Monell answers who pays when a constitutional violation is not one officer’s bad day but an institution’s standard operating procedure. A municipality is not liable simply for employing someone who violated rights; it is liable when its own policy or custom caused the violation.
Why prior incidents are the whole ballgame
Custom is proved by persistence. A single failure is an incident. The same failure mode, in the same institution, recurring after notice, is a practice. That is why historical cases matter legally and not merely rhetorically.
Record systems as policy
Where the alleged deprivation flows from how an institution maintains its records — docket accuracy, audit logging, warrant data quality, disclosure practice — the policy question is about systems rather than individual intent. See record-systems liability and the 2008 echo.