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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

It's turtles all the way down though. If police need to carry malpractice insurance then the cost will have to be built into salary which is paid by the taxpayers. It might be cheaper to just have the state pay out then pay for a bunch of individual insurance policies.

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Not necessarily, they can move to another police department if they get fired for wrongdoing at their current job. This happens frequently. An insurance company underwriting police malpractice policies wouldn't go for that, they would track the officer's claims history and deny coverage (or make it prohibitively expensive), same as if you kept wrecking cars, submitting claims, and switching car insurance companies.

When the state pays directly, there is no incentive for the individual to behave. If the state paid the officer's salary plus a standard 'allowance' equal to the cost of police malpractice insurance for an officer with no claims, then the incentive is to keep their record clean or pay higher rates out of pocket for misbehaviour.

The only difference I can see is that, like your car policy, if you have to pay a claim your rates go up. That would cause someone not to want a claim filed against them because their salary goes down (assuming the department doesn't just raise their salary to compensate). Still, I think you're right, the tax costs would just go up.

Yes, but there is now incentive to weed out the few officers that are the source of all the complaints. The ones that give good officers a bad name and are a walking lawsuit waiting to happen.

Noone (neither police nor citizens) want them on the force as they make everyone's life more difficult. But right now there is zero incentive to remove them, and only a union fighting to back them no matter what.

I'm assuming if you have a stream of 20-30+ excessive force complaints against you over the past two years, based on past behavior you are very likely to have them in the future and be the cause of a terrible situation leading to a lawsuit.

The point is to make the individuals pay for their own misdeeds. Like car insurance.

If you have a clean record, your car insurance is low. If you have multiple at-fault claims, your insurance is prohibitive.

Why can't we do the same for professional services? The individual who acts ethically ends up with lower insurance than the individual who acts unethically. And at the same salary, the ethical person will take more money home.

That's individual incentive.

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