Maybe. If a single claim could wipe out the pension, there's a good chance the department would close ranks even harder than today. You could hope they would police themselves better, but once something does happen, Johnny Idiot's mistake has put the entire department's pension at risk. This sets up bad incentives.

> You could hope they would police themselves better

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.

Yep, currently dealing with a situation like this. The captain of the troop closed my complaint against one of the troopers without any investigation or justification. They didn't even notify me.

Yeah this seems really really bad and I’m surprised that people in tech are suggesting it since we all experience the “if you fuck up you won’t be punished so long as you own to it” policy that makes it so that issues are actually felt with.

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.

If the developer intentionally caused that outage they'd be fired and in court before you could finish saying qualified immunity.

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.

It's important that it's at the department level and not the individual level too. It turns the "looking the other way for other officers" dynamic on its head right away.

Disagree - that sets up an incentive for everyone to cover for bad apples. To get the right incentives it's important that it's at the individual level to price bad cops out of the market.

They already do this. Making them self-insure would just lead to wiping out departments that eventually lose in court. And they all eventually lose.

I'm ok with that.

If that is the end game, why not just skip the middle part and disband the police.

People can arm themselves and settle their own problems

I also favor skipping the middle part and disbanding the police.