5 ms·

The fact that taxpayers and not the police themselves have to pay the settlement is the worst part of this. Every settlement against the police should be taken

• cdrnsf 5mo ago
  Accountability for police in the United States? That'll never happen.
• kvnhn 5mo ago
  What does your username mean?
• kadushka 5mo ago
  How would this work? Where do the money for their pension fund come from? Would taking money from it result in them receiving smaller pensions?
  • bearjaws 5mo ago
    Maybe it would make officers turn in the bad apples, since they insist "one bad apple" each time these issues arise.
    • saratogacx 5mo ago
      Do they still insist that? My unstudied feeling is that the current go to is "The officer acted in line with established department guidelines. We commit to reviewing the guidelines in light of this situation" with no accountability on any side to actually do anything.
    • breezybottom 5mo ago
      How do you "turn in" a sheriff? It's an elected position
      • stonogo 5mo ago
        You take it to the public, and the public recalls the sheriff.
        • breezybottom 5mo ago
          The indictment was already public, it's national news. That's why we're talking about it. I don't see any recall election planned.
      • shimman 5mo ago
        Recall or arrest them. Once workers realize how poor leaders effect their livelihood explicitly, the problem tends to solve itself. Doubly so when we're talking about police unions here.
      • ceejayoz 5mo ago
        You report them to state police or the FBI?
        • breezybottom 5mo ago
          Report that he arrested someone? That's already public information.
          • ceejayoz 5mo ago
            Report that he committed misconduct - in this case, a clear civil rights violation. Are we playing dumb?
            • breezybottom 5mo ago
              Report it to who? The Trump Administration? The arrest is public information already.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  • opo 5mo ago
    Well many government pension funds are horribly underfunded, so likely it would just add to the underfunding till eventually the government would bail it out. It is an expensive, inefficient way to try and solve the issue - when they screw up this bad, you fire them - this is how every other organization works.
• Hnrobert42 5mo ago
  That's a lot of liability for police. They would likely buy insurance against it.
  • WillAdams 5mo ago
    And insurers doing their due diligence and charging based on potential for liability would go a long way to mitigating abuses. Best solution would be to simply require licensing and conduct standards to be a police professional similar to that required for Registered Nurses.
    • ubermonkey 5mo ago
      Or barbers.
      • scarby2 5mo ago
        The reason we have licencing for barbers is that existing barbers wanted it and persued regulatory solutions to protect their market. Existing police officers do not want this.
    • staticautomatic 5mo ago
      Municipal insurers already do that
      • anigbrowl 5mo ago
        It seems like municipalities just past the insurance costs onto taxpayers.
        • georgeecollins 5mo ago
          The problem is that if elected officials are not comfortable confronting police unions about their conduct then any cost you pass on to the union or the officers is potentially just passed on to tax payers. Not that I disagree with any idea to hold police more accountable. You just have to address the issue from more than one direction.
• nyeah 5mo ago
  What if a majority of taxpayers voted for that sheriff?
  • autoexec 5mo ago
    Recent history has shown that sometimes people will vote for incompetent criminals but, elected or not, that doesn't mean we shouldn't still hold them accountable for what they do.
  • georgeecollins 5mo ago
    Another huge problem with our times is that local media is completely hollowed out. Voter awareness was never amazing but now there is no local paper to highlight abuse or corruption. Every problem becomes a national problem with no accountabillity. Lots of people in the state I live in vote for their sheriff. I would be shocked if one in one hundred even knew who that was.
    • geekone 5mo ago
      most local tv news stations being owned by two right-wing conglomerates doesn't help either
      • joe_mamba 5mo ago
        [flagged]
    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
      > but now there is no local paper to highlight abuse or corruption. There's indie journalists on Youtube and X exposing fraud and corruption. Follow them there.
  • foobarchu 5mo ago
    Being elected by a majority doesn't negate crimes committed, as much as a certain president would love everyone to believe that. Being elected shouldn't have anything to do with being punished, whether they won by 1% or by 99%
• kstenerud 5mo ago
  > Every settlement against the police should be taken from their pension fund. So... collective punishment? https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-33 https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
  • 5upplied_demand 5mo ago
    In the current environment, taxpayers are collectively punished.
