Hacker News Reader

Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

It's an awesome victory. But until the penalty for violating rights under color of law is something real (like serious jail + restitution, barred from further public employment, etc) they will keep doing it.

View on HN

A good start would be requiring police officers to carry individual liability insurance so that municipalities aren't paying for these lawsuits. If someone can't get insurance, they can no longer be a cop.

I don’t disagree, but can we really claim to have the rule of law if there is a class of people who can flagrantly violate criminal law and court orders and suffer zero criminal consequences?

Mayors, prosecutors, merchants, and local press get co-opted by police. This leads to systemic failures that, unfortunately, make dealing with this in criminal law less workable. Sometimes you gotta do what works.

It's going to be cheaper for municipalites to have group insurance for this (or self-insure) than to have to pay the police enough that they can afford their own insurance.

Ultimately it's the civil authorities and upper brass that want these intrusions. The insurance issue is easily worked around by hiring green recruits at a very high "bonus" to be used as basically burner employees to burn through their insurance and do the illegal stuff under their identity.

It has to be a criminal thing because the top brass and civil servants need RICO like prosecution and tossed in jail along with the guy who gets the insurance ding.

It’s already a (very real) crime to do a Conspiracy to deprive someone of their civil rights, which is what you’re talking about. Occasionally someone gets sued under it, but it’s rare.

The whole point of requiring individual insurance is precisely that insurance will be too expensive for people who are demonstrably high risk in that role, and less expensive for people who are low risk.

Some of the additional expense would be due to an individual risk profile, and some of the expense would be due to lack of bargaining power. The expense due to individual risk profile is a feature. The expense due to lack of bargaining power is not.

Police have unions.

Then the department can pay for each officer's insurance.

There are thousands of cops if not a million outright. I don't think this will be a problem.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with how bargaining works, but you only get the price break if you can come in as a large unified group. Having millions of individuals doesn’t result in a price break. Eg There are millions of private individuals buying health insurance in the US, but they have no bargaining power unless they purchase as a unified block. Individual health insurance policies are notoriously expensive.

Bargaining power can also come from the availability of competition. I don't collectively bargain to buy bread, but it's still competitively priced.

Good thing that police unions are notorious for being weak and ineffective, then!

If it's uninsurable in the private market, that's a hint. Maybe they could pledge the pension fund.

Before that we need a vast overhaul of qualified immunity for state officials and expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials. It is incredibly difficult to sue state officials for violating your rights because of how qualified immunity works and Bivens is even weaker when it comes to suing federal officials.

> expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials

I don't expect Congress to do so in the foreseeable future (regardless of how the 2026 midterms go), but I hope more states will adopt "converse 1983" laws [1].

[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-state-law-remedy-co...

Yes, an awesome victory. But I believe a tech solution is gonna be superior to any legal solution. Any data considered "private and sensitive" should be accessible only by the person who owns it. Full stop.

Tech solutions are toothless without laws to prevent authorities from detaining people indefinitely until they surrender access to their data. Efforts to prevent authoritarianism need to think more from the perspective of autocrats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com