Why isn’t insurance an option here? You mess up and you become too expensive to employ.

Professional insurance of the variety that doctors get doesn't cover reckless or malicious behavior. Insurance that covered the things that cops presently ought to be sued for would not be affordable.

What you are describing is another complex layer which would be liable to be perverted to serve establish interests because that is inevitably what happens with complex systems with powerful entrenched interests.

5 years after implementation we would be talking about why it had fixed none of our problems and how we needed to fix it which would be politically as hard as implementing it in the first place with the primary difference between now and then being paying a big bundle of money to the insurance industry. Instead of political pressure to just pay off the people the officers shot there would be political pressure to just subsidize the problem officers insurance payments and then STILL pay out for most of the egregious stuff that isn't covered. Most of the time a "market solution" makes as much sense as the people who faced with a technical problem yell "BLOCKCHAIN!"

Personal liability is still a complex system subject to the same forces but the less it is polluted with cop specific process the more likely that it will actually work because its harder to pervert the entire process of civil litigation than it is to pervert an incestuous insurance market that services the law enforcement industry.

Fair enough.

This has always seemed like the proper solution to me. Force individual officers to have malpractice-like insurance that pays for these fees (individual liability).

Any way of spreading the liability to the department or city bypasses individual accountability and will insulate bad actors.

I like the idea but you still have the challenge of transparent reporting. At least it should be easy for civilians to accurately report alleged misconduct (I think Raheem.ai is trying to figure this out.

Sure - but isn’t transparent reporting always a problem everywhere? At least it would solve some of the incentive misalignment.

With little to no repercussions financially to the department or employee and no major career punishments, what do you propose instead?

Force individual officers to carry liability insurance similar to malpractice insurance for lawyers and doctors. If the insurance is forced to pay out a couple times the officer would be uninsurable and thus unemployable.

This is suggested quite often, but 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.

But is that accompanied with officers being exposed to individual liability? And removing qualified immunity? Because that would be the bigger argument.

Limit qualified immunity and require officers to carry personal liability insurance on the job.

Increase police training requirements. They're woefully undertrained in the US (at least relative to Germany and several other Western European nations).

National LEO registration or something similar to stop the movement of bad officers from one department to another.

You are right but its not merely the degree of training but how they are trained as well. As it stands many are trained that every interaction with the populace might get you murdered and you ought to be ready to murder them first.

4. Independently investigate & prosecute

6. Body cams/Film the police

8. End for profit policing

10. Fair police union contracts

https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision

Award cash prizes to reporters and whistleblowers funded in the same way.