I think QI is there to protect officers making a mistake in good faith. So a better analogy would be an employee who breaks production and that results in financial loss to clients.

But the analogy would actually be that an employee who intentionally took down production in order to harm a client would still not be liable… because they sabotaged a component written in Rust which hadn’t been invented at the time that someone had previously been held accountable in a court case for sabotaging a program written in C. Thus, the doctrine holds, they could not have known their behavior was illegal, because their behavior did not exactly match something historical.

If this sounds absurd, it is: https://eji.org/issues/qualified-immunity/

Just to be clear, as far as I am aware, QI is about civil liability, ie compensation, not criminal liability.

I don't even understand the point of shifting the civil liability from the police dept to a low wage employee who will not be able to afford the compensation.

It would be an employee who intentionally deployed something to production. But that change turned out to be a mistake. Arresting people is the officer's job. This is a case where they arrested someone in error because they didn't understand the rules.

My understanding is that the people at the police department thought what they did was illegal and they should be arrested for that. Turns out they were wrong. I get that the system may make it too easy for people in bad faith to get away with things. And the reason why comparing it to development is that the developer and the user's goals are usually aligned, whereas there are different incentives in place for police work, so it's harder to rely on good faith.

That's bonkers too - why are police in the US not required to know the law they're in charge of applying, and why are illegal actions of theirs excused as "they didn't know any better"... why wouldn't they? It's literally their job, and non-police can't use the excuse that they didn't know something was illegal.

The law is complicated, fluid and extense. There's no way a police officer will know the law like a lawyer and, by design, they can't know the outcome of a trial beforehand, so it's impossible to fully know the law in that sense, as trials are what ultimately decide the laws.

I'm not saying that QI doesn't need to be reviewed, just that the notion that police officers should never take into custody someone who's innocent is not realistic. It just can't work together with democracy and the rule of law. The only possibility of police officers only arresting guilty people is if they are themselves the judges.

Because the foundations of Enlightenment society are relatively stupid. The only way to maintain them in the face of their own contradictions is arbitrary threat of violence.

> If an AWS employee commits fraud as part of his employment which results in a financial loss for a client, the employee will be criminally liable, but amazon will be financially liable to the client. Why would it be different for a police department?

It will be different because of QI: the reason Amazon will be legally liable is that the individual employee is legally liable in the first instance, and Amazon is jointly and severally liable for the employee’s liability (and a much more attractive litigation target, because you can’t squeeze blood from a stone but you can squeeze money from a trillion dollar corporation) because of the legal principal of respondeat superior.