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That's a lot of liability for police. They would likely buy insurance against it.
by Hnrobert42 5mo ago
That's a lot of liability for police. They would likely buy insurance against it.
- WillAdams 5mo agoAnd 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 agoOr barbers.
- scarby2 5mo agoThe 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 agoMunicipal insurers already do that
- anigbrowl 5mo agoIt seems like municipalities just past the insurance costs onto taxpayers.
- georgeecollins 5mo agoThe 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.
- WillAdams 5mo agoFor municipalities --- requiring that individual officers secure their own insurance would have far more effect on behaviour and standards.
- worik 5mo agoIs privatising ethics enforcement like this a good idea?
- HeyLaughingBoy 5mo agoAs opposed to doing nothing?
- solenoid0937 5mo agoAlternatively: Make the insurance come out of the collective pensions of the police department.
- Terr_ 5mo agoThe trick is to somehow ensure all the other officers (A) care about avoiding the cost while (B) are not motivated to collectively lie for one-another. It's not hard to imagine: Officer X does something bad through incompetence, Officer Y tells the truth about it, and then all the other officers take revenge on Y for "being a snitch" and "screwing our pensions." Once that pattern is in place, it continues even when Officer X is committing crimes, not just making mistakes.
- fellowniusmonk 5mo agoYes, it's a good idea to try it as an a/b test in a finite run of municipalities. Otherwise we are just doing the same things and expecting different results. Right now in many police abuse scenarios there is no system in place that is recognizable as a working ethical system, bringing policing into some ethical system, even if just financially self motivated is definitely an improvement over nothing.
- koiueo 5mo agoFor which they'd pay with taxpayer's money anyway
- aeturnum 5mo agoRight - but you are not considering that it's possible for a police department to be so bad as to be uninsurable. Even if the police continue to do misconduct, bad departments would get into situations where no insurer will cover them, and they are forced to make changes. It's not a perfect fix at all, but it would be a nice end-around for qualified immunity.
- hamdingers 5mo agoThen the state may do what it has done for habitually dangerous drivers and either make it illegal for private insurance to deny them or create a public option that hemorrhages taxpayer money (so back to where we are now, with extra steps). Just fire them after the first fuckup. It does not need to be this complicated.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoThere is actually a federal register for LEOs that have been terminated for cause or resigned to avoid termination. The police unions that operate in the jurisdictions that employ 70% of US police have negotiated into their CBAs that the register “cannot be used for hiring or promotional decisions”. Read into that what you will.
- pseudalopex 5mo agoYou meant NLEAD? Trump shut it down. I found no statistics of union agreements.
- s1artibartfast 5mo agoWould they, or would we just have less police?
- 5mo ago
- FireBeyond 5mo agoSo be it. I was a firefighter/paramedic. One of my state's laws about operating emergency vehicle in "emergency mode" (i.e. lights and sirens) is that the vehicle operator is permitted to disobey any and all road laws[1] provided they are doing so with due regard and with a presumption of fault in the event of any incident, i.e. you are default assumed to be at fault unless demonstrable otherwise. Such liability can transcend department or agency into personal liability against the operator. How is that hedged against, in practice? Most departments have their SOPs for emergency mode driving, for example mine said "You can exceed the speed limit by no more than 20mph, and subtract 5mph for any confounding condition, such as fog, rain, nighttime without streetlighting" and "You must come to a stop or to a sufficiently slow speed that you can affirmatively clear your passage through an intersection without incident." Stay within those guidelines and the department and their insurer agrees to indemnify your personal liability. Outside of those, you're on your own. That's tangential. I have no problem saying "police pension funds are responsible for these compensation claims". Then the fund itself can decide whether they want to police themselves better, seek insurance coverage at their expense, or (ideally!) both.
- quantified 5mo agoThey'd just refuse to arrest anyone, sort of like SF cops did when they didn't like the DA. Eventually people decide they want cops with all their problems instead. Don't underestimate the ability of police to look after themselves.