It's in the article. The pictured post by "Southern Belle Watch".

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The point of the arrest was not to win. The point was to inconvenience the whistleblower, cause her grief, and maybe as a bonus make her spend a night or two in jail. Nobody doing this remotely believed that they wouldn't have to settle. They did it to show that if you speak out against them, they'll arrest and inconvenience you. So the next person who gets a thought to speak out might decide not to bother.

Same for the guy in TN who got arrested for posting that anti-conservative meme. Nobody thought they would win, but they want to make everyone else think twice about criticizing a particular political side.

That's not a fair assumption in the current political environment.

Those who have lots of money will get fair hearings under the court, but those with less power might not. There's a reason people like Elon Musk write into agreements that they must be settled in particular Texas courts.

I think everything is consistent with the perspective Texas represents toward the united states. It's fine if Texas doesn't implement reforms and fails. (There are 49 other states and may the ones that invent or adopt the best practices survive.)

It's weird to me that courts don't at-least attempt to review if the conduct was in good faith and plausibly reasonable given the facts know at the time.

The idea that officials aren't personally liable for mistakes made in good faith isn't bad. But somehow the US tends to produce a lot of cases where good faith requires a lot of faith :)

Qualified Immunity should not apply ever. Period. No one should be above the law for any reason ever.

    Qualified immunity, as a concept, makes perfect sense. Police officers are not jurists, and they will make mistakes in enforcing the law. Making those officers personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive.

yup, i think a majority of people would agree with you, so why hasn't it happened? I think the answer is that elected representatives are more beholden to public sector unions than their constituents.

That town now has not just a bad water problem, but a large free speech lawsuit problem.

Maybe they could dock the Chief's retirement account?

The chief of police stands proudly by his decision. This will happen again.

Oh don't worry, the enforcement is extremely selective.

Never heard of Ken Paxton, I suppose?

they said to make sure you boil it slowly though, so the local frogs don’t jump out! /s

Do you have information on this? I’m curious to see.

Presumably because they are spending their money prosecuting people complaining about bad water.

Money does not grow on trees, you know!

Water is handled at the city level, not the federal level. If you have incompetent local leadership, this can happen. Incompetent local leaders can (and have!) bankrupted their cities.

We have more than enough resources, but a lot of people don't want to pay taxes to clean it or restrain corporations from polluting our water supply inn the first place. I'm guessing that plenty of people in this woman's own town were cheering Trump's slashing of the EPA's budget and deregulating clean air and water. Just this week the administration announced plans to kill off or delay limits in the amount of PFAS in the drinking water. They argue it's too expensive to limit or filter the poison but then give no-bid contracts out to their unqualified friends for tens of millions of dollars and spend a trillion bombing other countries for no reason so it's pretty clear where the priorities are and it isn't with us.

>How can X in the richest nation in the history of the planet be...

I've honestly grown absolutely sick of this type of comment as I get older. If you're not from the states, it's maybe understandable, but throughout my life most of the folks with me on the left that make these statements are completely ignorant of how their own government works and just assume "shit should be taken care of" without actually having to put any work in. It drives me crazy.

The vast majority of our electorate doesn't pay attention to politics, and then votes for feel-good measures (often very expensive), and almost universally avoid actual long-term net positive investments, like urban density and avoiding bond issuances wherever they are impractical.

As you see small towns welcoming -- even courting -- data centers while everyone in the town hates and protests them... yea, it's almost certainly because the town is broke, and the only folks who realize it are the city officials.

>How does a town ... not have the resources to get clear drinking water flowing through their taps?

Many, many, many, towns in America functionally insolvent! The amount of cost it takes to maintain our road/sewer/water/refuse/emergency/energy systems is very often more than the tax revenue that the town can bring in. This is literally the entire point of the Strong Towns organization: https://www.strongtowns.org/about

Rebuilding a water system is one of the most significant municipal finance events that a city will have to deal with, and more and more cities across the nation are requiring federal bailouts; e.g., the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi,_water_cr....

It's just so frustrating as someone who cares about municipal finances that American cities' sustainability that most people think that it's just supposed to work itself out when cities are just lighting money on fires... often to the cheers of the electorate who voted for it.

complete and utter incompetence by local elected officials. If one of the richest towns in America (average home price of >$2m) can do it - just imagine how bad it can be in "average" towns...

https://observer.com/2010/07/the-collapse-of-east-hampton-ho...

The country is the richest, but the money is not distributed equally. One factor to keep in mind is that the state would rather give the richest man in the world tax breaks rather than make sure everyone has safe drinking water.

Cuz all that wealth belongs to about 14 people and everyone else gets police harassment and poison water

It's absolutely not the slightest bit crazy if you've paid attention to how cops behave at any point in the last history of the country. 100% agree about personal responsibility. You must understand that when the cops says that oversight means they can't do their job, that means they view their job as bullying, harassing and killing citizens, so yea, we should put a stop to that. 1312

This entire debacle weirds me out. Surely the police is aware of the water issues. They drink from the same tap as the locals do. What would a sane person call arresting people that publicly call out that your water supply is obviously contaminated?

I hear you, but there has to be some balance between full immunity and no immunity at all. The one thing that comes to mind is rich and powerful people, because they have unlimited resources to sue and ruin the lives of cops, judges and politicians, which would lead to these officials avoiding to hold rich and powerful individuals accountable even when they have committed crimes.

Exactly which types of politicians, judges etc would be targeted by liability do you think? The unrighteous politicians? The judges in favour of those in power?

In my experience (I sued my town for violating my first amendment rights), the city will have insurance that will cover any damages or settlement they have to pay. Their premiums will likely go up, but the impact to taxpayers is probably minimal.

Even making them pay their own lawsuit insurance premiums would be enough to stop 90% of abuse.

No change will happen until cities stop using police revenue for discretionary spending.

Just more actions from free speech loving Republicans. Exactly like that guy in Tennessee who got $800k.

Nazi Germany wasn't chaos, just a lot of people following "cut-and-dry" protocol.

This is newsworthy because it's a clear and flagrant violation of her rights.

Source: I was threatened with a lawsuit by my own town for criticizing them online, but the ACLU helped me counter sue and win a settlement for violating my first amendment rights.

I assume you mean "Land of the fee"

Yea compared to Europe where you get arrested for memes

'Equal Justice Under Law'

World Cup Tourists about to get some “civic lessons” if they buy that too much, mmmhmmm.

"Meanwhile a pardoned Jan 6 rioter just told a City Counsel “they should be strung up” and isn’t even being charged."

A great candidate to get some money from the lawfare fund.

Who decideds what is free speech and what is a conspiracy theory?

For a long time saying tabaco creates lung cancers was basically a conspiracy theory and saying it is healthy was free speech.