"You've beaten enough innocent people your premiums are going from $500/month to $50,000. Your choice."
Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher salary demands of officers due to the cost of insurance, and then the police unions would lobby for targeted tort reform to limit their liability and insurance costs on the basis that it would save the taxpayers money, and succeed, and the structural problems that foster abuse would manage not to be dealt with at all, and the victims even worse off. That's what.
“Let’s absolve ourselves of liability”—which is what this amounts to unless it's a cop proposing it—is just an excuse to avoid addressing the problem.
(Doctor’s malpractice insurance is not instead of their private or public employer being liable as usual under principles like respondeat superior or just plain direct liability for acts aligned with bad policy or direction, and only covers professional negligence, not criminal acts. Mere police malpractice, is—while also an issue, to be sure—not the focus of concern here, and the acts involved are the kind for which it is generally illegal to insure liability for, for good reasons. Insurance for liability incurred through murder is not a thing, and I don't think anyone who has thought it through wants it to be a thing. Except maybe prospective murderers.)
The next step might be that departments have to publish their insurance rates, like the recent hospital bill law.
They already have to do this when the agency is liable and the cops aren't because of QI; which is equivalent to the agency self-insuring and managing risk through personnel policies and decisions.
Making the major crimes involved insurable would negate any benefit from making cops individually liable by eliminating or restricting the scope of QI.
> Then taxpayers would pick up the bill for the higher salary demands of officers due to the cost of insurance, and then the police unions would lobby for targeted tort reform to limit their liability and insurance costs on the basis that it would save the taxpayers money, and succeed, and the structural problems that foster abuse would manage not to be dealt with at all, and the victims even worse off. That's what.
Maybe that could be addressed by modifying the proposal to require that departments buy malpractice insurance individually for each of their officers, and make sure the cost of that insurance shows up on the budget of whatever department or team the officer is a member of. Basically make it more expensive (on a predicable, ongoing basis) to employ bad cops than good ones, which hopefully would then factor into personnel decisions.
BTW, I hate that America has become so neoliberalized that I end up needing to consider how to build a profit motive into having cops not violate constitutional rights.
It thus is always in everyone's individual best interest to try to identify incidents and report them as quickly as possible.
The sort of person who makes a good cop isn’t motivated by money. You don’t pay him to be a cop, you pay him so he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving job satisfaction from duty, honour, etc. The same way the really good programmers are in it for the love of the craft.
The instant you bring commercial incentives into it you drive away the people you really want. That’s why the military don’t do it. And why tech goes toxic when the techbros show up.
> The sort of person who makes a good cop isn’t motivated by money. You don’t pay him to be a cop, you pay him so he can be a cop. So he can pay his bills while deriving job satisfaction from...
That's likely also true of many classes of bad cops, as well (e.g. deriving job satisfaction from dominating others/exercising power over them).
I also think your kind of missing the point. I interpreted the comment on neoliberalism to be critiquing the idea that institutional solution to every problem has to be some kind of system involving money and markets. Basically, why dick around with insurance and budgets to dis-incentivize the employment of "cops who violate constitutional rights" when you should have an institution that's capable of just removing bad cops like that simply for the violations themselves.
For the bad cop they get paid a little more and pay a lot more for the insurance, so that it eats too much of their salary and they have to quit and find another job.
The people who are in it for honor and duty aren't going to be the ones paying the higher premiums, right?
I can't even find a life-insurance insurer that will measure my waist to add context to my BMI despite the clear predictive information that contains and I get penalized for having more lean body-mass despite the fact that it is also predictive of longevity.
Sure, cops should not benefit from QI, at least as currently constructed (a more limited form may be appropriate and arguably even Constitutionally necessary from a due process perspective), and that may make merely negligent acts something they can, and may even be required as a condition of employment, to cover with insurance. That isn't instead of their public employer being liable (the absence of QI for private employees doesn't negate respondeat superior), nor does it mean that the important acts (which are intentional crimes) at issue in the present discussion of police abuse would (without major and undesirable changes in public policy) be insurable. That would actually dilute the goal of effective cost to being a (deliberately) bad cop.
