There are people who just want to sue, even if they are told by a lawyer in good faith that the suit will probably not work out.
They insist, because they feel that they are in the right.
As a lawyer with free resources, why shouldn't you go ahead, phone it in, and make some thousands bucks off stubborn fools?
Many if not most 1983 clients don't have money to sue or they wouldn't even be in the kind of situation where they are suing the police. Also 1983 actions have fee shifting built in so a winning plaintiff's fees are paid by the defendant. So even nominal damages can add up to a nice paycheck, hence the prevailing practice for 1983 suits is contingency.
I doubt that means they'd actually be above milking a moron like Pat for thousands if they decided the suit was such total dogshit they had no chance of getting even a nuisance value settlement, but if they manage to phone it in well enough just to get past QI, a settlement becomes a real possibility. Then they tard wrangle Fatty into settling, take as much of it as they can get away with, and soothe his tard ego with some nonsense about a moral victory.
ETA: unrelated to post I'm responding to, but as cut and pasty as it is (you will see this case everywhere), they cite
Hope v. Pelzer as part of an attempt to end-run around the "clearly established law" requirement to collect on a 1983 action. Amusingly, they cite the case without citing its actual details. It's a Supreme Court case where they found that torturing a prisoner by restraining him in a stress position on a hitching post did indeed violate "clearly established" Eighth Amendment law prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
The lower courts had both found qualified immunity, the Circuit Court finding that while such a punishment did indeed violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, this was not "clearly established law" under qualified immunity, so while the plaintiff's rights had been violated, there had never been a specific case of using a hitching post as a torture device, so therefore the guards couldn't have known not to torture him that specific way.
This is how trial courts often treat 1983 actions, getting rid of them by any means possible and finding qualified immunity based on nonsensical arguments like this. SCOTUS essentially said it's clearly established that physical punishments like this that serve no valid penological purpose are a violation of the Eighth Amendment, even if the guards came up with some novel way of torturing someone.
You can see why they didn't elaborate on the specifics of this case, because it is so vastly different than what Pat is arguing is "clearly established law," that is, some right to be immune to reasonable police responses to 911 calls and to be treated as a Very Special Boy.
(Incidentally, the Kafkaesque result of the "clearly established law" doctrine is that, while subsequent cases can cite a finding like this to argue that while it wasn't clearly established law at the time of that case, it is now. So subsequent litigants can take advantage of it, but the litigant whose rights were actually violated, whose lawyers potentially spent millions to establish the new case law? He's shit out of luck. He gets squat.)