‘Plaintiff Police’ explores the recent trend of local police officers increasingly bringing civil lawsuits against those that they police, particularly in high-profile situations where the police have been accused of wrongdoing. For example, police officers have initiated multiple lawsuits suing Black Lives Matter protestors, police officers have sued rapper Afroman for using footage of their search of his home in a recent music video, and a Louisville police officer who participated in the Breonna Taylor raid sued her boyfriend for shooting at him when they began the raid into the apartment. This project theorizes these suits as democratic harms that degrade the relationship between the citizenry and local governments, considers why existing tools like the fireman’s rule and anti-SLAPP legislation are inadequate responses, and offers an approach that navigates the space between the value of open courts on the one hand, and the importance of robust protest and political participation on the other.
The presentation will be over Zoom (no registration is required). Zoom details can be found in the attached poster or on the Tort Law and Social Equality website: https://www.tortlawandsocialequality.ca/speaker-series.
Leave a Reply