Above the Law: How “Qualified Immunity” Protects Violent Police

By Ben Cohen and Michael "Killer Mike" Render

• A police officer kills a twelve-year-old boy. It’s caught on video. The officer gets off.
• A police officer strangles a man selling cigarettes. It’s caught on video. The officer gets off.
• A police officer shoots a man in his car. It’s live-streamed. The officer gets off.

It happens over and over again. The culprit here, alongside the cops, is Qualified Immunity (QI), a legal principle which Reuters describes as “a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.”

Originally intended to protect cops from being sued over good faith mistakes, courts have interpreted QI so broadly that police are shielded from accountability in all but the rarest of circumstances. Only when the exact same abusive behavior was already deemed unconstitutional by a court in the exact same jurisdiction can victims succeed in a prosecution.

Above the Law recounts 12 cases in which justice was denied because of QI. The stories are accompanied by infographics, timelines, and contextualizing background to create a concise and compelling indictment of an outrageously unjust legal principle that must be changed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781682192559

Ben Cohen

Bennett Cohen is a businessman, activist and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's

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© 2021 Ben Cohen

Published by OR Books, New York and London

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First printing 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Lapiz Digital. Printed by BookMobile, USA, and CPI, UK.

paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-310-5 • ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-255-9

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

SONIA SOTOMAYOR

WALKING WHILE BLACK

TASED, HOGTIED, AND . . .

UNDERCOVER AND ABOVE THE LAW

DRIVING WHILE BLACK

JUSTICE REEVES—BUMPER

CALL THE REAL COPS

HIDE THE TEA

TAKE IT FROM ME, A FORMER COP: QUALIFIED IMMUNITY MUST END

SURRENDERING WHILE BLACK

SCHOOL DROP-OFF

THE REASONING BEHIND QUALIFIED IMMUNITY

UNARMED AND NOT DANGEROUS

SLEEPING WHILE BLACK

QUALIFIED IMMUNITY?

SEARCH AND STEAL

BROKEN HOME

A MISGUIDED EXPERIMENT

WATCHING TV WHILE BLACK

TEDDY BEAR

NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW

HOME, SWEET HOME

TWO-WHEELING

A PERVERSE IRONY

PLAYERS’ COALITION LETTER

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

—James Baldwin

On the night of May 30, 2020, I was standing at the Mayor of Atlanta’s podium, wondering what I might say to keep my hometown from burning itself to the ground before the sun came up in the morning.

The fury erupting in the streets of Atlanta in George Floyd’s name that night was the cry of generations, and it was a righteous cry, and it was justified. Standing there before those TV cameras, I thought of Mr. Floyd in his last moments on Earth, his neck crushed under the knee of a cop who once took an oath to serve and protect his community, his partner standing watch while Mr. Floyd cried out for his mother in heaven and died.

I thought of the next generation of Black boys and girls across America who watched that horrible lynching on their phones and I wondered how many of them were no longer surprised by what they saw. I wondered how many would go on themselves to die at the hands of a racist law enforcement system not far removed from slave patrols of the antebellum South or the decades of Jim Crow oppression that haunted my people afterward. I felt the old rage rising in my own heart and burning in my own eyes, too.

Looking back on that night, I know that a part of me wanted to watch the world burn, as well. A part of me wondered if it wouldn’t be better than the alternative, of living in a world like this one, where every day it seems I am waking up to watch another Black person die.

At the same time, I knew burning ourselves down was not the way. Atlanta is the homeland. Atlanta is to the Black diaspora, in my mind, every bit as significant as Israel is to the Jewish community, as Brazil is to the Pan-African community. One hundred and twenty years of economic opportunity for Black Americans like my grandmother, who moved here in 1952, or my grandfather, who arrived ten years earlier. Fifty years of Black mayoral leadership. A city that is thriving, even if it ain’t perfect. A city with the third-most Fortune 500 companies in the nation. A city home to the Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems, hosted by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois each year from 1896 to 1914. A city where more than fifty restaurants are now owned by Black people, and in particular Black women. Atlanta could not fall, not like this, not right now. We had to fortify.

I was duty-bound to speak directly to Atlanta at that moment—to remind everyone, including myself, that we must remain a fortress in a sea of chaos. We do not have to destroy our homes, our neighborhoods, our businesses. We do not have to give in to despair the way they want us to. We do not have to live our lives in grief and anguish that spans the days between one martyred hashtag and the next. We do not have to hang our hopes on some damn prosecutor to do the right thing after they stood by and let the wrong thing happen, again and again.

So I swallowed down my anger, and I opened my remarks by laying down the truest line I knew: I didn’t want to come, I said. And I don’t want to be here.

First, before we talk about qualified immunity, let me say something about cops that needs to be said. I am the proud son of a former officer of the Atlanta Police Department. Two of my cousins are police officers right now. Based on what I experienced growing up here in Atlanta, I believe that there are cops who are not inherently bad or evil people, who want to keep our communities safe and who work hard to do so. One example right off the bat is Officer Tommy Norman out in North Little Rock, a guy I’ve thrown some shine to before on my podcast. Maybe you’ve seen Tommy on his social media accounts—if not, look him up sometime. Tommy doesn’t live in his patrol car, looking to hit some arrest quota by the end of the month. He knows the people on his beat, and they know him back. North Little Rock ain’t an easy place to be a cop, but even still, people in the community don’t fear for their lives the second they see Tommy’s squad car roll up. That’s a testament to him. That’s because he does it right.

With that said, even good cops like Tommy Norman still operate inside a larger system that is itself overly militarized, harshly punitive (particularly against Black Americans), and absent of any real legal accountability—as we continue to see, time and time again, with these