Centro de Documentação da PJ
Analítico de Periódico
CD 357
The plaintiff police [Recurso eletrónico] / Sarah L. Swan
The Yale Law Journal, Danvers, MA, Vol. 134, n. 4 (February 2025), p. 1182-1267
Ficheiro de 1,04 MB em formato PDF.
MANIFESTAÇÃO, POLÍCIA E DIREITOS DO HOMEM, ACTUAÇÃO POLICIAL, PROCESSO CIVIL, RESPONSABILIDADE CIVIL, ESTADOS UNIDOS
In civil litigation, police officers typically occupy the role of defendant, regularly responding to allegations of excessive force, unlawful arrest, and discriminatory policing. However, police officers can also do a different litigative role: that of plaintiff. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and the increased attention to police violence, for example, officers quite frequently sue the people they police. These tort suits allege all sorts of harms, including physical injuries from confrontations, emotional harms from “being forced” to inflict violence on others, and defamation and privacy harms said to flow from complaints of police misconduct. These plaintiff police lawsuits have profound practical and political significance. They bring core and fundamental principles of justice into serious tension: on the one hand, the idea of open courts and the right to petition for redress of grievances are prized properties of the American legal system, and all who suffer wrongful injuries - including police officers - deserve to seek compensation and deterrence. On the other hand, these lawsuits inflict a plethora of harms. They exacerbate a power imbalance between the police and those who are policed; they have a demonstrable chilling effect on political participation; they add to an accountability mismatch where citizens seeking to sue police face significant procedural and doctrinal hurdles, but police can sue citizens with relative ease; and they constitute a distinct democratic harm that degrades the relationship between the citizenry and local governments in troubling ways. This article argues that the competing values of democracy, political participation, compensation, and deterrence are best served by disallowing plaintiff police suits in all but a very narrow set of circumstances. And it offers a feasible framework for implementing reforms.
