Free Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham Page A

and a wax. The real bad guys know who’s boss.

SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY
     
    While on duty, cops have another advantage you don’t know about. They are generally immune from lawsuits. “Hey!” you remonstrate. “What about Rodney King, the guy the cops beat up in L.A.? Didn’t he sue the police and win millions?” That’s right, he did—in L.A., but that’s the Left Coast, where tort lawyers are kings.
    State and municipal employees generally have sovereign immunity from lawsuits. This means that you can sue the police department, or the city, but not the individual police officer as long as he or she is determined to have been operating within the scope of employment—which is legalese for saying that, as long as cops don’t get too far out of line, you can’t sue them personally. If you win in a lawsuit against the department or against the city, a cop may get disciplined, fired, or even indicted, but he’s probably not going to be writing any checks to you. Most states have strict limits on what you can win in punitive “pain and suffering” damages when you sue the government. If Rodney King had sued in Florida, he would have won lost wages (i.e., zero) and a maximum of $100,000 in damages, which is about what tort attorneys spend on espresso and Danish during a big case.
    Sovereign immunity is an amazing power. In law enforcement this makes sense. How could cops work if they had to think “Am I going to get sued?” every time they tackled some whacked-out perp with a gun? Cops don’t worry about getting sued—ever. This is astonishing in a society where everyone else is paralyzed by lawsuit fears. Civilians, which in practice means people with insurance, money, and property, can get sued for spilling hot coffee or dropping a banana peel. Fart in an elevator and you can get sued for olfactory pain and suffering. So next time you get stopped by the cops, don’t yell, “I’m gonna sue you!” After they quit laughing, they’re likely to charge you with stupidity in the first degree.

THE GLORY
     
    Being a police officer is exciting, and not just from the thrill of the hunt. Cops see life and death in the raw. Babies are born in the back of squad cars all the time. When someone gets shot, cops are the first responders and may have to close off an artery and save a life that would otherwise have been lost. They see life at its extremes. During domestic disturbance calls, police intervene between men and women devoured by love and hate, who may be crying, “I love you” even as they pull the trigger or plunge a knife into their beloved. As women wail over dead children and mates, cops are often by their side.
    There’s much death. Cops hold people and look into their eyes as they bleed out and get cold. They hear the screams of people dying in agony in burning vehicles. They hold epileptics as they shiver in grand mal seizures and their brains fry with electrical discharges. Civilians only infrequently experience life this way. They often know only the gray version of events in the newspapers or the flickering imitation on TV. Cops have a front-row seat, comped by the taxpayers, to life at its most intense.
    Media are no substitute for the real thing. Crime reportage is a pale shadow of what it once was. In the 1930s and ’40s, police photographers like Weegee photographed murders for the front page. Readers saw gangsters’ bodies riddled with bullets in the barber chair or on the restaurant floor. Nowadays, tragedy is masked from view. Crime-scene tape prohibits entry. No photographers and note takers allowed—except cops.
    They also routinely see something most people aren’t sure even exists—evil. Most cops have looked into the empty eyes of stone killers. They arrest people with no socialization who react with the savage instincts of animals. Such people can exist safely only in prisons, asylums, and graves.
    During my FBI tenure, I was a specialist in serial killers and sex offenders. I