Finished reading it. Don't like the prose. Its very boring. But Patrick has a case, and he hired the most boring lawyer imaginable.
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First off, what the actual fuck. FORTY times? My brothers in Christ, what the actual fuck?
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This is a problem thanks to the exigent circumstances issue. Sucks to suck.
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(Out of order purposely, because the Lawyer should have put this next)
This is a situation where Police Officers are well advised to ALSO not talk about situations they are involved with to the opposing party. Because this just torpedoed Exigent Circumstances. The way it works is the Police can conduct a search if they have a reasonable suspicion that a crime is going on. Which is a super low bar. The fake 911 call alone is enough to meet it. Except this mongoloid of a beat cop decided to just publicly state (probably in view of Doorbell Cameras) that "He is Aware" the call is bullshit, but he's going to conduct a search anyway. The correct answer would be "Sir, we've had a report that X is happening on this property. We are just going inside to make sure X is not happening".
This is not good for the State. No sir, not good.
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Part of that training had probably be about not talking about how you know a 911 call is bullshit. That said, yeah dummies, you SHOULD have done something about this and established a protocol. Thanks to the idiot you pay and put a badge on, you now have immense liability AND it can be showed you did nothing about it after being made aware.
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What the fuck is wrong with you Patrick A-Logs.
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Yep.
Patrick is going to win a million dollars. In settlement. Unless of course the City of Milwaukee has a Very good excuse or a Very Jewish lawyer.
I'd like the full quote and specific context of what the officer was "well aware" of. Being aware of a bunch of bullshit in general is not the same as being aware that this one is.
I'd want to know what the call said that time. I'd look at how the whole conversation went, how calm or not Patrick was, if things escalated, and if it did escalate verbally, was it in a way that aligned with the specifics of the call. And on.
Milwaukee is a city. It's not like someone in a one-horse town who is a pillar of the community and has known the sheriff of the sleepy place for 50 years, where you might see that person able to just have a chat with the police that yep, alogs at it again, while your wife is swapping recipes with the sheriff's wife and so everyone knows everything is OK. That sheriff might not need to ride out every time and walk in.
Maybe. But a known hysteric with a turbulent background and aggressive and aggressively stupid demeanor in a large city? A basic officer cannot ignore a call. Imagine he shows up, doesn't insist on a walk-around, turns to walk away and bam Patrick shot his wife or "wife" Idk in the head. Or whatever other scenario was called in is true. Officer loses his job, minimum.
Or 30 years later winds up in the billionth retelling of how the Milwaukee police
once again wrote off a domestic situation and wound up literally handing a kid back to a serial killer (Dahmer, but Gacy's another regional example - and Gacy, btw, filed a civil suit against his police department because of their surveillance of him ).
Nah. It is
well established in caselaw that the police are not legally liable for an individual's protection absent a 'special relationship' (which this would not be). You could be
getting stabbed a few feet away from cops who hide instead of helping and you can't sue em. Legally, inaction is a lot safer than action in most cases.
Just because that Court found no 14th Am due process right of non-custodial victims to be protected by police officers and school personnel in the Parkland shooting doesn't mean cops have no duties to investigate or generally do their jobs. (That ruling was really about whether being in school is "in custody" for purposes of the 14th Am.). You're still going to be disciplined, fired, or sued (win or lose, it's a hassle). And MAYBE some cops actually are scrupulous and believe in serve and protect, regardless of a technical out on specific legal liability.
And of course you could sue your hypothetical cops. Suing isn't winning.
And btw,
the Federal government paid $127.5 million to settle claims from the Parkland incident.
True. I suppose we would have to see the video. If there is one. In order to get the context.
That said though, if we take what Pat is saying on face value, this exchange happened after this particular officer has arrived on his doorstep multiple times for bullshit. This would I suppose depend on the timeline of events. The complaint seems to imply when Evans said he "was aware" of the situation, this was not the first time he had been called out to a swatting at the Tomlinson house. I would argue this broad interpretation of what he meant by being "aware" could be favorable to the State if this was the First time he was called out. The complaint is not entirely clear on this point.
If this was a second or even third time however, this could be more of a problem for the defense. Because being "Aware" in the context of "The Situation" could be seen by the fact finder as meaning he was aware that this was another Swatting, but he was going to use exigent circumstances anyway. I'm going to blame the shitty writing of Pats lawyers for this one again. Because something like this is something that you absolutely must be clear about. Did Evans say "he was aware" the FIRST time, or the SECOND time? Because the two present a very different issue.
Future law students, this is why your legal writing professor autistically scolds you for bad commas.
It's a complaint. They quoted it this way on purpose, either disingenuously or (more likely (for the lawyers, anyway)) because the situation and statement were ambiguous, so of course they're going to include it in a non-neutral way favorable to their own position and try to gin up a 1983 claim that might survive a motion to dismiss OR bring a settlement, of course. But absent actual context - and maybe even with it - it's just as likely "I'm aware, sir" was "I'm aware of what you say and that you don't like this, but I need to take a look inside your house."
Moreover, this was this guy's third, fourth time there specifically? (Only reading the parts reposted in snips here so far, I'm not clear on the precise sequence outlined, if any.) 3 or 4 calls to a volatile household with dodgy aggressive people ready for a fight is not too many times to prudently take a look around.
The city will probably have to respond, likely with a motion to dismiss based on qualified immunity.
Agree with you that qualified immunity should apply here. The bar to beat qualified immunity for a 1983 claim is high - you have to violate the law knowing that what you are doing is unconstitutional. Saying "I'm aware" of the situation, as Patrick's filing put it, is his whole hook. And it's not a good one - if it were, it would not have simply characterized the rest of the comment as "of the situation.".
To put it in perspective (obvs not the same facts at all; point is to illustrate Supreme Court perspective on how high a bar Q.i. is and that overcoming it requires clear precedent for the specific acts:
The qualified immunity doctrine is very favorable to states and local governments. “Clearly established” means that, at the time of the official’s conduct, the law was sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would understand that what he or she is doing is unconstitutional. According to the Supreme Court, qualified immunity protects all except the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.
The Supreme Court has offered multiple justifications for qualified immunity, including that it encourages government officials to “unflinching[ly] discharge . . . their duties” without worrying about being sued for actions a court has not yet held violate the constitution.
The Supreme Court has held that use of force by police and correctional officers violates the Fourth Amendment when it is “excessive.” Police and correctional officers receive qualified immunity if it isn’t clearly established that their use of force was excessive. According to the Supreme Court, while qualified immunity “do[es] not require a case directly on point,” it does require that “existing precedent must have placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond debate.”
For example, in 2014, the Supreme Court held in
Plumhoff v. Rickard that police officers didn’t use excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment when they shot and killed the driver of a fleeing vehicle to end a dangerous car chase. The court also held that even if the officers used excessive force, they were entitled to qualified immunity because it wasn’t clearly established that shooting the driver in these circumstances amounted to excessive force.
https://www.ncsl.org/civil-and-criminal-justice/qualified-immunity#:~:text=The%20evolution%20of%20qualified%20immunity,be%20sued%20under%20§%201983.
As phrased in
this Congressional brief, "Under current law, officials are entitled to qualified immunity unless 'clearly established' law
prohibited their conduct."
to him replying to the jimbot not even talking to the real jim.
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