“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” It’s the first thing you learn in a criminal law class. If you break the law, saying “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that” will not get the charge dropped — unless you’re a police officer.

If a government official uses his or her power to violate your constitutional rights, you can sue that official for civil damages. That right is codified in 42 U.S. Code § 1983, and provides the only method of financial redress for citizens who have been unfairly treated. Yet in Pearson v. Callahan, the Supreme Court instituted the “qualified immunity” doctrine, which shielded government officials from civil liability unless they violated a “clearly established” right.

As one might expect, this proved to be a high standard for plaintiffs to meet. The precise interpretation of what constitutes a clearly established right is often hotly debated, especially between those who are at opposite sides of the political spectrum. The Court claimed that officers need to exercise their duty without fear of lawsuits, and that they can’t be expected to keep up with the nuances of the laws they enforce.

In New York, qualified immunity has coupled with injurious policing policies to ensure that cops can arbitrarily assert their authority without fear of consequence. For instance, stop-and-frisk, a hallmark of the Giuliani administration, allowed police to search any individual they “reasonably suspected” of committing a crime. Due to the well-documented biases of police officers, 83 percent of those stopped and frisked were black or Hispanic, and only six percent of the stops resulted in arrests. As stop-and-frisk muddied the boundary between a legal and illegal search, cops easily and regularly invoked qualified immunity to avoid culpability for flagrantly unjust searches.

In Allen v. NYPD, a warrantless search of a black male was deemed non-actionable because stop-and-frisk laws made the right to be free from unwarranted searches anything but “clearly established.” Similarly, an eighth-grade girl who was strip searched by school officials on suspicion that she had pharmaceuticals was denied damages under qualified immunity. And perhaps most frighteningly, a cop needlessly ran a license check on a black man’s car, which erroneously returned a stolen license plate number. The cop pulled into the car owner’s driveway, harassed his mother when she came outside and shot the car’s occupant when he stepped out defend his mother against the cop’s actions. Again, the Court denied damages under the qualified immunity doctrine.

This is a doctrine predicated on a double-standard, and bears horrific consequences for victims of police abuse. The government has have already vested police with maximum power; to allow them minimum responsibility only makes it worse. Qualified immunity is a dangerous and unfair loophole in our police code, and if we respect ourselves and our sovereignty at all, we must remove it.

Opinions expressed on the editorial pages are not necessarily those of WSN, and our publication of opinions is not an endorsement of them.

Email Matthew Perry at [email protected].