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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> This is why I wonder about working the wallet angle, and if insurance can be part of the solution.

Personal insurance requires personal liability to insure.

But if you establish personal liability (which is not an easy legal issue, among other complications), that itself is essentially the whole ballgame, whether or not there is an insurance mandate and even whether or not the liability is even insurable.

> Could a concerted #TaxpayersLivesMatter campaign put enough political pressure on mayors and governors (and counteract the police unions) to change the way these legal settlements work today?

Or would the effort backfire, and taxpayer concerns align with police unions to create even more barriers to public agencies being held liable, which would deal with the taxpayer issue without dealing with the police violence issue at all.

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>Personal insurance requires personal liability to insure.

Any insight into how this gets established by profession? Seems to be an entire industry offering and encouraging nurses to take out malpractice insurance, beyond whatever their employers' coverage is.

On the effort backfiring...maybe, but I don't see why it would play out the way that you describe. The criminal justice system lets these cops skate, but apparently the civil system is picking up the slack -- as evidenced by that NYC figure cited. Somebody is going to keep paying for these, I do not think there's anything the unions can do to change that fact. So the only question is who and if you can make the case to taxpayers that it sure as hell shouldn't be them, self-interest might rule and help fix this.

Edit: some clues here as to the question of personal liability of cops. From a study by Joanna Schwartz in the NYU law review:

>This Article empirically examines an issue central to judicial and scholarly debate about civil rights damages actions: whether law enforcement officials are financially responsible for settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases. The Supreme Court has long assumed that law enforcement officers must personally satisfy settlements and judgments, and has limited individual and government liability in civil rights damages actions—through qualified immunity doctrine, municipal liability standards, and limitations on punitive damages—based in part on this assumption.

>Scholars disagree about the prevalence of indemnification: Some believe officers almost always satisfy settlements and judgments against them, and others contend indemnification is not a certainty. In this Article, I report the findings of a national study of police indemnification. Through public records requests, interviews, and other sources, I have collected information about indemnification practices in forty-four of the largest law enforcement agencies across the country, and in thirty-seven small and mid-sized agencies.

>My study reveals that police officers are virtually always indemnified: During the study period, governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement. Law enforcement officers in my study never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments — even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated, or prosecuted for their conduct.

http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawRe...

A rational taxpayer should be very upset about this.

> The criminal justice system lets these cops skate, but apparently the civil system is picking up the slack -- as evidenced by that NYC figure cited.

The civil system picks up the slack because of the current state of the law -- which is also the same reason that the departments and not the individuals are picking up the tab.

If you propose changing the law to protect the taxpayers -- rather than protecting victims -- from the costs, and the change you propose is to move the liability to the officers, you have to be prepared for the alternative proposal to be made that the correct way to protect the taxpayers is to change the law to reduce or eliminate the exposure to liability entirely, rather than moving it police officers.

No, really, why are the departments picking up the tab, even in cases where the city's law prohibits this? The NYU paper has a couple illustrations.

>Only one jurisdiction in my study—El Paso, Texas—reported a practice of never indemnifying police officers.145 Yet no El Paso officer personally satisfied settlements or judgments against him during the study period. The city of El Paso did, however, pay $279,000 to settle sixteen civil rights cases against its officers between 2006 and 2011. The deputy city attorney in El Paso explained that, because the city is responsible for paying officers’ attorneys’ fees, it sometimes settles claims against officers because it would be less expensive to pay a small settlement than to continue to pay for the defense of the case. From the deputy city attorney’s perspective, paying a settlement on behalf of an officer to avoid the cost of further litigation should not be understood as equivalent to indemnifying that officer.

>California allows indemnification of punitive damages if the “governing body of that public entity” finds that “[p]ayment . . . would be in the best interests of the public entity.” [How do they figure?]

>Some jurisdictions [Las Vegas, New York, Oklahoma City, and Prince George’s County] appear to have indemnified officers in violation of governing law.

>Jurisdictions may sidestep prohibitions against indemnification of punitive damages by vacating the punitive damages verdict as part of a post-trial settlement.

>Although my study shows that officers almost never contribute to settlements and judgments, I found anecdotal evidence that some government attorneys affirmatively use the possibility that they will deny officers indemnification to gain settlement leverage, limit punitive damages verdicts, and reduce punitive damages verdicts after trial— only to indemnify their officers once the cases are ultimately resolved.

>During litigation, the threat that a city will deny indemnification may discourage plaintiffs from proceeding with claims against individual officers.

http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawRe...

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