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Yes, both of these tests will work. In the sense that if you ARE being detained, you'll know it, because you'll be down on the ground with a split lip.
In reality, the police will just say no, and only beat you if you resist arrest.
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You are going too far. This would be a very easy civil lawsuit to win if the police behaved as you just described.
LOL, no. The police will say whatever it takes to win, the judges support them (in court, your word is suspect and theirs is gospel), and even if they get caught doing something wrong, there's qualified immunity. When they lose cases it's because the politicians want them to lose (e.g. sympathetic minority plaintiff)
That’s not what qualified immunity is. It means you can’t sue the cop personally. You can sue the city. And you can get jury trial. And you would have video evidence.
you can sue the city for what?
"cop did something bad" isn't enough to hold a city liability for the bad behavior of one of their cops
a video of a cop protected by qualified immunity doing something bad isn't some golden ticket to find municipal liability
under Monell, it is even more difficult to find municipal liability than individual liability with a steep evidentiary burden which courts are very reluctant to allow much discovery (if any) to find (if they don't just dismiss the claim during the pleading stage for failure to present supporting evidence)
in roughly half the federal circuits, a finding of municipal liability when qualified immunity has been upheld is all but impossible because the circuits have held local governments cannot fail to train to prevent a cop from violating a constitutional right which isn't clearly established
iirc, only the 9th circuit allows an independent claim to functionally survive upheld qualified immunity but in practical terms is very hard and very rare
for all practical purposes in typical cases, an upheld finding of qualified immunity ends the lawsuit
responding to someone pointing out these cases are not "a very easy civil lawsuit" by implying these sorts of claims are difficult because the vast majority of the time qualified immunity is upheld that they don't understand this situation because municipal liability is, to be frank, ridiculous
I see cases all the time where cities had to pay out for violating civil rights or excessive force. In the specific example I was replying to it included physical injury to myself without probable cause to detain. I am no legal expert but I feel like I see in the news all the time someone getting paid out. All of this would be on body camera. What am I missing?
As far as I am seeing qualified immunity only protects government officials from personal civil liability and has nothing to do with protecting a city from civil liability.
it's a big country with a national media
you don't need probable cause to detain, the standard for a brief detention referred to as an investigatory stop is reasonable suspicion
the original case is about whether or not the cop had reasonable suspicion, the appeal has to do specifically about whether this was a brief detention requiring reasonable suspicion or a "mere encounter" and if there was clear error in the trial court's holding (I don't think the state even contested the lack of reasonable suspicion holding)
your original guess was likely accurate: this is a judge doing racial politics to protect some black teenager carrying a gun
very similar situations like this happen all over the country, and the gun is almost never suppressed
civil liability for what?
there has to be an underlying constitutional rights violation by an individual agent of state or local governments in order to file the claim under s. 1983
the underlying act is the same for both s. 1983 claims against the cops and the governments
without the s. 1983 case, a federal law which allows these lawsuits to get past sovereign immunity in the first place, and the underlying act, there is no municipal liability for a constitutional violation at all, whether it's a clearly established right or not
it is more difficult to find municipal liability because there needs to be more evidence and they must satisfy an additional and higher standard than getting passed the qualified immunity under s 1983 claims alone; in about half of federal circuits, an upheld finding of qualified immunity all but makes it impossible to find municipal liability and it's still very rare and difficult for practical reasons in the others
they're intimately connected in this context
in the overwhelming vast majority of cases, an upheld qualified immunity defense ends the lawsuit and it does so very early in the lawsuit
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Yes, exactly what he said. The law is swift and brutal to you, not to underclass criminals.
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