Where I disagree with the more recent discussion of police brutality is this idea that they should be financially responsible instead of tax payers.
Taxpayers should be responsible. These are people hired by the state for purposes defined by elected officials. We, the voters/taxpayers should bear financial responsibility for their actions...we should bear the financial responsibility for any actions done by government responsibility because they are done in our name. However, financial penalties are not justice. These cops should not be financially penalized, they should be criminally charged because they are committing crimes. If it isn't a crime, that is something that should be fixed. That should be the norm not a rarity. The criminal justice system is our method of accountability for citizens, it should especially be the system of accountability for them. If that fails, the answer isn't the financial accountability.
It isn't completely irrational to say 'you acted outside of the norms of the justice system as an officer entrusted with its authority, therefore you are not entitled to its protections'. As a strawman, if vigilantes handled violence committed by police officers do you think excessive violence by police would stop? It would be an ugly but interesting experiment.
Most likely if you hold officers financially responsible as a rule, they'll take out errors and omissions policies. Salaries may be raised to pay for premiums, but either way it's tax payer money. The insured pool would probably be police officers from a wider area, but still tax payer money. So if you ended up getting a claim paid by insurance, it's just coming from a wider pool of tax payers.
If you only allowed people to be a police officer if they were wealthy enough to pay a judgement, that would be pretty gross.
It is far from an ideal solution but it should help start getting the ball rolling towards a more professional and transparent police force.
Most workers in the US are not protected by unions, the police are a stark exception to this. Their union contracts not only protect them as workers, they ensure protections that people absolutely would not believe, such as mandatory cooling off periods before police can be interviewed when charged with misconduct.
Even if the rules were nearly even for police and non-police the issue remains that most enforcement would have to come from their peers (other police or DAs, even other enforcement officers at state and federal agencies will see themselves on the same team). They don’t want to subject one of their own to the criminal justice system because they know how cruel and damaging it is.
[0] It actually won’t work though:
- Taxpayers with police forces that actually avoid incidents that would pay out will still have to pay the insurance tax
- Incidents of gross civil rights violations (such as intentionally arresting or killing someone when it was not warranted) are so injurious that nobody will insure the police forces that actually need it
- In the interim we may see one of the worst possible outcomes: a police understanding that violations are simply a dollars and cents issue
Dumb question—what about introducing a competing agency or agencies?
How bad of an idea is a “for profit police force?”
What's wrong with simply _enforcing the law_ on police officers?
With actual financial incentives on the line (their insurance premiums and their jobs) we may see natural behavior change without having to build out a new enforcement apparatus that could be subject to the same abuse as the current one.
I think the only real catching point is that the courts don't care about rights nor are police willing to really investigate claims against another officer. I have some very recent/on-going experience with this. There was a trooper who knowingly held a false charge against us, leading to restrictions in our freedoms and small costs. I contacted a civil rights attorney who told me the courts don't care unless we sustained significant costs/damages. Recovering costs would be great, but we would mostly like to see protections put into place so this doesn't happen to others (and maybe get this bad trooper removed). I filed one successful complaint against him. Then he took further actions and I filed another complaint. That complaint was closed without any investigation or justification - they didn't even tell me they were closing it.
We need to stop punting the cost of this to faceless entities like the state and allow the officers themselves to be sued and the free market will do the rest.
If someone is wrongly imprisoned, injured or killed the financial remedy must not stop at the individual officer’s net worth / insurance coverage maximum or be subject to potential coverage gaps.
Additionally, everyone will still pay the cost through taxes, but now an insurance company will try to turn a profit on it and those living in regions with “good cops” will be subject to the tax as well.
It's too bad the system is corrupt and they won't hold people within the system accountable.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
If there is no case to be made in defending a cop, nobody wants to make it. But then it isn't a story, because it's only a story if it's a controversy.
That creates the impression that many people are defending all of these bad cops in the clear cases, when they're really only defending them in the controversial cases.
And a system where the cops in those cases end up with unaffordable "malpractice" premiums and have to quit would be a benefit.
