Comment by db48x

This is a misunderstanding. In most cases you cannot sue the federal and state governments, with very important exceptions, but you can definitely sue the police. Government officials, such as the police, usually only have _qualified_ immunity rather than absolute or sovereign immunity, and even then only when they were acting in good faith and are not being accused of violating someone’s constitutional rights.

The real problem right now is how the courts determine if an official was acting in good faith. Right now they are assumed to have acted in good faith unless it has already been “clearly established” that what they did was illegal. This means that the official can argue that they didn’t know that their actions were illegal because no prior case ever dealt with that exact fact pattern. This works far too often and has let a lot of very guilty police get away with their crimes. Still, some police officers _are_ held to account, so it is not actually impossible.