Observation 1.

The negative is under no burden to prove the converse of the

resolution, but rather simply to negate the affirmative position. To negate
means to deny the truth of.
I value governmental legitimacy.

Governments arent moral actors because a.) Morality is defined in terms of

individual agency, but a government is made up of many people with varying
preferences so there is no way to make a single obligations for many
individuals; b.) a government is an entity, and not an individual that has
intuitions or acts on single freedoms; and c.) States never act on a single
conception of morality which means that there is no way the aff framework
can be applied to a state- for example states can act on utilitarian ethics but
are also bound by rights constraints.
So, while the individuals within the group can be aware of their own
decisions, a nation cannot be self-aware and thus is not a moral agent.
Gerson 5 explains the impact,
If nations are not moral agents, then it is a sort of category mistake to suppose
that nations have moral obligations or rights or duties, or that they can bear moral
guilt or blame. Many people who would concede this claim strictly conceived
would maintain that, nevertheless, it is desirable or even inevitable that we
adopt the fiction that allows us to make moral judgments about the
citizens of the community of nations. I suppose that this fiction is not entirely insidious, so long as it is agreed that all
the claims about moral duties, obligations, rights, and so forth, made in regard to nations are fictions, too . Thus, for example, to claim that one nation has an
obligation to ameliorate the circumstances of another nation (or its members) is to implicate oneself in a fiction. The truth of this assertion is
not, so far as I can see, affected by the hypothetical truth of another assertion; namely, that each and every human being has an obligation to
ameliorate the circumstances of every other being insofar as possible. It is not affected even if we concede that nations, like other groups, can
have interests. If, for example, one acknowledges in oneself an obligation to serve the interests of the Jewish people, it does not follow from
this that ones own nation has an obligation to support Israel. Indeed, more to the point, in my view the latter claim is unintelligible.

Instead, governments have an obligation to do what is decided is best for the

country.
[George Kennan, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Morality and Foreign
Policy, Foreign Affairs. 1985. HYPERLINK
"http://www.politics.ubc.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/poli_sci/Faculty/price/Kennan.pdf"
http://www.politics.ubc.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/poli_sci/Faculty/price/Kennan.pdf]

The interests of the national society for which government has to concern
itself are basically those of its military security, the integrity of its
political life and the well-being of its people. These needs have no moral quality.
They arise from the very existence of the national state in question and from
the status of the national sovereignty it enjoys. They are the unavoidable

necessities of a national existence and therefore not subject to

qualifications as good or bad. They may be questioned from a detached philosophical point
of view. But the government of the sovereign state cannot make such
judgments. When it accept the responsibilities of governing, implicit in that acceptance is the
assumption that it is right that the state should be sovereign, that the integrity of its political life should be
assured, that its people should enjoy the blessing of military security, material prosperity and a reasonable
opportunity for, as the Declaration of Independence put it, the pursuit of happiness.
assumptions the government needs
reproach for acting on the basis of them.

For these

no moral justification, nor need It accept any moral

Governments cannot decide to require actions that promote morality but they must
make decisions based on the well being of the people.

Contention 1: The affirmative is an attempt at reform that will always fail.

Limiting qualified immunity creates the illusion of fixing a problem
but actually does not solve the root issue associated with that
problem. This moves attention off this problem and makes things
worse.
This is known as piecemeal reform, which is defined as reform accomplished
piece by piece piecemeal, reform therefore is a fragmentary way of changing
problems a society is facing
Piece meal reform is problematic as it causes the perception that (Police
brutality/racial tension/whatever) is solved.
Khousser

university of California, San Diego Jan 2011

The most obvious disadvantage of piecemeal reform is that one-by-one

amendments ostensiblycannot bring changes as profound as those that might
emerge from a convention or a revision commission. Looking closely at the
interpretation of this doctrine, though, reveals that the constraints in fact rule out
very few attempts at major reform. The single-subject rule requires that every
part of an initiative be functionally related in furtherance of a common
underlying purpose. Studies show that the application of this rule depends
as much on political circumstances as on the objective breadth of an initiative .
Qualified immunity is ineffective, juries naturally believe and trust police.

Convicting an officer is a tough challenge, experts say

September 22, 2011|By Jack Leonard, Times Staff Writer

Legal experts said jurors who are naturally sympathetic toward law
enforcement are not easily persuaded that an officer has committed the
ultimate crime, even after seeing video of the death.
Ira Salzman, who has represented police officers, said defense attorneys in Orange
County will have the added benefit of jurors who look favorably toward law

