[bradleyjg]

I took an entire class on §1983 in law school, I'm not going to be able to do justice to it in a comment. But the long and short of it is that there are a series of judge made doctrines that put a giant thumb on the scale when you sue a police officer for violating your constitutional rights.

Among many other things you must show that the right in question was "clearly established". But the courts have lately been requiring a case with a nearly identical fact pattern in order to find that a violation of a clearly established right. Worse yet, they have been taking the questions out of order and deciding that a right is not clearly established without deciding that there is a constitutional right in the first place. Which in turn means that that case can't be used as precedent for someone else.