Notwithstanding his dalliance with criminal justice reform and his castigation of law enforcement officials he says have abused their powers to target him, Donald Trump has always been inclined to “back the blue” against critics of police policies and practices. That instinct goes back decades, and it has served him well in his current incarnation as a populist politician catering to the anxieties and resentments of Americans who worry that policing has been undermined and compromised by the demands of left-wing agitators. But the latest manifestation of this theme—Trump’s campaign promise to “indemnify” police officers who supposedly are paralyzed by fear of civil liability for doing their jobs—is so detached from reality that it belongs in the same category as his insistence that he actually won reelection in 2020.
“We will restore law and order in our communities,” Trump said during a campaign rally in New Hampshire last Saturday. “I am also going to indemnify our police officers. This is a big thing, and it’s a brand new thing, and I think it’s so important. I’m going to indemnify, through the federal government, all police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the United States from being destroyed by the radical left for taking strong actions against crime.”
The problem, Trump claimed at a rally in Iowa a few days earlier, is that police are “afraid to do anything. They’re forced to avoid any conflict. They are forced to let a lot of bad people do what they want to do, because they’re under threat of losing their pension, losing their house, losing their families.” To address that problem, he said, “we are going to indemnify them against any and all liability.”
Although Trump seems to think indemnification of police officers who are sued for alleged misconduct is “a brand new thing,” it has been long been routine practice. In a 2014 study of civil rights cases that covered “forty-four of the largest law enforcement agencies across the country,” UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz found that “police officers are virtually always indemnified.” That means they are not personally responsible for settlement payments or jury-awarded damages arising from allegations of police abuse. From 2006 to 2011, Schwartz reported in the New York University Law Review, “governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement.”
Hellbound and Down 