Seems like the unions will defend an officer regardless of what they did.
Compare to credit reporting where everyone starts with a decent provisional score and then the cost of borrowing goes down if you demonstrate the correct risk/reward behavior.
With all respect, this sounds like an awful idea. Doctors have malpractice insurance because their field is an outlier in many ways. In almost every other profession, people who mess up get fired, not fined, and it works pretty well.
Given that that is largely not the case with police officers, it seems like we should try what works everywhere else before we try the one-off exception we've carved out for medicine.
Why not just deduct all lawsuits and other costs from the collective pension fund for police departments? This seems like a trivial problem to solve (I mean assuming the goal were to solve it, and not increase police power while minimizing accountability). Once the police have to start paying for their own fuckups, I think they will quickly turn on each other. And in the event they decide to double down and hide it collectively, they risk losing the pension fund for the entire police department (obviously depends on the court settlement). At least they'll have skin in the game for their corruption.
Communal punishment is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. While those clearly do not apply in the situation you propose, it may be an interesting datapoint for considering its fairness.
Absolutely, and that's a great change. Currently, 'good' cops are incentivised to cover up for their bad brethren due to institutional pressures (see: 'good' cops getting bullied out of the force). If instead the culture incentivised speaking out against bad actors because suddenly it affected the majority, maybe we'd see the necessary change.
My work bonus depends 50% on the company's performance and 50% on my own personal performance, and the company performance is measured partially by our safety figures. When other people in the company injure themselves, my bonus drops because the company safety performance drops. I'm incentivised to improve the safety culture in general and enable others to be safe, rather than just my own personal performance.
It's an entirely acceptable approach, because you're supposed to be part of a team. I don't see a difference with the pension example.
100%, not even a second thought. We need reform, not excuses. Why do cops even get a pension in the first place? It should be a reward, not an entitlement. And it should only be rewarded if the entire department does its job, not an individual officer. They serve the community, and if the community is not served they should not be set for life.
To be clear here, the bar is "don't break the law." This isn't some extraordinary standard we're expecting them to adhere to. In fact, we're only trying to hold them to the same standards they hold everybody else to.
Then convict them. You can't? Fix that. Why this convoluted scheme that punishes unrelated people? You say you want the same standards to apply to the police but on the other hand you accept that they can never be punished directly and their colleages must be fined instead. That's crazy inconsistent, those are not at all the standards that normal people are held to.
How? How do you convict cops when their co-workers cover for them?
Please take some effort to understand what the problem is, because it's painfully obvious to me you do not. If I had to guess, you're not even from the United States. I say that solely based on how completely disconnected from this problem you appear to be.
Make a lien on the pension which forces the old guard to feel uncomfortable and request department changes.
Make this occur for the slightest infractions of any individual officer.
Make the municipality have to disclose very significant policing stats when they want to issue a bond, and then quarterly. They currently have a complete disclosure exemption from the SEC.
Turn on these consequences every time a police report doesn't match the video. Or whenever one just lies whether there is video or not.
Make the partners accomplices when they don't report, and that alone being a trigger for the wide range of sanctions against the entire municipality.
There are a lot of ways to make them turn on themselves, while keeping their primarily stated concern of being able to make split second decisions and get home safely at the end of the day.
This would be much better than requiring all this fanfare for a small subset of egregious transgressions.
Replace individual officer with individual common citizen. Knowingly doing something wrong results in <insert anything> for egg Knowingly driving a car into a building won’t be slap on the wrist and the tax payer will pay for it. It probably means you’ll be in jail, bankrupt etc. why shouldn’t same standard be applied?
Could there not be something similar for other professionals that can end a person’s life while ‘on the clock’?
No one is going to sell you a liability policy to protect you from committing crimes.
When police officers commit blatant misconduct the officers involved should at least be fired and criminal charges should be applied to them if applicable. This is how it works for every other job, not sure why police should be different.
Cost the state a million dollars because you abused or killed somebody congrats you will now be poor for the rest of your life.