I don't have a problem with direct liability for cops.
I have a problem when what is proposed is that as an excuse for absolving public-agency liability, or when it is suggested that civil liability for the intentional violent crimes at the core of the abuse discussion should be made insurable (which has the same problem as QI with only public agency liability, since then the agency effectively is self-insuring the crimes and dealing with individual costs of employees in it's hiring and firing policies.)
Liability from criminal acts is generally legally uninsurable for very strong public policy reasons, even without a conviction of the crime, and deprivation of rights under color of law is already a federal crime. (And many of the other things at issue with police abuse—murder most obviously—are more specific state and/or federal crimes, as well.)
There's a space of insurable liability without QI, but it's not actually the space of most interest in the police abuse discussion.
OK, but cops are also subject to civil suits, as well as the legal fees themselves. It'd be a start.
Civil liability for ones own criminal acts (at least wilfull ones, and often wilfull rather than merely negligent acts more generally) is often prohibited (the exact boundaries differ by jurisdiction), for very strong public policy reasons, and the vast majority of the acts of concern with police abuse are (very frequently unprosecuted, but that's not material when it comes to whether the civil liability is insurable) both willful and crimes, not mere negligence in either the general or professional malpractice sense (almost always intentional deprivation of rights under color of law and/or conspiracy against rights, and very often wilfull/intentional violent crimes on the assault to voluntary manslaughter to murder spectrum.)
Drawing analogies to medical malpractice misses the fact that medical malpractice covers mistakes that fall short of the professional standard of care, but don't cover when someone who happens to be a doctor just decides to murder someone.
No, it is so accountability no longer, in practice, relies on public prosecutors choosing to file criminal charges. The acts of major concern are criminal acts, that are routinely unprosecuted (in some cases, this might be just because of the civil vs. criminal standard of proof differences, but it's very clear that there are a lot of cases of prosecutorial favoritism to law enforcement, whether because of the working relationship that the two institutions naturally have or for other reasons.)
In fact, there have been many such forces, technology being o a big one, which have driven many such improvements over the years. It just isn’t moving fast enough to save everyone.
I'd love to see all complaints of brutality and all deaths caused by police be investigated by a different organization (maybe a state level org) and if cops are found to be brutalizing/murdering people they are fired or arrested depending on the severity of their actions.
There needs to be consequences for bad behaviour, but I think beyond that the solutions are further down the roots, in terms of the institutional culture that attracts and protects bullies, brutalizers.
- the end of qualified immunity
These 2 would already help a lot.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/insuran...
Good. It's gone far too much in the opposite direction.
> They'd never admit to mistakes which could be used against them in the court of law.
Already the case.
> when successful suits impugn the integrity of officers' statements in criminal court (even after the fact)
As it should.
> The policy holders would settle to save money because court is more expensive on average.
Already the case. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/09/04/police-lawsuit-settl...
> In other words, we'd expect them to stop policing in general.
Given current policing, that might be a positive.
Why not treat it as what it is, a criminal matter. If a non police officer would repeatedly beat up people the person would be in jail. And they would likely not get their job back. It's really as simple as treat police officer like everyone else.
Also doing this nationwide would require up to 18,000 different jurisdictions to write similar laws and change other law to homogenize the laws they already have. Police unions are extremely effective at watching legislators when they propose bills and have strong lobbying efforts (combination or money for election campaigns, money against election campaigns, public relations, and the ability to threaten strikes which scares citizens into pressuring politicians to back off their positions).
In short, there's a reason that we look to money to solve part of this problem and that's because it's far more likely that money will solve it in the US political system than good thoughtful legislation despite the pressure of 1.1 million law enforcement officers (and their families and their "blue line supporters" and their social media campaigns).