How The Police Became Untouchable | Joanna Schwartz | TMR

Emma hosts Joanna Schwartz, professor at UCLA Law School, to discuss her recent book Shielded: How The Police Became Untouchable. Professor Schwartz zooms out to look at the history of qualified immunity, beginning with the passage of the Klu Klux Klan Act in 1871 which sought to grant the right of trial and due process to the recently freed Black population when it came to addressing justice for constitutional violations by the state, only for the Supreme Court to respond immediately by making various decisions to undermine and stunt these developments as the US continued into the Jim Crow era. Moving into the second half of the 20th Century, Joanna and Emma explore the Supreme Court’s decision to finally reverse this decision in 1968, then opening up lawsuits against local governments in ’71, only to – once again – launch various decisions that undermined this right, opening up local governments to passing qualified immunity and other measures that protect them from accountability and hinder victims of police brutalities’ quests for justice. Wrapping up the interview, they tackle the history and development of policing institutions in the US, coming out of the slave economy and settler-colonial structure of the early US, and discuss what policy measures can help bolster Americans’ right to justice in the face of state abuses. Sam Mellins then joins as he walks through Kathy Hochul’s failed nomination of Hector LaSalle to the Chief Judgeship of the NY Court of Appeals, why she embraced this loss so dearly, and where it leaves the future of this seat.

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Joanna Schwartz is a law professor at UCLA and the book is called Shielded How the Police Became Untouchable. Joanna thanks so much for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. of course. So you open your book in Atlanta in the introduction. And that's been in the news for cop-related police-related reasons recently because of the construction of Cop City, the demonstrations, and the protest against it. And you tell the story of Henry Norris who was a 78-year-old grandfather who had this encounter with police. It was not a lethal encounter, right? But still a horrifying one. Why did you make the choice to start with that story as opposed to you know some of the more well-known Infamous stories of police brutality in this country? And that is for a reason. The cases that Garner National and international attention are cases where there's a lot of public pressure to get Justice for the victims of misconduct. And in those cases often justice of some sort is quickly given to the victims and their families. But the kinds of cases that I'm really focused on are the cases that don't get public attention. and those really are the cases where the various kinds of barriers that the Supreme Court and state and local governments have created make it very difficult for those people to seek Justice. And so I start the story with one of those people his name is Andre Norris as you mentioned. He was sitting at home watching the news as he did most nights when a group of over a dozen police officers stormed into his home they were looking for a drug dealer and had a warrant for a house that was 30 yards away and looked nothing like his home. But they came into his home anyway, busted down the doors, handcuffed him, put him to the floor, and ignored his calls for help. He had heart trouble and he was twice the age of the person they were looking for but was mistreated nonetheless. and when he wanted Justice through the system there was no chance that the officers were going to be prosecuted. They weren't disciplined by the department.