Trump is pushing a pro-police agenda, with one major exception: his criminal cases

Former President Donald J. Trump has long spoken with admiration about police officers who use aggressive force while on the job. For years, he has touted his staunch support for local law enforcement, pitching himself as a “law and order” candidate who would help police tackle violent crime.

But as Mr. Trump campaigns again for the White House, he has added a new promise to his speeches along the way: to “indemnify” police officers and protect them from the financial fallout from lawsuits accusing them of misconduct.

“We’re going to compensate them so they don’t lose their wives, their families, their pensions and their jobs,” he said this month during a speech in New York.

Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s proposal — which he first raised in an interview in October and has been raised five times this month — would have little effect and would largely enforce the status quo. Police officers in most jurisdictions are already protected from financial responsibility for potential misconduct. They also benefit from a legal doctrine that can protect officers accused of misconduct from lawsuits seeking damages.

Since entering politics, Trump has often pledged his allegiance to police as a way to attack Democrats, accusing them of being more concerned about progressive ideas than public safety. For decades, he has dismissed calls for police reform, arguing that such changes prevent officers from using aggressive crime-fighting tactics.

His promise to compensate officers also reveals a contradiction at the heart of his current campaign. Even as he expresses his steadfast support for rank-and-file officers, he rails against federal and state law enforcement officers who led the four criminal cases against him, resulting in 91 felony charges.

Two Capitol Police officers injured during the riot on January 6, 2021, have sued himcharging him with incitement to violence, and the Colorado Supreme Court ruled this week that there was sufficient evidence that he engaged in insurrection to disqualify him from holding office.

This reality has not stopped Mr. Trump from courting police, encounter with the police groups the path And posing with officers who are part of his column. He and his assistants post often photos And videos of the interactions social media.

During a speech on Sunday in Nevada, he proudly told the crowd that he had “shaken hands with so many police officers” before arriving. Later, when he promised to compensate the officers, he shouted at them: “All those police officers shaking my hand there, you better listen.”

Mr. Trump regularly criticizes Democrats for being too critical of law enforcement. He conjures up images of big cities as lawless and unsafe, laying the blame on liberal politicians whose calls for police reform, he says, have prevented officers from carrying out their duties. The police, he has argued in recent speeches, are being “destroyed by the radical left.”

“They’re afraid to do anything,” Trump said recently. “They are forced to avoid any conflict, they are forced to let many bad people do what they want to do because they risk losing their pensions, their homes and their families.”

But legal scholars who have studied the issue say police officers are already largely shielded from personal financial consequences when it comes to lawsuits filed against them.

“The idea that officers need compensation is simply absurd,” said Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “Because they already have it.”

Indemnification, in a legal context, refers to a process whereby one party agrees to cover the liability of another party, essentially agreeing to pay for any wrongdoing by the second party.

In the case of policing, many state and local governments have laws in which they agree to indemnify police officers from lawsuits. In other cases, police unions obtain indemnification agreements as part of their negotiations.

Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a 2014 study looking at lawsuits against police in 81 jurisdictions over six years. She found that 99.98 percent of the money paid to plaintiffs in these cases came from local governments or their insurance companies – and not from the agents themselves.

“Officials almost never pay anything in settlements or judgments against them,” Ms. Schwartz said in an interview.

Mr. Trump, as is often the case, has been vague about the details of his plan, making it difficult to know whether such a move would be feasible, though experts say its implementation may require legislation from Congress instead of an executive order.

On Sunday, Trump said in Nevada that the government would pay police “for their costs, for their lawyers.” Earlier this year, he said he would shield states and cities from lawsuits, a comment that suggested a broad expansion of existing legal protections for police officers accused of violating constitutional rights.

Under a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, someone who accuses police of using excessive force or discriminating against them must not only show misconduct but generally also be able to cite a similar prior case in which officers were held responsible.

Critics say qualified immunity provides blanket protections that prevent officers from being held accountable. Police groups say these protections are needed to prevent officers from becoming so concerned about personal liability that they fail to do their jobs.

Mr. Trump has long expressed his staunch support for it qualified immunity for police officers, especially during his 2020 re-election, when the country was rocked by protests following the killing of George Floyd. Several major police unions supported him during that campaign.

In 1989, long before he entered the political arena, Trump bought ads in New York claiming that civil liberties concerns had crippled policing and led to a rise in crime.

In a newspaper advertisement, he wrote about how young he was and how “two young bullies” harassed a waitress at a restaurant. “Two officers rushed in, picked up the thugs and threw them out the door, warning them never to cause trouble again,” he wrote.

In 2017, when Mr. Trump was president, he urged police not to be “too nice,” telling them not to shield the heads of people suspected of being gang members as they were put into police cars . Law enforcement authorities across the country criticized these comments.

In 2020, as protests rocked Minneapolis, Mr. Trump called protesters “thugs” on social media and wrote, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was criticized for encouraging violence against protesters. Mr. Trump later said he wanted to convey that looting generally led to violence, an interpretation that ignored the phrase’s racist history.

As protests spread across the country, he threatened to send the military into cities and states if he believed their leaders were failing to maintain order.

This year, Trump said he thought so at a meeting of Republicans in California shoplifters should be shot on the way from the shops. “If you rob a store, you can be sure that you will be shot as you leave the store,” he said, to which the crowd responded with thunderous applause.

Then, after calling for the extrajudicial shooting of petty criminals, Mr. Trump returned to a familiar message.

“You know, our law enforcement is great,” he said. “But they are not allowed to do anything.”

Kitty Bennett research contributed.