The goal of this petition is to REMOVE The qualified Immunity Bill from the upcoming CT Bill Reform VOTE where police officers are allowed to be Personally sued. There are VALID and CONCRETE Points below for consideration.

I would like to take this time to put forth some considerations in your upcoming review of the amended police accountability bill in CT. Specific to the inclusion of the controversial clause for limiting the qualified immunity against litigation to open officers up to individual lawsuits. As our government, I plead for you to take the time to read this, to digest it, and really think about the ramifications it will have as you go to vote this  The bill passed the House of Representatives, and is now in the StatE Senate. Law enforcement officers are always open to a discussion about change and how to better serve the community. The 99.99% of law abiding citizens and their communities will be affected negatively by this bill. Changes need to be based on facts/statistics, open discussion, and not emotion. 

In general the Bill puts police officers in a place where they may not be able to perform their job, they are being discriminated against and showing unfair treatment for a profession, and where the state now becomes inundated with even more false claims and monetary responsibility. Currently CT Does a great job for accountability and putting this in place you will lose motivation, responsibility and many officers will resign who will not risk their life earnings over a traffic ticket. The safety of the community will be jeopardized.

Now, Do you know what Police Officers actually do day in and day out? Have you ever been shot at, spit at, a knife pulled on you, attacked, hit, hair pulled, because you were trying to defend innocent people? Have you ever had your spouse in tears worried about your safety but know that you are helping people in a thankless underpaid job out of the good? Have you ever worked 24-hour straight shifts seeing dead bodies, stuck in a room with a corpse, watching children be abused, or cleaning up a decapitation on a highway? And with the only reward is helping others…

So now I ask… you have someone coming at you with a knife, or someone robbing a bank in front of you, you know have to think to yourself is it worth me getting sued to save the other guy? Is it worth me getting sued to risk my life? Is it worth me getting sued to defend myself? Is it worth saving these other people and put my family on the streets because the CT government will only see color or they don't trust me to do my job and not see that I was doing my job, and defending myself and the community?

Think about this… Being non supportive of the police with the trust for them to do their jobs to PROTECT AND SERVE is for lack of a better word, disgusting. It is demoralizing, it is saying all their hard work and training is not valid unless you say so.  Have you ever called 9-1-1? Have you ever needed a police officer or EMT? Have you ever been somewhere and so happy to know help is one call away?  So how do you NOT Support the police now? This bill will remove your ability for police fast response times, increase costs, taxes, insurance and so on. 

And finally what about the same provision for other professions? So why ONLY Police officers? Does it seem fair you are only implementing this based om a horrible situation in MN for this profession? So if you as a politician puts in place a law that ends up hurting someone, or I am the CEO of one of those companies putting out toxic sanitizers, I am the farmer who grew the tainted E.coli lettuce – than technically I should be able to SUE EACH AND EVERYONE ONE OF THEM INDIVIDUALLY TOO? Right? Think about that. You are discriminating against ONE Profession because of a few bad apples in the world. There are bad apples in every profession – politicians should know that.  

On other notes:

·       Where is also the inclusion of Hazard Pay for these men and woman who serve the front lines and risk their lives daily?

·       This also if you read carefully does not address discrimination or accountability against police officers. How about their right to be treated fairly? Where is that in the provisions? Where is the inclusion of Police Officers risking their lives against criminals and crime of every color race and religion who attack them? Who attack our communities?

The consideration for this bill should be to REMOVE This portion. We have a police team for a reason, let’s not jeopardize that. We are not a socialist economy and let’s not become one.