1/3 of 1% of the US works in law enforcement its absurd for the other 99.66% of us to vote in bad terms for everyone unless 70% of us believe those bad terms apply to someone else like a minority.
Look, I have no sympathy for police officers who intentionally do harm but this isn’t the way to weed them out.
To continue the malpractice analogy a doctor who failed to order a test that ought to have been ordered given the patients symptoms and fails to diagnose a condition leading to the patients preventable death would be a victim of malpractice.
The current and suggested practice is for the government to provide what amounts to errors and omissions coverage similar to professional liability insurance to all police officers.
What isn't normally covered by malpractice insurance is reckless, illegal, or intentional acts.
https://equotemd.com/blog/common-exclusions-for-medical-malp...
I'm saying that cops ought to be legally liable for the classes of acts that wouldn't normally be covered by professional insurance. Planting drugs, recklessly shooting someone without ensuring that they actually have a gun not a cell phone in their hand, assaulting someone because you can.
Hey how about using a flimsy pretext to search someone's anus for drugs!
All things that haven happened in recent years!
Reckless or illegal acts are almost certainly uninsurable at any reasonable price because protection for such acts would ultimately be very expensive because in a world where your union keeps you from being held accountable and the law keeps you from being sued personally people would do them.
Malpractice insurance for cops would probably be overkill for actually reasonable mistakes and amount to enriching insurers while it would be useless to solve more serious issues.
It is an interesting solution searching for a viable problem.
Maybe even pull some of their own possession BS grab some restitution on the way in.
I doubt we’d be able to achieve that without the willingness to disband the police. Police unions are extremely powerful and they would never accept this without an existential threat to all of their members’ jobs.
At that point, why not go all the way and disband the police, creating a new law enforcement agency to replace them, with an entirely different culture and mandate?
A fool's errand, we know that won't happen on the basis of "doing the right thing".
It would have to be structured so that covering up only makes it worse, it is a perfect subject for applying game theory to steer the outcomes.
I mean the poor guy who caused the AWS S3 outage doesn’t need to be personally personally responsible for the millions people lost due to it nor does their teammates via their 401ks. These are structural issues and trying to find someone to scapegoat makes it so people ignore them.
Accidents and mistakes happen, but a great deal of these incidents are not individual mistakes, they're often an escalating pattern of behaviour which has been ignored or excused until something terrible happens.
I'm ok with that.
People can arm themselves and settle their own problems
The video makes it clear - it wasn't a mistake.
The cop deliberately broke the law because he wanted to.
> police officers need to be held accountable for their actions. Not sure how to implement that
Why is the idea of simply enforcing the existing laws out of the question? The video shows two people in a uniform assaulting another. The two people in uniform should be charged with criminal assault in exactly the same way it would be the other way around.
The point is that the United States is a lawless country, where "lawmakers" and "law enforcement" commit crimes at will, in public, and laugh about it.
https://ij.org/press-release/u-s-supreme-court-rules-unanimo...
Cities should start suing on behalf of their citizens.
On a side note, do you know of any case law that shows that leaving a charge stand when you know it is false (no detention/custody) is a violation of Constitutional rights? I have a situation that this would be useful for.
They ultimately supervise and choose the people that hire the police, the people that set the policies for the police, and the people (both in and out of police departments) directly responsible for holding police accountable.
I'm pretty sure there is no jurisdiction in which you can't fire a police officer convicted of unlawful homicide. It's true prosecutors aren't likely to prosecute police officers, but that's because they are elected officials that are held accountable for being sufficiently successful in prosecuting non-cops, but not for prosecuting cops.
Second, while both Constitutional law regarding due process rights attached to public civil service employment and employment contract terms may make it difficult, time consuming, and procedurally involved to fire police officers, which also makes agencies reluctant to even initiate the process, you are significantly overstating the case even absent criminal prosecution.
And third, the only reason it is possible to have contract terms that make it so hard to fire police officers for misconduct is that the the law doesn't set out accountability standards or qualifications for continuation in such roles that would make such a contract void as contrary to public policy. Which is, even if a negative choice, a legislative policy choice by elective representatives. And the decision to enter into such contracts, given that they are allowed, is also a decision made by publicly accountable officials.