  • eli_gottlieb 5mo ago
    Yes, collective punishment of the smaller collective who can self-police (cops, no pun intended) rather than the larger collective who can't (citizens and taxpayers at large).
  • valbaca 5mo ago
    Police aren't "protected persons" > civilians who find themselves in the midst of an international armed conflict or military occupation and are in the hands of a foreign power
  • int_19h 5mo ago
    If they don't like it, we could have individual punishment but they have to surrender qualified immunity. Deal?
  • kstenerud 5mo ago
    Nice... I'm always disappointed when I see otherwise "enlightened" people being fine with civilizational regressions like this simply because it's a group they don't like. It's moves like this that chip away at your society. Penalizing a group of people for the actions of a few is the very definition of collective punishment, and is universally condemned in the civilized world for very good reason. If you can't get such a fundamental thing through your head, ask your AI agent.
• bell-cot 5mo ago
  > By aligning the incentives right, it will mean good cops will force out the bad cops quickly. While that would be nice, it seems like extremely wishful thinking. Maybe ask a wrongful termination lawyer how things would actually play out?
• whyenot 5mo ago
  I agree, and any time there is a security breach, bug or other employee-caused calamity at a tech company that results in a lawsuit or settlement, the money should come out of employee 401k accounts, stock options, etc. These people need to police themselves. By aligning incentives it will encourage the good developers and force out the bad ones.
  • magicalist 5mo ago
    Not sure if you're trying to be clever (in which case I'd encourage you to just say what you mean next time), but financially penalizing a company for bad behavior absolutely is one way to pierce the corporate veil and ensure workers aligned with corporate health (through things like stock, continued employment, etc) are also aligned with societal health.
  • JuniperMesos 5mo ago
    One benefit of a 401k account over a pension is that the individual beneficiary controls the account, and not some other entity who can be sued for something an individual employee had nothing to do with. Indeed, pretty much every personal financial advice thinker would advise an employee not to put their own company's stock in their 401k, in order to avoid a source of company-specific risk.
• JeremyNT 5mo ago
  > The fact that taxpayers and not the police themselves have to pay the settlement is the worst part of this. Oh boo hoo. The official in question here isn't some rank and file rando, it's the sheriff who the taxpayers in question duly elected. I guarantee you they'll elect him again. $91 per resident is a small price to pay for a guy who's willing to arrest their political enemies. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  • Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
    > I guarantee you they'll elect him again. $91 per resident is a small price to pay for a guy who's willing to arrest their political enemies. in some sense you might be right because instead of this 91$ being taken per resident directly from their wallets, what would happen is the de-gradation of the services because of lack of funds, so your roads,clean drinking water and everything needed for a govt would have 91$ less per resident. and then when those same quality of roads decline and other negative things happen, the same community might find scapegoats of its the problem of X,Y or Z and the sheriff is their vocal voices against the X,Y or Z. So you might be right, also y'know what's the worst part is? It's the assymetry, these sheriffs might continue to get re-elected because of the above reasons I gave and they would continue doing un-just things. And then it is upon the onus of the person (in this case the tennessee man) who was jailed unjustfully and who would have to file a lawsuit and win. Things perhaps could've turned out differently or taken more longer and imagine the man who might've been jailed for more time. Either way, I think because of all of these reasons, its a systemetic problem but the result of it is that the society has become too polarized and so weirdly incentivized that you can get thrown into jail for memes. I imagine these things might continue to happen but atleast a legal precedent might've been set now (not sure about how American law works).
    • JeremyNT 5mo ago
      > Either way, I think because of all of these reasons, its a systemetic problem but the result of it is that the society has become too polarized and so weirdly incentivized that you can get thrown into jail for memes. I imagine these things might continue to happen but atleast a legal precedent might've been set now (not sure about how American law works). It would've been pretty clear to anybody that there was no real case here, but the way these rural areas work is that they never expect any attention or pushback. They're used to their little corrupt fiefdoms slipping under the radar. These people in rural TN also live in a bubble of others with the same politics, and they surely overestimated the power of their ideology to win the day. So it's not really that any precedent was needed, because speech like this is not a crime - full stop. The scary thing however is that for every case you see like this that goes viral, gets national attention, and has a victim who is aware of his rights and wins... how many small town sheriffs are out there getting away with it? It's easy to just lock up people for similar trumped up charges and expect that nobody with resources will ever notice or care.
