A college student is walking down the street when suddenly two men approach him and ask him who he is. The student says his first name and the two men start being really pushy towards him and one of them gets behind the student, grabs him, and forcefully pulls his wallet from his pocket. The victim rightfully thinks that he's being mugged by some perps and starts running away, screaming for help.
The two men start chasing him, tackle him to the ground, and one of them starts beating him with his fists very aggressively again and again. He gets beaten so badly that he ends up hospitalized afterwards with severe injuries.
Several bystanders witness what's happening and they, too, think that someone is getting mugged and assaulted, and they phone the police and several of them start filming the events with their smartphones.
When the police arrives, it turns out that the two perpetrators were actually law enforcement officers themselves, in plain clothes.
The thing is, they never identified themselves to the student, they never told him that they were police officers, and they grabbed him without any warning and pulled his wallet from his pocket without even asking for it, and when the student started running they still didn't identify themselves (such as shouting "stop, we are police officers!") and instead they tackled him and started viciously beating him.
Even if the student had been the guy they were looking for, this would have still been highly illegal, but turns out that this was an egregious case of misidentification (the student didn't look anything like the suspect they were looking for) and the student was completely innocent of anything.
The worst thing about it? The student was charged with three felonies, even though he was completely innocent, and he had no idea that those two men were police officers (because they never identified themselves, up until after they had beaten him to a pulp). The felony charges were much later all dropped, but not before there was public outrage about the incident (without it he would have probably been sentenced).
But it doesn't stop there. After the uniformed police arrived and had a chat with these law enforcement officers in plain clothes, do you know what those uniformed police officers did? You are not going to believe this: They went to the bystanders who had filmed the event, and demanded them to delete all the footage.
And that's not actually even the worst thing.
Consider how illegal the activities of those officers in plain clothes was: They grabbed the guy without any reason, which is illegal assault, they pulled his wallet from his pocket without asking and without permission, which is also a crime and a violation of his constitutional rights, they beat him to a pulp which is highly, highly illegal, so much so that normally it would warrant jailtime, and they demanded bystanders to destroy evidence, which is also highly illegal.
The consequences for those police officers, especially the one who hit him in the face with his fists at full force like a dozen times?
Nothing, obviously.
Turns out that not only did they have "qualified immunity", but they were in fact completely immune from being sued at all. That's because it turned out that they were deputized federal agents (ie. normal police officers that were temporarily granted the rights of federal agents). This, in the United States, apparently means that not only do they have qualified immunity, but they have almost full immunity from all lawsuits, period. They cannot even be sued, no matter what they do. They could literally go on a killing spree murdering a bunch of schoolchildren, and they could not be sued for it. Compared to that, beating some random guy to a pulp is nothing. They are apparently completely free to do that with complete impunity, and even have the right to destroy all evidence, without any consequences.
The student has been fighting for justice in different courts for years now, and it's a complete uphill battle. The perpetrators have faced zero consequences.
The case is discussed eg. here.
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