Hacker News Reader

Comment by aljg | Hacker News Reader

Good point, I retract my blanket statement of "no legal liability." I should have said that they are not criminally liable.

Your link [1] shows how rarely police officers are found criminally liable for murder even in the most egregious of circumstances (only the most egregious ones are prosecuted at all and even most of those result in acquittals).

On the other hand you are right that link [0] shows that it is much more common that the police are found to have civil liability. Not personally, of course, the payments will come out of liability insurance (and, therefore, taxpayer coffers).

View on HN

I agree. There needs to be more accountability for police.

> Not personally, of course, the payments will come out of liability insurance (and, therefore, taxpayer coffers).

I think this might actually be eminently desirable that the taxpayer is on the hook. We shoulder a lot of responsibility for our police (not the actions of any given officer, but the system that either fails to weed out 'bad apple' officers or fails to adequately train them or whatever other systemic failure is responsible) and it's right that we shoulder the cost for our lack of will to enact police reform or take it seriously. Of course, I don't think the liability--criminal or civil--is adequate in magnitude, and I would like to see more of both.

Your argument for the taxpayer being on the hook is that it gives us an incentive to do police reform?

Just put the officers on the hook instead, reform done.

Doctors are on the hook for medical malpractice, works quite well and we still have doctors.

How do you suppose you increase accountability for police officers (or any other police reform) without public support? And how does increasing accountability give police officers the special skills that they increasingly need, for example, to for interacting with mentally unwell members of the community? "Figure out how to be a mental health professional or face jail time"? To use your "doctors" analogy, we also have a system that adequately trains doctors and filters out the unfit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com