• janalsncm 5mo ago
  From what I could tell from the article, an officer submitted a warrant request to a judge and the judge approved it. That request was potentially incomplete because it left out the fact that the victim here didn’t actually make the meme. On the other hand I’m not sure whether omission matters since it would still be protected speech if he made it. So I would place a good amount of blame at the feet of the judge, who should be more knowledgeable about legal questions. I think cops should have a general understanding of the law but I doubt the legality of online memes comes up much. So I don’t think it is catastrophic that the police came to the judge with this issue. The problem is the judge rubber stamping something that should’ve been rejected. Second problem I see is that this took 37 days to resolve, which is also incredibly slow. So it really magnified the earlier mistakes. That said, I’m not against liability for cops in general. I just think in this particular case I blame the judge more.
  • worik 5mo ago
    > Second problem I see is that this took 37 days to resolve "Justice delayed is justice denied " is an important principle that appears to have been forgotten in the west
    • etothet 5mo ago
      Not just the west. Posted a couple weeks back here on HN: https://sundaicity.com/blogs/getting-arrested-in-japan https://sundaicity.com/blogs/getting-arrested-in-japan https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48078647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48078647
      • csa 5mo ago
        When people read these links, I encourage them to assume that the author/creator left out part of the story for convenience or due to lack of knowledge (specifically the language and customs around legal issues in Japan). Her story does not jibe with any of my experiences, direct or indirect, with law enforcement in Japan.
    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
• UltraSane 5mo ago
  US police absolutely hate accountability and fight any effor to impose it very hard.
• Someone1234 5mo ago
  We already have a system for this; it is used by doctors: - Individual Officer liability insurance. You scrap Qualified Immunity; and instead claims could be made against the specific Officer's insurance. This would be a nationwide insurance system, and their premiums would follow them as an individual from job to job/location to location. If departments want to compensate Officers for liability they CAN, but ultimately it would come out of that department's payroll/budget unlike now where lawsuit settlements don't even hit the police department's balance sheets at all.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• jongjong 5mo ago
  Exactly, what's to stop police officers and judges from giving each other retirement payouts by locking each other up?
• vkou 5mo ago
  Those taxpayers are free to elect people who will hold the police to a higher standard. The police are an organ of society (if you don't live in an authoritarian shithole), so the society that gives them the power of pit and gallows is ultimately accountable for their behaviour.
• cco 5mo ago
  Their pension is funded by tax dollars, this doesn't change the incentive structure. You'd need to have it either impact their pension payments in a way that cannot be backfilled or more directly force the police officers themselves to carry liability insurance (far better). Of course tax dollars pay their salaries as well, but if an officer became uninsurable then it weeds them out eventually.
  • kelnos 5mo ago
    Right, but taking from their pension directly reduces their payout when they retire. Not sure what you mean by "cannot be backfilled"; the budget is the budget, and the tax dollars only go where the (non-police) elected officials say.
    • cco 5mo ago
      All in implementation I suppose, but typically pensions _must_ be fulfilled as they are a legal contract with the employees of the state. If you take money out of a pension (typically illegal) or otherwise forgo payments, limit payouts etc, you must backfill those at a later date. They're also treated very seriously by most state law, they're usually senior debt that takes precedence over pretty much any other debt a city/county owes. Really hard to get out from under.
• dennis_jeeves2 5mo ago
  >By aligning the incentives right, it will mean good cops will force out the bad cops quickly. Not system will ever work as intended if entire societies are either corrupt and/or stupid. Cops are no different.
• sleepybrett 5mo ago
  Police officers should have to carry some kind of malpractice insurance. If they can't get insurance because they keep fucking up then they should find a new career.
• BizarroLand 5mo ago
  I wouldn't feel too bad about that. This is what insurance coverage is for. All cities and municipalities carry insurance to cover police brutality and overreach, so worst case their premiums go up a few tens of thousands of dollars a month for the next 20 years or so.