President Donald Trump’s new executive order promising free private legal protection for law enforcement officers is likely to have little tangible impact on courtroom battles over alleged abuse, local civil rights attorneys say, even as the sweeping directive signals a larger federal focus on protecting police.
As part of a presidential action entitled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” President Trump on Monday, April 28 directed federal law enforcement agencies to provide legal resources and protection to officers who “unjustly incur expenses and liabilities” for actions they take while carrying out their law enforcement duties.
That assistance includes “private-sector pro bono assistance” for officers. While it is not explicitly stated in the order, that work would likely come from several of the country’s largest private law firms who in recent months have reached deals with the White House to provide unspecified pro bono – free – work on the administration’s behalf.
“When local leaders demonize law enforcement and impose legal and political handcuffs that make aggressively enforcing the law impossible, crime thrives and innocent citizens and small business owners suffer,” the executive order reads.
Local attorneys involved in civil and criminal cases against police officers say the specific promises of legal protection for law enforcement won’t change anything. Officers facing civil or criminal allegations generally already receive top-flight legal assistance and the court doctrine of qualified immunity already provides significant legal protection for police, they note. And criminal cases against police are relatively rare.
“They (the police) are never criminally prosecuted, they never pay a penny out of their pocket (for attorneys),” said Dale Galipo, a Los Angeles-based attorney who has brought lawsuits against law enforcement across Southern California. “They have so many protections already.”
But even if the details in the order make little difference, the larger message in the executive order could potentially impact which incidents involving officers are criminally prosecuted, attorneys say.
“I think it should have a positive effect in preventing politically motivated prosecutions of law enforcement,” said John Barnett, a Orange County-based defense attorney who has represented many officers facing criminal allegations. “Too often, the prosecutions of police officers would not be brought except for their title.”
For civil cases against law enforcement officers, the defense bill is usually paid by the city or county that employs the officer, unless it can be argued that the alleged conduct occurred completely outside their normal duties. For those civil cases — and for attorneys in criminal cases against officers — the defense is usually paid by police union-related legal defense funds.
Attorneys who have represented officers and those who have brought lawsuits against them agree that the law related to police use of force and alleged civil rights violations is highly specialized.
Attorney Jerry Steering, who has been involved with many civil rights cases involving police over his multi-decade career, noted that there are a handful of specialized law firms around the Los Angeles metropolitan area that deal with police-related cases. Attorneys with large, nationwide firms that have no familiarity with such cases would provide little real help to officers, Steering added.
“I’d love to have these big firms defend them, because they don’t know what they are doing,” Steering said.
“A municipal entity isn’t going to allow anyone from a law firm that doesn’t do cop cases defend any case that has any merit to it,” he added. “The logical outcome of such a stupid policy is the only cases they (the large pro-bono firms) would defend are sure losers.”
If the administration wants to back police officers, Galipo argued, they would be better served focusing on other areas.
“I do agree with supporting the police, but supporting the police does not mean accepting unlawful conduct,” Galipo said. “It means, to me, better training. It means better screening of who should be a police officer.”
But Barnett argued the executive order is an important show of support for law enforcement. He argued that some law enforcement officers have been unfairly targeted for prosecution for political purposes following public outcry regarding videos that captured a portion of violent confrontations.
“It sends a negative message to all law enforcement — ‘Don’t do your job for fear you will be prosecuted, don’t get out of your police car, don’t get your weapon out, don’t involve yourself in violent conduct, because your freedom is going to be at risk,’” Barnett said of such prosecutions.
The focus on the order’s “unleashing America’s law enforcement,” as the title states, has led to concerns that the administration could be backing away from investigating allegations of systemic law enforcement problems in local communities.
Scott Sanders, a recently retired public defender who unearthed the Orange County informant scandal involving the misuse of jailhouse snitches and the withholding of evidence from defense attorneys, said the U.S. Department of Justice played a key role in investigating that scandal.
After the DOJ in 2017 announced an investigation into the snitch scandal, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department — which along with local prosecutors had denied the systemic misuse of informants — began releasing previously withheld documents about their use of snitches, Sanders said. The defense attorney speculated that local law enforcement officials had been worried that if they didn’t begin releasing that documentation they would get in trouble if federal investigators discovered it later in the course of their investigation.
“Suddenly, in our hands, was all this documentation we had never seen before in which in their (the sheriff’s department’s) own words described the program they had been denying,” Sander said.
The U.S. Department of Justice, following an exhaustive years-long investigation into the snitch scandal, determined that Orange County prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies had violated the rights of criminal defendants by systematically planting jailhouse informants to garner incriminating evidence.
Should federal law enforcement agencies back away from investigating civil rights violations involving local law enforcement, attorneys say the burden of uncovering such abuse would likely fall on local defense attorneys or the California Attorney General’s Office.
“The impact of having a DOJ (Department of Justice) that will hold law enforcement accountable for such conduct is such a valuable tool,” Sanders said. “To have that literally pulled out completely in the moment should create fear for all citizens, and non-citizens, for what could happen over the next several years.”
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