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.
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.