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Comment by fgonzag | Hacker News Reader

If you force officers to carry malpractice insurance, the city only pays the base premium for a spotless record to the officers (collectively negotiated by the union most likely), anything extra is supposed to come out of their pockets. The insurance would probably disqualify gross negligence too, so police officers as a whole would have to be a lot more careful.

It is far from an ideal solution but it should help start getting the ball rolling towards a more professional and transparent police force.

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You are talking about a solution that might work[0]. But the issue is not that this solution has not been tried, rather no solutions are being tried because the police simply refuse to allow any potential solutions.

Most workers in the US are not protected by unions, the police are a stark exception to this. Their union contracts not only protect them as workers, they ensure protections that people absolutely would not believe, such as mandatory cooling off periods before police can be interviewed when charged with misconduct.

Even if the rules were nearly even for police and non-police the issue remains that most enforcement would have to come from their peers (other police or DAs, even other enforcement officers at state and federal agencies will see themselves on the same team). They don’t want to subject one of their own to the criminal justice system because they know how cruel and damaging it is.

[0] It actually won’t work though:

- Taxpayers with police forces that actually avoid incidents that would pay out will still have to pay the insurance tax

- Incidents of gross civil rights violations (such as intentionally arresting or killing someone when it was not warranted) are so injurious that nobody will insure the police forces that actually need it

- In the interim we may see one of the worst possible outcomes: a police understanding that violations are simply a dollars and cents issue

It’s clear police and their supporting systems don’t want to change.

Dumb question—what about introducing a competing agency or agencies?

How bad of an idea is a “for profit police force?”

This is the most free-market approach to resolving police brutality that I've seen so far. With no ideal solutions sometimes the pragmatic ones are the best.

Why is "free market" a good idea in this case?

What's wrong with simply _enforcing the law_ on police officers?

The problem is who enforces the law for the enforcers?

With actual financial incentives on the line (their insurance premiums and their jobs) we may see natural behavior change without having to build out a new enforcement apparatus that could be subject to the same abuse as the current one.

This is basically my thoughts too.

I think the only real catching point is that the courts don't care about rights nor are police willing to really investigate claims against another officer. I have some very recent/on-going experience with this. There was a trooper who knowingly held a false charge against us, leading to restrictions in our freedoms and small costs. I contacted a civil rights attorney who told me the courts don't care unless we sustained significant costs/damages. Recovering costs would be great, but we would mostly like to see protections put into place so this doesn't happen to others (and maybe get this bad trooper removed). I filed one successful complaint against him. Then he took further actions and I filed another complaint. That complaint was closed without any investigation or justification - they didn't even tell me they were closing it.

I like it. Even if unions decide to start covering costs bad officers will get expensive quick. Free market will force out bad officers.

We need to stop punting the cost of this to faceless entities like the state and allow the officers themselves to be sued and the free market will do the rest.

There's probably a pretty large constituency willing to give money to bad cops' crowdfunding campaigns. Free market works both ways- lots of people would be happy to subsidize this sort of behavior as long as they can be convinced the cops are being "canceled" by "antifa" or whatever.

Nearly all of the "bad cops" stories in the media, like nearly all stories in the media whatsoever, are toxoplasma:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

If there is no case to be made in defending a cop, nobody wants to make it. But then it isn't a story, because it's only a story if it's a controversy.

That creates the impression that many people are defending all of these bad cops in the clear cases, when they're really only defending them in the controversial cases.

> If there is no case to be made in defending a cop, nobody wants to make it.

Seems like the unions will defend an officer regardless of what they did.

Of course they will, that's their job, just like a defense lawyer will defend anyone regardless of what they did.

That's basically tautological. Controversy just means people disagree. It doesn't say anything about which cases are controversial and why.

The point is that uncontroversial (i.e. the cop was definitely in the wrong and basically everybody agrees) cases exist, but nobody talks about them because there is no controversy because there is nobody prominent to argue the other side because it's indefensible.

And a system where the cops in those cases end up with unaffordable "malpractice" premiums and have to quit would be a benefit.

Even if that's the case, better those people pay for the crimes, than everyone via taxes. And, civil suits are one thing but criminal liability should be a thing too. Can't just pay that off.

"... criminal liability should be a thing too."

It's too bad the system is corrupt and they won't hold people within the system accountable.

No, the region that employs and directs a police officer who ends up violating civil rights must absolutely be responsible for civil remedy (money), the issue is simply that police largely will never be charged for their criminal liability.

If someone is wrongly imprisoned, injured or killed the financial remedy must not stop at the individual officer’s net worth / insurance coverage maximum or be subject to potential coverage gaps.

Additionally, everyone will still pay the cost through taxes, but now an insurance company will try to turn a profit on it and those living in regions with “good cops” will be subject to the tax as well.

The base premium would be the cost of covering the typical available hire, not the cost of covering someone with several years of low cost behavior.

Compare to credit reporting where everyone starts with a decent provisional score and then the cost of borrowing goes down if you demonstrate the correct risk/reward behavior.

I think the problem with this proposal is the us vs them mentality of police departments. I would expect that cops will continue to close ranks around the bad cops, and use these insurance claims as a tool against those that don't.

Police unions have so much power that they’d force cities to cover them completely.

Or, they just do a better job of covering up for each other, choose to enforce the law less frequently, arrive to reported crimes slower, etc...

> If you force officers to carry malpractice insurance...

With all respect, this sounds like an awful idea. Doctors have malpractice insurance because their field is an outlier in many ways. In almost every other profession, people who mess up get fired, not fined, and it works pretty well.

Given that that is largely not the case with police officers, it seems like we should try what works everywhere else before we try the one-off exception we've carved out for medicine.

Downvoters, what am I missing? I'm not saying cops shouldn't be held accountable, I'm saying malpractice is a convoluted way to go about it. The default method (getting fired when you screw up) isn't really done effectively today; while it might be hard to implement, developing some equivalent to malpractice for cops, and making it stick, sounds an order of magnitude harder.

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