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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> force cities to pay for police misconduct settlements out of existing police budgets and pension funds, rather than apportioning taxpayer money to do so

Err that is taxpayer money?

Police budgets aren't the police's personal money. They don't care if you take it away it's no problem for them as long as they're still being paid.

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If a police department has a 10m/year budget, resulting in 80 police officers employed, a 2m settlement coming out of the budget means they have to lay off 16 police officers to pay it.

That would create an department incentive to force out risky officers, as they know their jobs are on the line.

Presumably the city employs 80 police officers because they's how many they think they need?

If the voters are happy with 16 less police officers then why not fire them right now?

Government agencies don’t willingly cut headcount because it looks like they’re overstaffed. What a quaint notion.

If the job is getting done and you have 500 employees and the budget for 500 employees, there is literally no incentive to even determine if it could be done with 400. Leaders don’t get a portion of money saved or anything like that. They just lose the budget that was for the extra employees and get a bunch of pissed off employees that now have to work harder for the same pay.

The police don't set their own budget, if that's how you're imagining things.

They get given money by government, representing the voters.

If the voters think they're happy with less police of course they can drop 100 employees worth of budget. The police can't stop that.

The voters don’t know when police are overstaffed, that’s the problem. Only police management understand how over-subscribed officers are and they have no incentives to fix it when there are too many officers for what’s really needed.

You live in a fantasy if you think voters make rational decisions about policing based on police-load.

Take it from their pension (and cut their budgets). Yes, that's wasted taxpayer money but I'm sure the police also view it as their own personal money.

What if that happened in your company? Another person's misconduct resulted in you getting your pension drained?

I don’t have a pension.

Pension / retirement fund, whatever.

There's a big difference. Pensions are paid by the employer and retirement accounts are paid by the employee.

Excessive benefits aside, the culture of the police is rotten and policing in the US needs to be rethought from the ground up.

> There's a big difference. Pensions are paid by the employer and retirement accounts are paid by the employee.

You make it sound like you're paid more if you get a pension!

If the company pays into a pension for or gives you the money which you then pay into a pension... guess what it's the same money just a slightly different setup.

I've got a pension I pay into myself, so it doesn't need to be your employer which does it.

Rethought from the ground up scares me a little. Yes I think some places need some fundamental changes but you don't want to try a rebuild on a system like that.

Out of curiosity, what are you afraid of?

When you attempt to build something from scratch you run the risk of creating something worse than the thing you were replacing.

The police/prison industrial complex in the US is the worst in the world. It would be impossible to make it worse especially since its foundation is firmly rooted in racism (policy and history). We only gain from starting from scratch.

> The police/prison industrial complex in the US is the worst in the world. It would be impossible to make it worse

No, it wouldn't. It's not even, right now, the worst it's been in the US. (It may be the most controversial it's ever been, but that's because standards have evolved faster than it has, not because it has gotten worse.)

It may be (but probably

We have the world's largest imprisoned population, both by total number and per capita:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

We have known issues with police violence and racism. We have insane police budgets and a militarized police force. We have a highly ineffective "war on drugs" that has destroyed wide swaths of our country.

I don't think it's controversial to say that the US has the worst police force and prison industry on earth.

> We have the world's largest imprisoned population, both by total number and per capita

Perhaps; we certainly have the largest reported imprisoned population by those standards, but we also know that there are several countries whose numbers really, really can't be trusted. But, I didn't take issue with “the US police and prison industrial complex is the worst in the world” [0], I took issue with “it would be impossible to make it worse”, since it manifestly has been worse in terms of both abuses within the system and unjust motivations for getting people into the system.

[0] which is not to say I agree, even setting aside potential issues with reporting of incarceration rates, because I'm not sure you've weighted situations where the “police” (and often the prison system, military, and other institutions) are heavily in league with organized crime, such as drug cartels, and directly involved in carrying out and covering up large scale murder on their behalf properly against incarceration rates.

I'm interested in some concrete examples of how we could make it worse. Do you mean we'll spend even more money? It seems that rebuilding the police force with demilitarization as one of the driving principles would make that outcome unlikely.

Maybe they will pay more attention to hot heads and prevent them from getting hired in the first place.

> Another person's misconduct resulted in you getting your pension drained?

This happens quite frequently in companies with public stock and/or profit based bonus contributions. If someone fucks up and the product kills someone, it impacts everyone’s retirement that’s based on company performance.

> This happens quite frequently in companies with public stock and/or profit based bonus contributions.

Wait there are companies with their pension funds entirely invested in... their own stock?

There is fairly strong evidence of broad complicity among police officers in each other's misconduct, to the point that there are dozens of stories out there of new police officers joining some of the most prominent police forces in the country, seeing bad things happening, and trying to get them to stop—only to be told, persuaded, coerced, and threatened into shutting up or quitting.

This literally can happen. If the company causes enough harm lawsuits can drain their coffers and cause the company to go under or nearly so and restructuring to stay afloat temporarily can harm pensions.

They’ll just increase their base pensions and budgets to calculate in the expected costs from the settlements. All this will do is destroy the budgets and pensions in one-off cases where the act is egregious enough for the cost to be 10x any expected costs.

That’s why I also said budgets need to be cut.

Not sure how else to make sure you saw this, but FYI there is an answer to your comment on a different HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26285917

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