualified immunity is not a law! It is a legal doctrine, which means it was created through a progressive series of court rulings.
Because qualified immunity is a legal doctrine and not a law, this means that victims of police brutality have to show a legal precedent to proceed with their case in civil court, even if their rights were clearly violated by a police officer. A legal precedent is an earlier case that is the same or nearly the same to the set of facts for this case. This makes it really hard to find precedent, because it is very rare for two incidents to be exactly the same!