Qualified Immunity and the Plea for Accountability
Law enforcement officers respond to protests in Columbus, Ohio following the death of George Floyd (Paul Becker, https://tinyurl.com/ycwk4785; CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).
Following the tragic death of Breonna Taylor, the City of Louisville, Kentucky, settled a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by her family. The city not only agreed to pay $12 million but also took the remarkable step of agreeing to implement numerous police reforms, including creating an early-action warning system to identify officers with red flags, implementing mandatory commanding officer reviews of all search warrants, and hiring a team of social workers to assist with dispatched runs. The terms were remarkable because such structural reforms are typically achieved, if at all, through consent decrees entered into with the U.S. Department of Justice rather than suits brought by individual plaintiffs. As civil rights litigation goes,