So, a whole lot of different, directly publicly accountable decision makers are necessarily involved, either actively or tacitly, in permitting bad cops to continue to do bad things. If the public cared to stop it, they could through the democratic process.
What decade(s) would you place that time frame in?
The reality is that the police in the US are here to enforce the social order, not to protect the public.[0] It has always been that way; as the sibling poster said, it’s just more visible now. I think we have the chance to improve policing now because of that visibility.
Edit: I’m adding this paragraph in response to your other comment, which says in part “Police must have satisfied the primary requirements posed by the people at some point in the past, if we are to believe that democracy works at all.” I understand what you’re saying, but we are still struggling to get equal representation up and running here. Democracy may or may not work, but lots of people were excluded from the process until very recently, and there are continuing efforts to keep it that way. So in a very narrow sense, sure, police did what they were designed to, which is to enforce the social order. The social order is messed up, therefore police are too and always have been.
[0] See this Supreme Court case from 2005; a lower court ruling from 1981 says the same thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...
I think it was always broken, but it’s only since police body cams and everyone carrying a video camera (10 years, give or take a few years) that problem has been given a voice.
Sometimes it feels like the prevailing sentiment is just “police hurts us so we need to create outrage until they remove police and/or give us a better one”, which is understandable but remembering that how police works today is in fact a result of democratic process (and that indeed it works for the taxpayer) might be useful—less “us vs. them” and more “taxpayer today vs. taxpayer of the past”.
unlike private sector unions there is no accountability, the contracts are actually written to forbid any real means to hold members or the union as a whole accountable for actions.
So unless they are reigned in nothing is ever going to change. More likely you will be told and you will buy into the idea that more money and more staffing is needed.
and nothing will change except the public will be on the hook for even larger and more outlandish suits and worse pensions
"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters."
Tribalism rules the day, even in the face of more or less objective facts.
Collectively bargaining to ensure you are being treated fairly is not holding anyone hostage. Your melodramatic language doesn't do your argument any favors. Folks like our mail carriers deserve to be treated well, to have decent pay and functional equipment. Yet legislators time and time again do what they can to cut funding and decrease worker compensation.
Tribalism rules the day, even in the face of more or less objective facts."
It's charming that you think unions try to achieve a fair outcome. Aren't they a tribe fighting for a they can get? I've seen businesses go under due to never ending demands.
"Collectively bargaining to ensure you are being treated fairly is not holding anyone hostage. Your melodramatic language doesn't do your argument any favors."
And your condescending language doesn't do your argument any favors. The ability of the workers to hold the services hostage from the people until thier demands are met, is very much true. This can be extremely inconvenient, in cases such as teacher strikes, even forcing some people to miss work to stay home with the kids.
"Yet legislators time and time again do what they can to cut funding and decrease worker compensation."
This isn't always bad. Do you really think the government should be giving everyone a pension? It would make sense to move people from defined benefits plans to defined contribution plans. This brings them in line with the vast majority of industry.
* The jobs are largely undesirable, so threatening to quit is viable
* The jobs are public facing (for the major unions like police and teachers) so they can rally the public on their behalf
* These professions have extreme leeway for "work to rule" (doing the minimum requiremed) that applies pressure on employer without violating employment agreements.
* note: When most people debate unions, they mean collective bargaining obligations, not free association "minority" unions. A minority union can still speak up for its membership and provide financial support for victims of management.
I think this is underscores the biggest issue. Mistakes are made by these power-hungry ignorant police officers, usually due to their fragile ego, and then they face little consequences. Someone sues and gets a nice settlement. Nothing changes. Taxpayers are taking the brunt instead of the police officer. The offending officer will likely get a slap on the wrist, or if it's a really bad mistake that went viral they might choose an early, comfortable retirement. In order for change to happen, police officers need to be held accountable for their actions. Not sure how to implement that but I think that would result in police officers being much more careful about their conduct.