Ben Cohen is the co-founder and former CEO of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. He is the founder of a variety of advocacy organizations and the author of several books, including: Ben & Jerry’s Double Dip Capitalism: Lead with Your Values and Make Money Too; Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun; and Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book. Ben and his partner Jerry Greenfield are currently helping to lead The Campaign to End Qualified Immunity.

Walking While Black

In the summer of 2016, David Collie worked full-time building produce displays for supermarkets in Fort Worth, Texas. He was saving up to return to college that fall. On the night of July 27, David went to visit some friends who lived nearby. He wanted to check in and say hello to their kids. They called him “Uncle David.”

Meanwhile, two off-duty police officers heard a radio description of two suspects in a nearby robbery. The dispatcher described the suspects: Black males in their teens or early twenties, one 6’1”, the other 6’4.” The suspects, one apparently armed with a small pistol, stole two pairs of sneakers after arranging a deal on Facebook.

The cops saw David—5’6” and 33 years old (at least seven inches shorter and 10 years older) but Black—walking into his friends’ apartment complex. They shouted at him from their unmarked car as he continued to walk toward his friends’ apartment. But David didn’t know what they wanted. Did they want to see his hands? Did they want to know where he was going? “I was trying to comply,” David recalled. “I did hear him say ‘take your hand out of your pocket,’” David told a reporter a few months later. “So in my mind, I’m, like, trying to be like, ‘look, I’m showing my hand.’”

David took his hand out of his pocket, raised his right arm, and pointed away from the cops, toward the nearest building, where he was headed. That’s when one cop, standing 34 feet away, opened fire, and shot David in the back, severing his spine.

Approximately five seconds passed between the beginning of the encounter and when the officer fired his weapon.

David fell to the pavement and cried out, “You didn’t have to shoot me!”

In the hospital, he was handcuffed to his bed. Paralyzed from the waist down and suffering from a collapsed lung, David spent the next two months in the hospital fighting false charges that he assaulted the officer. They were “painting a dirty picture,” David told a reporter a few months after the shooting. “It’s not the truth.”

The charges were untrue. The police officers falsified police reports to try to protect themselves.

David’s lawyer called the charges “revolting and repugnant.” It was the police who were breaking the law by compounding their attacks on David. “It’s a crime to falsify police reports, to say that someone lunged at you, or pointed a weapon at you. It’s a crime to shoot someone in the back from thirty-four feet away.”

Meanwhile, the police closed ranks around their officers. The officer who shot David was put on paid leave while police conducted an internal investigation that their spokesperson said lasted just “a few days.”

After stalling for a Freedom of Information Act request, the district attorney’s office shared dashcam footage of the shooting with David’s attorney. The video clearly shows that David was never anywhere near the officers, much less assaulting them. The cop’s body cam, which might have yielded a clearer picture of the incident, had conveniently cut out before he exited his cruiser and did not resume capturing video until after the shooting.

Despite the damages, the months in the hospital, and enduring vindictive charges and police stonewalling, David didn’t give up. He sued the police and the officers in federal court.

The police benefited from taxpayer-funded lawyers who fought hard for qualified immunity. The lawyers argued that the officers had acted reasonably because they feared for their safety. They emphasized that one of the robbery suspects was armed and pointed to the dashcam footage, which shows David raising his arm to the side while walking away from the officers.

The court sided with the police, granting them qualified immunity. They concluded that there “is no doubt that innocent citizens have a clearly established right not to be shot by police officers,” but that David could not sue because “reasonable officers could differ on the lawfulness of” the officer’s decision to shoot.

Going on little more than the officers’ statements about what they felt, the judges denied David justice and ruled that the cops decision to shoot him was “objectively reasonable.”

Now 37, David lives in an assisted-living facility, sharing a bathroom with another resident. He struggles to get by on Social Security and Medicaid.

“Paralyzed over some tennis shoes?” David laments. “Come on, man. You’re playing with a human life here.”

Had he prevailed in court, David would have been able to afford to renovate his mother’s house to enable wheelchair access. He holds out hope that he will one day be able to live with his family, but he is aware of what he has lost: his mobility, his job, his dream of being a cinematographer.

• “Stop putting police officers above the law: End qualified immunity in New York State” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen writes for the Daily News (6/1/2022)
• “Everybody deserves equal justice under the law” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen featured on NBC5 (2/8/2022)
• ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on the Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC (6/22/2021)
• ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on Leonard Lopate at Large (6/22/2021)
• “Qualified immunity serves as a giant rubber stamp on even the most egregious transgressions” — ABOVE THE LAW featured in the Progressive (6/11/2021)
• “Ending qualified immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on CNN (6/11/2021)
• “Cops get off scot-free” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed by Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC (6/11/2021)
• “The Campaign to End Qualified Immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on Amped Up with Ryan Knight (6/4/2021)
• “Ben & Jerry’s co-founders ask Congress to end qualified immunity for police officers” — ABOVE THE LAW featured on FOX Business (5/25/2021)
• ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on Law and Disorder (5/21/2021)
• “Police reform and the fight to end qualified immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on MSNBC (5/21/2021)
• “Qualified Immunity breaks down trust between communities and the police” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on Yahoo! Finance (5/11/2021)
• “Calling for an end to qualified immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on Pitchfork Economics (5/11/2021)
• “Ending Police Immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on the Mehdi Hasan Show (5/7/2021)
• “Qualified immunity prevents holding cops accountable” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed for the Hill (5/7/2021)
• “Qualified immunity is essentially a get out of jail free card for bad cops” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed for the Santa Cruz Sentinel (4/29/2021)
• “Qualified immunity is an insult to Americans whose rights have been violated by public officials.” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on the CATO Daily Podcast (4/29/2021)
• “We must end ‘qualified immunity’ for police. It might save the next George Floyd” — ABOVE THE LAW excerpt published in the Guardian (4/20/2021)
• “Let’s get ‘Qualified Immunity’ thrown out.” — ABOVE THE LAW contributor Killer Mike interviewed on CNN (4/20/2021)
• “When it comes right down to it, Cohen demonstrates, Qualified Immunity (QI) is not only evil as a police protection against ‘frivolous lawsuits’ but absurdly illogical” — ABOVE THE LAW reviewed in CounterPunch (4/20/2021)
• “The murder trial of Derek Chauvin has put a spotlight on a number of police reform efforts, including the push to end qualified immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on CBS News (4/9/2021)
• “How ‘Qualified Immunity’ damages the relationship between law enforcement and their communities” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on MSNBC (4/9/2021)
• “It is now time to shift from protest to policy” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed for CNN (4/9/2021)
• “The campaign to end qualified immunity in civil rights cases involving police” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen interviewed on C-SPAN (4/2/2021)
• “End qualified immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen writes for the Hill (4/2/2021)
• “Better policing begins with accountability and an end to qualified immunity” — ABOVE THE LAW author Ben Cohen writes for USA Today (4/2/2021)