Forty years ago, in a notorious case, a 19-year old thief, who was trying to steal a spotlight from a high school, fell through a skylight during the course of his criminal activity. He was paralyzed, and sued the school district for “failure to warn” about the potential hazard. He was awarded a $260,000 settlement plus $1,500 a month for the rest of his life.
I remember being outraged by the result. The thief basically extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers for injuries sustained due to his own criminal activity. That didn’t make sense to me, and it still doesn’t.
Fast forward 38 years, to May, 2020, and a massive George Floyd protest in Denver. Thousands of demonstrators turned violent after nightfall. As darkness fell, a member of the Denver School Board, Tay Anderson, who was a strong supporter of the demonstration, urged the protesters to stay peaceful; many such demonstrations become violent after dark. It didn’t work. “We asked white allies to go home and some of them still insisted throwing rocks, bottles, etc. at police,” Anderson wrote (according to the Denver Post). “The police responded with gas and rubber bullets. I am disgusted in how allies ignored our asks to go home and stay peaceful.”
Predictably, some of the protesters were hurt when cops justifiably responded to the violence. They sued the city of Denver for the use of excessive force, and, just the other day, won: a dozen activists were awarded $14 million.
The lesson is: break the law—attack cops--get hurt during the commission of your criminal activity—sue somebody—and get rich.
Am I the only one who finds this phenomenon disgusting and bizarre? It used to be that, if criminals deliberately broke the law and got hurt as a result, the public attitude toward them was, “Too bad. You should have thought of that before committing your crime.”
Apparently, those days are gone.
Closer to home, we saw a version of this farce a few weeks ago in Danville, when a man who tried to kill a cop with a knife was shot to death by that cop, in an act of self-defense. The perp’s family obtained the help of the well-known plaintiff’s attorney, John Burris, who specializes in suing police departments. Burris got a $4.5 million award for them. And once again, I found myself appalled. Let me get this straight: a violent, armed man tries to kill a cop. The cop shoots him in self-defense. And, in another twisted perversion of reality, the guy’s family gets millions of dollars.
Something is horribly broken in our system. I don’t understand why defendants in these cases—cities, police departments, school districts—don’t fight harder when they know they’ve done nothing wrong. Fight like hell in the courts: take it from District Court to Superior Court to the Court of Appeals to the State Supreme Court all the way to the United States Supreme Court if you have to. Fight, because we can’t let these charades continue unabated. One reason for the crime wave in America is because these thugs know that, even if they’re arrested, if they’re injured in the process they can sue the cops and maybe get a huge settlement. And even if they’re killed, their families likewise can get a huge settlement. A lot of these guys don’t care if they’re killed; they ask for it. It’s suicide by cop.
It’s so wrong, so biased, so through-the-looking-glass. We need a District Attorney in Alameda County, and city attorneys as well, who will stand up to this kind of extortion and call it out for what it is: BS. And we need brave, honest City Council members who will refuse to pay out this blackmail money. It’s time to stop rewarding criminal behavior.
Steve Heimoff