enforcement and can make a forceful argument that police had the legal right
to use force against a non-complying suspect.
Over the last two decades, prosecutors from Los Angeles, Alameda and Riverside
counties have tried a handful of similar murder cases with mixed results. Last year, a
Los Angeles jury rejected a murder charge against a Bay Area transit officer
who shot an unarmed man on a train station platform, but found him guilty of
involuntary manslaughter. Even when prosecutors are able to win a murder
conviction, the outcome may not be to their liking:In 1983, Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Deputy Robert Armstrong was charged with shooting a pregnant woman and her
fetus during an illegal raid. She survived but her fetus did not. A jury convicted him of
second-degree murder, but a judge reduced the conviction, and despite the fact that
Armstrong had disguised his identity as a police officer and set up the confrontation with a
false call to police sentenced him to a year in jail. An appeals court later reinstated the
murder verdict, but allowed the one-year sentence to stand. At other times, however, juries
have shown willingness to convict law enforcement officers of manslaughter charges while
rejecting murder. Ramos is also charged with involuntary manslaughter, as is Cpl. Jay
Cicinelli, who arrived later to help Ramos.
After limiting qualified immunity, the public will view police violence as
solved. The government wont address or fix something that the general
public views as not a problem, in order to judge what a problem is we look to
the mediaas its how we get information on the problems in our country,
Schmitz, Andy. "Mass Communication, Media, and Culture." Creative Commons, 2012
In addition to acting as a watchdog, media provide readers and viewers with news coverage of
issues and events, and also offer public forums for debate. Thus, media support
or lack thereofcan have a significant influence on public opinion and
governmental action. In 2007, for example, The Washington Post conducted a fourmonth investigation of the substandard medical treatment of wounded
soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. Because of the ensuing two-part feature,
the Secretary of the Army and the two-star general in charge of the medical
facility lost their jobs.
The government is elected based on the general public so the government has no
reason to pass a law that the public is not interested in as theyre not being pressured
by the general populace, or media

On the aff.

The affirmative will not create any meaningful change as the

State will

always protect police officers.

SCHWARTZ, JOANNA C. POLICE INDEMNIFICATION. NYU Law Review, 2014,
www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/nyulawreview-89-3-schwartz.pdf.
ny prescriptions should also be made with the understanding that modifications to one area of the law will likely

it became more difficult for a defendant to

win a motion to dismiss on qualified immunity grounds, courts might
create more stringent liability rules to reduce the number of successful
claims; Congress might impose damages caps to reduce payouts; cities
have secondary effects.256 If, for example,

might settle fewer claims in an effort to discourage weak suits or

indemnify fewer officers to reduce costs

Suing individual officers cant solve the organizational roots of police

violence

Rushin 15
Rushin, Stephen (Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Illinois College of Law), Structural Reform Litigation in
American Police Departments (2015). 99 Minnesota Law Review 1343 (2015); U of Alabama Legal Studies Research
Paper No. 2414673. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2414673 [Premier]
Federal policymakers did not come to view local police misconduct as a pervasive, national epidemic until the
Wickersham Commission Report revealed the scope of the problem in 1931.33 Since then, the most prominent
federal regulations of law enforcement have come via decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court,

Federal law also

permits private litigants to bring civil suits against state actors that violate their
constitutional rights. And federal law makes it a criminal offense for local law
enforcement to violate a persons constitutional rights. These traditional regulations
operate as cost-raising mechanisms.34 That is to say, these traditional approaches attempt to
dissuade police wrongdoing by raising the potential costs of such behavior. They cannot force police
departments to adopt proactive reforms aimed at curbing misconduct. While
these cost-raising mechanisms almost certainly have had some statistically significant
effect on police wrongdoing, they are ill equipped to combat the organizational
roots of police wrongdoing. The Rodney King beating brought national attention to
the inadequacies of this traditional regulatory approach. In the years that followed, Congress
which use the weapon of evidentiary exclusion to discourage certain police practices.

responded by quietly passing 42 U.S.C. 14141 to fill this regulatory void.

QI can only be asserted by individuals, not governments., against lawsuits. Since

someone can sue both the government and an individual police officer for
constitutional violations, the person can still obtain financial recovery from the
government even if the police officer defendant receive immunity.
Tim Miller, JD, Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, Part IX, Qualified
Immunity, https://www.fletc.gov/sites/default/files/PartIXQualifiedImmunity.pdf
DOA: 10-1-16
Qualified immunity balances two important intereststhe need to hold public
officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to
shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their
duties reasonably. Pearson v. Callahan (07-751). Specifically, it protects
government officials from lawsuits alleging that they violated plaintiffs
rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a clearly established
statutory or constitutional right. When determining whether or not a right was
clearly established, courts consider whether a hypothetical reasonable official
would have known that the defendants conduct violated the plaintiffs rights.
Courts conducting this analysis apply the law that was in force at the time of the
alleged violation, not the law in effect when the court considers the case.

Qualified immunity is not immunity from having to pay money damages,

but rather immunity from having to go through the costs of a trial at all.
Accordingly, courts must resolve qualified immunity issues as early in a case as
possible, preferably before discovery. Qualified immunity only applies to suits
against government officials as individuals, not suits against the
government for damages caused by the officials actions.