zlacker

>But police arrest a lot of people, and they aren't experts on the law. They will get things wrong frequently. They can't be expected to make the correct call every time, but they also can't do the job if the average officer is regularly sued.

That seems so very one sided reasoning when the same logic is not applied to the rest of us. When we interact with police, they get to break the law but we must perfectly follow the law or face charges. There is no equality in that arrangement.

>>SkyBel+(OP)
Of course there's no equality to that arrangement. Police officers are just professionals who handle a lot of cases with no skin in the game (except their own safety). If your tax agent doesn't know about some loophole and doesn't save you some money, they are not automatically liable for paying you the difference. If your doctor doesn't know about a brand new life-saving procedure and you die, the doctor is not also killed to make it even. A police officer who arrests you with a reasonable belief that you've done something illegal but who is mistaken due to some complicated detail of case law should not in turn be convicted of false imprisonment.

But the flip side is also true. Just as a doctor can absolutely be arrested for intentionally harming a patient, a police officer who arrests you for clearly wrong reasons should absolutely be sued or prosecuted for their crime. But describing the line between those two cases is hard.

>>Cobras+m3
There is a core difference in these. Two really. Consent and violence. A police doing their job is often acting against your consent and invoking violence. Doctors don't. Well cutting you might be violent, but they are sure to get your consent and it is for your well being, to say nothing of the difference in training requirements before a doctor is allowed to touch you with a scalpel. And then they have to carry malpractice insurance while cops do not have to do similar.

When a police officer arrests you, they are doing something to you that in any other situation would be a major crime and it is not done in your best interest. This significantly changes the reasoning and, especially in light of recent events, needs a significant improvement in how it is currently legally treated.