Christian Glass

[Jamie123]

Family of Christian Glass Reaches $19 Million Settlement - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

This is a sad, sad story, but in a way it's quite encouraging. Consider:

• The police department is not paying up grudgingly whilst insisting there was "no wrongdoing". They have admitted that their original statements were incorrect, that Christian was not to blame for his own death, that he was not (as was originally claimed) threatening officers with a knife. (This is not my opinion - it is what they have actually said.)
• There is now to be new training of police in crisis response.
• No nonsense is being talked about "qualified immunity". Even after the George Floyd case there was some talk that despite police murder convictions, there would still be no compensation for the victim's family because of qualified immunity. I don't know if that has been the case (I've not really followed it) but it's certainly not what's happened here!
• The officers involved are now facing murder charges, just as they were in the Floyd case.
• $19,000,000 is an astronomical sum. It won't bring Christian back, but it shows how seriously this matter is being taken.

Quite what line the police unions are taking I don't know, but their protestations (if any) are not being featured very prominently.

P.S. Several of my close relatives are cops, and I'm well aware of the difficult and dangerous work they do. Most of them are very good people - at least here and I'm sure in America too. There has been some silly talk on YouTube about "extracting that $19,000,000 from police pension funds, 'coz it's not fair that the taxpayers should pay it". Well, it's not fair that the good honest cops should bear the full brunt of it either, just because of a couple of trigger-happy lunatics. They will pay their fare share of the cost in their own taxes.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Jamie123

[mordorbund]

On 5/24/2023 at 12:04 PM, Jamie123 said:

There has been some silly talk on YouTube about "extracting that $19,000,000 from police pension funds, 'coz it's not fair that the taxpayers should pay it". Well, it's not fair that the good honest cops should bear the full brunt of it either, just because of a couple of trigger-happy lunatics. They will pay their fare share of the cost in their own taxes.

Springboarding here. Ideally, what is the proper punishment? Attaching a fine suggests a systemic rather than a personal failure led to the death. That being the case, what system failed here?

- The retired police staff? If so, is the incentive for the retired police to head to the station and set the house in order? Pensions don't make sense.

- The tax-payers? $19M comes to about $3K per resident of Clear Creek County. If they were directly assessed they would feel the sting of the fine but I doubt they will be. If they were assessed, or payed it as a lump sum, then it would incentivize them to take some action, but what would that action be? Recall the sherriff? Vote directly on police policy?

- The PD? They had a budget of $5.7M in 2020. I'm guessing this is where the fine is actually going, and it will impact their budget for a decade or more. This would seem to have the desired incentives provided the cost isn't already masked through some sort of insurance.

[pam]

Public Square Magazine (owned by More Good) just published an article today on qualified immunity.

https://publicsquaremag.org/dialogue/racial-healing/a-license-to-kill-reevaluating-qualified-immunity/