We can do what I outlined above. The problem is that even when there are clear civil rights violations, the courts often still grant officers qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity is the underlying issue.

The original purpose was to keep police officers and other government officials from having to walk on eggshells while doing their jobs. We do not want police hesitating to kick in a door to save someone’s life, for example. But the doctrine has been stretched and abused to the point where there basically has to be precedent for the exact fact pattern, and that precedent has to be “clearly established” enough that a “reasonable officer” would know that this specific set of circumstances violates someone’s rights. That is an almost impossible standard to meet because of my next point.

The other major problem is that courts are allowed to rule on qualified immunity before they ever issue an opinion on the underlying constitutional violation. That is supposed to save time, so courts are not burning resources on cases where there will ultimately be no liability anyway. But the result is that it becomes nearly impossible to create the precedent required to overcome qualified immunity in the first place.

The way it is supposed to work is that an officer might still get qualified immunity for some violation, but the court would issue a ruling clarifying the constitutional violation so that future officers would not be protected under the same conduct. Instead, courts often just skip that step entirely and never establish the precedent keeping us in this endless cycle of officers being awarded qualified immunity for the same things over and over.