Fundamentally Un-Fair
September 29, 2022
On February 7, 2014, 14-year-old Andrew Joseph III went to the Florida state fair in Hillsborough County. It was “student day,” a day when students are given the day off school and a free ticket to attend. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office was in charge of policing the event – including both on- and off-duty officers. They received about 20 minutes of training to prepare for the event and no information about Florida state law, which requires young people being discharged from custody be handed over to parents or another adult.
Because no educational event on or off campus is complete these days without plans to police children using actual law enforcement, a processing center was set up. Trusting their “discretion,” deputies were permitted either to force disruptive students to leave the fairgrounds or to take them to the processing center, where they filled out paperwork. It appears that at some point, some students were disruptive – there isn’t much clarity on why deputies thought crimes were being committed, though – and Andrew Joseph was arrested for alleged “disorderly conduct.” (It seems that the adolescent was “running,” which…have cops met children before?)
He was taken to the processing center where, according to the complaint, his phone was broken. Then deputies dropped Joseph and a friend (who was, incidentally, only 12) off outside of the fairgrounds near a busy stretch of unlit highway.
The two kids were trying to get back to where the parking lot was located, which is where their parents would have picked them up. But they couldn’t reach it without crossing a highway. A deputy refused to let them walk through the fairgrounds. So, they crossed the highway. Andrew Joseph was hit by a car and died.
The trial, which was this month, raised many questions about the sheriff department’s behavior and attitude. Kids as young as 12 were thrown out of the fairgrounds; no one bothered to call parents or make sure the kids had a ride home.
The sheriff’s office did its best to kick the can down the road as long as possible, even generating more misconduct along the way. In one instance, a young woman – a girl when Andrew Joseph was killed – did not appear in court to testify as a witness. The judge issued a bench warrant for the witness’s arrest and specifically asked the warrant be delivered by a U.S. Marshal, not the sheriff’s office. What did the sheriff’s office do? Why, they sent six of their finest to a young lady’s door, arrested her, and took her to the jail, where she wasn’t booked and was eventually released. But this all to testify in a civil trial about her friend who died a traumatic death and at the hands of law enforcement. (After all that, the judge ended up not letting the witness testify; her deposition was read into the record.)
Additionally, the sheriff’s office – midtrial – attempted to deny facts already admitted, like the name of the deputy who detained Andrew Joseph, Corporal Mark Clark. The judge told them, “You can’t manufacture facts.”
Last week, a jury found the sheriff’s office liable in the teen’s death and awarded his parents $7.5 million each – a verdict that will most likely be appealed.
The lawsuit exemplified the limited ways that police can be held accountable for the violence they cause. In this case, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office delayed the case by making numerous appeals based on the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which basically makes it very hard to hold government officials in general, and law enforcement officials in particular, liable for anything. The sheriff’s office lost at the 11th Circuit, but there’s still been no nationwide reform to the court-made doctrine despite the desperate need for change. (Incidentally, in one of the appeals the 11th Circuit held that the arresting deputy was unreasonable in thinking that a running kid is committing a crime – so, a very small win?)
What do delays matter to the sheriff’s office? The deputy who was present is now retired. The sheriff then is no longer the one in office now. As time moves on, it is too easy for law enforcement to escape accountability through retirements, job changes, elections, and on and on. There is no real accountability here even though the jury found the sheriff’s office at fault.
This is the problem with the system we have now. Section 1983 claims are the main way to hold law enforcement accountable, yet the deck is so clearly stacked against plaintiffs. Even if the doctrine of qualified immunity is somehow eliminated or changed through statute, it’s fundamentally unfair to expect grieving families to file a lawsuit and wait for 8 years for a verdict – with no guarantee it won’t happen again.
Money damages are cold comfort to families who have lost a loved one. Money can’t bring people back to life. While a civil rights lawsuit should theoretically discourage police agencies from engaging in bad behavior – deterrence, if you will – there’s no reason to think it works. Counties (and their taxpayers) regularly pay millions of dollars in settlements and judgments for bad policing. It’s to the point where insurers who cover police misconduct claims are forcing municipalities and counties to pay more by raising their deductible amounts. Whatever the case, the point remains: the police themselves are never on the hook for these amounts and they know it. So they act like it.
Activists and scholars have proposed that police reform could happen by forcing departments to pay these costs of settlement and court awards out of their own budget, instead of relying on insurance or the county budget. But this is all just money, which is all too easy for departments to recoup through higher court costs or fees or federal funds. Law enforcement departments need to be held accountable now, not a decade down the line after intentionally stalling. Forcing a family to wait for an acknowledgment that their child was killed by a sheriff’s deputy is no justice at all.