President Trump will not move forward with any policing reforms that limit qualified immunity, according to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
McEnany highlighted reforms to qualified immunity as one of many “nonstarters” in a legislative package drafted by House Democrats to reform policing on Monday. She noted that the White House had not yet received the final text on proposed reforms but said the administration does not support limiting immunities for law enforcement.
“The text of it hasn’t even been given to us. I have not talked with the president about that yet. Hee hasn’t reviewed it yet. He is looking at a number of proposals, but there are some nonstarters in there, I would say, particularly on the immunity issue,” McEnany said.
“You had A.G. Barr [Attorney General Bill Barr] saying — this weekend he was asked about reduced immunity and he said, ‘I don’t think we need to reduce immunity to go after the bad cops’ because that would result, certainly, in police pulling back, which is not advisable,” she said.
Qualified immunity is a principle that has been upheld by the Supreme Court that grants officers immunity from facing civil rights lawsuits if they violate a person’s rights while working as a law enforcement officer.
Even if the officer acted with malice, the person can only file a civil rights lawsuit against the individual officer if there is precedent of a case that involved the same violation of a right under the same circumstances, a legal threshold that is difficult to meet. Those who believe they had their rights violated can sue departments as a whole but cannot file civil rights lawsuits against individual officers.
Reforms to qualified immunity have been sparked bipartisan interest in Congress, but Barr argued on Sunday that such changes could result in officers “pulling back” and limiting their response to avoid costly lawsuits. McEnany said that Barr speaks for the administration.
“He [Trump] hasn’t reviewed the legislation, but A.G. Barr as a member of the administration noted this prior to the proposal coming out,” McEnany said.
