Yes, but certain groups of people who's job it is to confront people in the public are the recipients of orders of magnitude more complaints than the average individual.

The legal system is unfortunately set up such that there is a significant burden (time and cost) on defendants, even when cases are brought without merit.

In that way, the legal system can be "weaponized" and public employees can be influenced to act a certain way under the threat of a sea of PERSONAL lawsuits. ...something that seldom happens to individuals.

For that reason, immunity was created. I think we'll see a very sharp increase in lawsuits as a result of this change. ...and a lot of resignations. I wouldn't be a police officer if I didn't have immunity. At the very least, I would refuse to work shifts/neighborhoods with high crime.

> who's job it is to confront people in the public

You mean bouncers, train conductors, cabin crew members and hotel receptionists?

If you are a private security agent for a mall what's the difference with a cop patrolling a mall?

In sectors where private compete with public that's very difficult to understand why people should be regulated by different laws.

People doing their jobs and receive training should be personally immune from legal liability. That liability should be held by their employer.

...which is generally how it works, though it's not as strongly codified as it is with qualified immunity.

If you're saying we should expand qualified immunity, I agree.

> People doing their jobs and receive training should be personally immune from legal liability. That liability should be held by their employer.

They aren’t, outside of government-agent immunities.

> ...which is generally how it works, though it's not as strongly codified as it is with qualified immunity

No, it is not how it works. The idnividual agent is generally personally liable, but the employer generally is often also liable for the torts of its agents under the principle of respondeat superior, or more directly if it also checks all the boxes for having committed a tort without considering that principle.

The problem comes when the people doing their jobs are also abusing their power for personal gain or vendetta and can’t be punished.

Did you even read the bill? That is exactly what it does

> INDEMNIFICATION BY PUBLIC BODY.--A judgment awarded pursuant to the New Mexico Civil Rights Act against a person acting on behalf of, under color of or within the course and scope of the authority of the public body shall be paid by the public body.

I think it's more about finding the right middle ground than anything else. So expanding is good if people are still responsible in a way.

I agree that a lot of time the institution are liable (mostly for ordering people to achieve impossible target).

"... significant burden on [rogue govt] defendants ..."

Victims currently have little or no recourse, so govt employees can run wild. Non-govt handles this by insurance (liability, error and ommission). Govt can and should do the same. Equal rights, or not?

Assuming these cases have no merit, most of that burden is needing to pay for legal representation and spend time dealing with it. In general we'd be better off if the justice system were reformed to reduce these damages for everyone. In the meantime, employer (government) policies can straightforwardly handle both of these, without needing to undermine the justice system by creating a privileged group of people.

Sure it does. I don’t want paramedics prematurely giving up on saving peoples lives because there is fear of a lawsuit.

Software developers don’t have this fear, so we get to kill people through releasing buggy bloated applications without any fear of personal liability.

> Software developers don’t have this fear

We should. A software engineer was one of a handful of people sentenced in the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

It was fraud, and submission of false documents to further their conspiracy. There was code involved, to further the fraud. Not a hapless software dev.

Correct, and the push for accountability in police work isn't about punishing hapless officers. It's about creating some mechanism by which offenders like Chauvin can effectively be sanctioned in civil courts.

Pure nonsense. Cite these cases where software engineers have built a decades-long track record of abusing power and murdering innocents under the guise of civil service and directly abusing qualified immunity to get away with it. Or maybe tone things down.

Perhaps that is data people should be tracking but aren't, which doesn't indicate an absence of such concerns.

You can't even do that for civil servants though. The actual number of "encounters gone wrong" vs total encounters is vanishingly small.

People think there is an epidemic of police murdering minorities, but in reality the number of unarmed black men killed by police is somewhere between bear attacks and babies drowning in buckets in terms of annual deaths.

That's not to downplay the horror of such killings, but to put it into perspective of the pervasiveness of the problem. The media and especially social media of turned it into a full blown public health crisis.

I think you're underestimating the problem by limiting it to unarmed black men killed by police. There's a lot that a police force can do besides killing people. There's profiling and unlawful arrests and prosecution, cruel and unusual punishments in prisons and jails, along with general harassment. You should look at the results of DOJ investigations into the Ferguson and Baltimore police departments, they are absolutely scathing. In the Baltimore police department, there were incidents in which they arrested people just hanging out on a street corner for no reason (when they told their lieutenant they didn't have a valid reason to arrest them they were told "just make something up") in front of the DOJ investigators! I'd also recommend the book "Just Mercy" for examples of the horrors of malicious prosecution. Just one egregious example from that book: a mentally disabled woman was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her child. The problem? The woman never had a child, and was in fact infertile!

Justice isn't based on probabilities, but rather addressing every single crime. If I were to come up with a novel way of committing murder, that doesn't mean I can carry it out and expect to be ignored because such events are rare. Every time a uniform wearing criminal escapes justice due to corruption is its own injustice, regardless of how uncommon it is when compared with all police interactions.

> the number of unarmed black men killed by police is somewhere between bear attacks and babies drowning in buckets in terms of annual deaths.

You're comparing accidents to murder¹.

We can and should try to prevent deaths from bear attacks. But we should also have higher standards for human behavior than for bears.

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¹Or at best manslaughter