Bad police training may have killed Philando Castile
Castile’s family has announced plans to sue Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed him, but I will address the question of when a police department can be sued. The leading case is City of Canton, Ohio v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378 (1989). Citing the 1978 case Monell v. New York City Dept. of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658, the Canton court reiterated that “a municipality can be found liable under § 1983 only where the municipality itself causes the constitutional violation at issue. Thus, our first inquiry in any case alleging municipal liability under § 1983 is the question whether there is a direct causal link between a municipal policy or custom and the alleged constitutional deprivation.”
The court set a high bar for failure-to-train cases: “We hold today that the inadequacy of police training may serve as the basis for § 1983 liability only where the failure to train amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights of persons with whom the police come into contact.” Following statutory language and precedent, municipalities are liable under section 1983 for a “policy or custom.” So “only where a failure to train reflects a ‘deliberate’ or ‘conscious’ choice by a municipality — a ‘policy’ as defined by our prior cases — can a city be liable for such a failure under § 1983.”
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I do not know the training policies of the St. Anthony Police Department. But there is some evidence, beyond the Castile case, that these policies were woefully bad and that the city was on notice about the dangerous deficiency.
The evidence has been supplied by professor Joseph E. Olson, who is now an emeritus tax law professor at Mitchell Hamline Law School in St. Paul.
I have a good basis for assessing Olson’s credibility and veracity. He and I have co-written three law review articles, most recently “Knives and the Second Amendment,” 47 University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 175 (2013) (also with Clayton Cramer). I have known Olson for about a quarter-century and have interacted with him at many conferences, seminars and other meetings. He served on the NRA Board of Directors in the 1990s and leads Minnesota’s Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.
Olson has probably written more of the text of Minnesota gun laws than any other person. This includes the state’s right-to-carry statute, the Minnesota Citizens’ Personal Protection Act, which is one of the strongest such laws in the United States. I have no doubts about the accuracy or the veracity of his recollection of events.
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In short, Olson’s report provides some evidence of a “policy or custom” of improper training, particularly for traffic stops, since any motorist may be armed (lawfully or unlawfully). Further, Olson’s meeting with the chief put the municipality on notice about the improper training.
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