>An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim's Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation.
>To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so.
If a cop violates your rights, you just have to pray the DA will prosecute criminal charges. But you still won’t get an monetary damages from the cop. You might talk the state into settling.
Cynically this probably only happened in the Chauvin case because the state would have been burned to the ground otherwise.
Maybe folks need to get in the street more...
Kind of like when a robber comes to your house, you have him arrested, and when you go to court you look up and he is the one swinging the gavel.
Of course, interesting the cop has to know there is a constitution violation. Somehow ignorance of the law is always an excuse for the cops but the citizenry must know all 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000+ laws and by god if they forgot one they are fucked.
This is the reason why I've long believed we need a check both federal and local to police that is completely divorced from regular prosecution. We need lawyers/investigators whose sole purpose is investigating and prosecuting police at pretty much all levels of the government. The federal government theoretically has that with the office of inspectors general.