This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 12th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As Democrats running for president prepared a debate again, there is much to like in some of their criminal justice policy proposals.

Few candidates have even zeroed in on qualified immunity, a special legal protection for cops,

as a key contributor to our broken criminal justice system.

Cato's Clark Neely details some of the plans of the Democrats running for president.

Well, I think the issues that the Democratic candidates for president are willing to grapple with are primarily focused on policing

racial disparities use of force and to some extent accountability

Those are all very important issues,

but I don't think they really go

to the very heart of the criminal justice systems

pathologies.

So in terms of particular policies that you are supportive of that we see across

multiple candidates, what are they? Well several of them have flagged qualified immunity as something

that they would like to get rid of. Of course, the Cato Institute is leading the

campaign to eliminate qualified immunity, which is a judge-made doctrine that makes it very difficult to hold

police and other government officials civilly liable for violating people's rights. And so it's a very positive development

that several different Democratic presidential candidates,

including Castro and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth. and may well try to get rid of. So Bernie Sanders has a habit, and I don't know if this is shared by some of his fellow candidates,

but he has a habit of talking about policy changes that the president doesn't actually affect that much, how would qualified immunity, I guess as a president, what can they do to get rid of it? Yeah I mean it is it's challenging

but the president is not without some ability to influence policy first and

foremost qualified immunity is a defense that is available to federal officials who are sued for

...