This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 24th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's more than just qualified immunity,

though that's a big part of what author Joanna Schwartz describes in her new book

Shielded, how the police became untouchable. The book describes the myriad

ways law enforcement are protected from accountability and the difficulty

regular people have seeking relief when their rights have been

violated. We spoke earlier this month. We talk a lot about police misconduct on this program and most specifically we talk about

qualified immunity and the kinds of behavior that qualified immunity enables on not just law enforcement but on

different kinds of public officials. What do you identify as sort of the kernel, the seed of, you know, what you talk about in your book, which is, of course, shielded how the police became untouchable.

Well, part of the goal of writing shielded was to make clear that there are many, many barriers to justice in the courts when people's constitutional rights have been violated.

And qualified immunity is a critically important one of those barriers.

It's one that's received a great deal of attention publicly,

particularly since 2020.

But part of what I want to make clear in Shielded is that qualified immunity is the tip of the iceberg,

that there are protections that the Supreme Court and state and local governments have put into place

at every stage of the litigation process that makes justice difficult to achieve

and then in the rare event that justice is achieved makes it difficult for those cases actually to have a meaningful impact on the officers and the local governments involved.

Well, can we walk through an example case where somebody who, let's say an innocent person was misidentified, which happens

and gets the hell beat out of him by police and is in the hospital recovering from those injuries police realize at some point that they have the wrong person and that this person was beaten unnecessarily, to put it mildly, he wants to sue.

He wants relief.

He wants satisfaction.

...