Hard to imagine any desire to be police officer
It’s wonderful that there are young adults who want to enter public service to help people by becoming police officers. But it’s an increasingly difficult choice to make, especially with so many people showing bias against police.
Police at any moment could be involved in a situation where they might have to decide to use deadly force. There are wellfunded organizations and many people who immediately think after every shooting that the officer should be terminated and arrested. Their standard, even after investigations, is that the officer should be condemned even after proven innocent.
Recently, a state’s attorney ruled that a Waterbury officer who fatally shot a man was justified in doing so.
I don’t want police officers to have to suffer the trauma that follows if they use deadly force, which is exacerbated by attacks by members of the public and the media while they are taken out of work and have to deal with a criminal investigation regardless of how reasonable their actions are.
To make things worse, we just passed an act creating new standards so that even if your use of force is constitutional, your actions could be found to be unreasonable. You could be terminated for excessive force, sued and even arrested in a case where your actions were in compliance with many United States Supreme Court cases and decades of legal precedent from our appellate courts.
Those who really want to help people should enter the medical profession. According to a Johns Hopkins study, approximately 250,000 innocent people die each year due to medical errors. Members of the medical profession are not threatened or ridiculed by anti-medical groups.
Worse yet, we created a new cause of action effectively stripping officers of defenses, expanding the scope of liability and limiting due process for police. Police officers still have indemnification statutes, but there is now a far greater chance that they may be held personally liable.
Legislators passed this act because they were falsely informed that Connecticut officers would be entitled to qualified immunity in a George Floyd-type incident. But such acts have been found to be a violation of clearly established law for decades. Our new statute ensures that more cases will be tried before juries.
Because of the new law, we will have civil rights cases before state judges who have less knowledge and experience than our federal judges. There is no body of law for them to rely on.
We also created new standards for decertification that, frankly, I don’t understand, and I don’t think anyone can predict how they will be applied.
It doesn’t matter if an officer makes a bad decision the first day they work or during their 20th year. It doesn’t matter how impeccable their work record is or how many people they have helped or how many lives they have saved. It doesn’t matter how many dangerous criminals they have arrested or how often they have risked their life. That one bad decision could lead to personal liability and financial ruin. That one mistake could lead to an end of a career, and all the time and money invested in that career will have been been wasted.
In 2015, we passed a police reform act because of a legal use of force in Missouri and an illegal shooting in South Carolina. This new act was initiated because of a incident in Minneapolis. We never looked at the true nature of police actions in our state when considering the need for this legislation.
Police should not expect that just because of all the good they have done that the political leaders of their town will back them, or that someone will magically provide them with another career to support their family. I can understand when police take a risk when confronting a criminal or a dangerous situation. But I don’t want them to hesitate and lose their life because of the risks we created in this statute by increasing the chances of civil liability, decertification and prosecution.
I can’t understand why any person in their right mind would choose to be a police officer. There are plenty of other careers with better pay and benefits without any of the risks we have contrived.