Comment by acdha

Qualified immunity is a relatively modern invention by the Supreme Court. The origins were fairly reasonable in the civil rights era, saying in Pierson v. Ray that some Mississippi police officers were not liable for enforcing a state law against assembly which was later ruled to be unconstitutional, which is probably the strongest case for a positive effect.

The negatives started mounting as it was rapidly expanded from the question of whether the action was legal at the time as in the Mississippi case to whether the officer violated clearly-established precedent for the specific actions they made. There really isn’t a positive argument for that better than “the courts invented a doctrine because Congress didn’t set a clean policy”. Because it ties into some hot-button political issues now, we’re unlikely to see improvements for a while but it is interesting to contemplate the alternate timeline where the Markey/Booker/Harris resolution in 2020 actually turned into a law.