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Comment by Hnrobert42 | Hacker News Reader

That's a lot of liability for police. They would likely buy insurance against it.

And insurers doing their due diligence and charging based on potential for liability would go a long way to mitigating abuses.

Best solution would be to simply require licensing and conduct standards to be a police professional similar to that required for Registered Nurses.

Is privatising ethics enforcement like this a good idea?

It's not "privatising ethics enforcement" at all - it's just letting the free market put dollar amounts on the actual cost of staffing reckless officers. The actuaries won't be reading textbooks on ethics, they're going to look at the same thing they do for drivers: history of violations, incidents, etc.

That depends on what you think of existing liability insurance coverage, such as the one commonly sold to physicians.

The way I see it, if you are not granting immunity, and also creating the possibility of financial penalties, then you're creating an opportunity for arbitrage via pooling risk. I'm not horny for the "free market", but I think there have to be cogent reasons to ban such insurance, and I can't think of any.

Municipalities would be free to put up the money to insure officers whom they wished to hire, but which insurance agencies find too expensive/problematic to insure.

Alternatively: Make the insurance come out of the collective pensions of the police department.

The trick is to somehow ensure all the other officers (A) care about avoiding the cost while (B) are not motivated to collectively lie for one-another.

It's not hard to imagine: Officer X does something bad through incompetence, Officer Y tells the truth about it, and then all the other officers take revenge on Y for "being a snitch" and "screwing our pensions."

Once that pattern is in place, it continues even when Officer X is committing crimes, not just making mistakes.

Except that’s how cops already act even without that incentive.

My point is that it's quite possible add the pension mechanism and make things even worse, if it isn't done carefully in conjunction with other policies.

Yes, it's a good idea to try it as an a/b test in a finite run of municipalities.

Otherwise we are just doing the same things and expecting different results.

Right now in many police abuse scenarios there is no system in place that is recognizable as a working ethical system, bringing policing into some ethical system, even if just financially self motivated is definitely an improvement over nothing.

versus what we have now, no or minimal ethics enforcement.

We had a police officer run down a young lady in a crosswalk while responding to a non-critical call without running lights or sirens. The officer was eventually fired but only because body camera evidence from the vice president of the officers guild surfaced where he was mocking the victim.

Ended up costing seattle taxpayers $29m.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/family-student-killed-by-sp...

Heaven and earth had to be moved in order to get the officer off the force.

... the officier is apparently suing to be let back onto the force. I guess his year long paid vacation wasn't enough severance for him.

Seems better than the status quo, where there is no enforcement at all and instead taxpayers are hosed.

The public sector has been failing at this for decades. How can privatization be worse?

As opposed to doing nothing?

less ethics and more accountability. But a public audit committee is more than welcome to join in as well.

Municipal insurers already do that

For municipalities --- requiring that individual officers secure their own insurance would have far more effect on behaviour and standards.

It seems like municipalities just past the insurance costs onto taxpayers.

The problem is that if elected officials are not comfortable confronting police unions about their conduct then any cost you pass on to the union or the officers is potentially just passed on to tax payers. Not that I disagree with any idea to hold police more accountable. You just have to address the issue from more than one direction.

Or barbers.

The reason we have licencing for barbers is that existing barbers wanted it and persued regulatory solutions to protect their market.

Existing police officers do not want this.

So be it. I was a firefighter/paramedic. One of my state's laws about operating emergency vehicle in "emergency mode" (i.e. lights and sirens) is that the vehicle operator is permitted to disobey any and all road laws[1] provided they are doing so with due regard and with a presumption of fault in the event of any incident, i.e. you are default assumed to be at fault unless demonstrable otherwise. Such liability can transcend department or agency into personal liability against the operator.

How is that hedged against, in practice? Most departments have their SOPs for emergency mode driving, for example mine said "You can exceed the speed limit by no more than 20mph, and subtract 5mph for any confounding condition, such as fog, rain, nighttime without streetlighting" and "You must come to a stop or to a sufficiently slow speed that you can affirmatively clear your passage through an intersection without incident." Stay within those guidelines and the department and their insurer agrees to indemnify your personal liability. Outside of those, you're on your own.

That's tangential. I have no problem saying "police pension funds are responsible for these compensation claims". Then the fund itself can decide whether they want to police themselves better, seek insurance coverage at their expense, or (ideally!) both.

They'd just refuse to arrest anyone, sort of like SF cops did when they didn't like the DA. Eventually people decide they want cops with all their problems instead. Don't underestimate the ability of police to look after themselves.

For which they'd pay with taxpayer's money anyway

Right - but you are not considering that it's possible for a police department to be so bad as to be uninsurable. Even if the police continue to do misconduct, bad departments would get into situations where no insurer will cover them, and they are forced to make changes. It's not a perfect fix at all, but it would be a nice end-around for qualified immunity.

Then the state may do what it has done for habitually dangerous drivers and either make it illegal for private insurance to deny them or create a public option that hemorrhages taxpayer money (so back to where we are now, with extra steps).

Just fire them after the first fuckup. It does not need to be this complicated.

There is actually a federal register for LEOs that have been terminated for cause or resigned to avoid termination.

The police unions that operate in the jurisdictions that employ 70% of US police have negotiated into their CBAs that the register “cannot be used for hiring or promotional decisions”. Read into that what you will.

You meant NLEAD? Trump shut it down. I found no statistics of union agreements.

Would they, or would we just have less police?

Just make them pay for the insurance out of the pension fund. Better yet, make individual officers personally liable for acts outside of their official duties such as civil rights violations and crimes. After the first few cops lose all of their money in court the rest of them will start actually policing themselves.

> make them pay for the insurance out of the pension fund

The pension payments will be increased. There isn’t a good solution for this other than individual liability.

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