I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
"You've beaten enough innocent people your premiums are going from $500/month to $50,000. Your choice."
> I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
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.)
> Sure, but there’s someone managing a budget and has to decide to either hire 2 good cops or 1 expensive bad cop.
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.
>> I'd love to see what would happen if cops had to carry doctor-style malpractice insurance, instead of the taxpayers picking up the bill for abuse settlements.
> 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.
Make the officers buy it personally. Have cities pay officers 110% of the base rate, such that officers with clean records get a bonus based on it. Those whose rates go up will pay the difference or leave the force.
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.
Those who don't report incidents within x days of the first report should forfeit their 10% bonus for some pay period y to a pool to be split among those who do report incidents in the time frame, with those who report earlier receiving larger portions than those who report later.
It thus is always in everyone's individual best interest to try to identify incidents and report them as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately not everyone has the same sense of duty and the respect for life. Since "these bad apples" don't get punished anyway, and since the system is evidently useless from removing them from ranks, one alternative is to hurt them where it really hurts them, their wallet. I don't know of this will push the half-dirty in police forces to go all the way to the dark side since they will feel that society owes them and they need to make up for the reduction on their disposable income.
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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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.
But you're not paying them more to be a cop. For the good cop they get paid a little more, they buy the insurance with the money, nothing really changes.
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?
Tech was toxic long before techbros showed up. RMS' problematic behaviour drove a lot of people away from the FSF, and he's never struck me as a man motivated by the fat stacks of cash.
Well said. I too find it disturbing that upholding Constitutional Rights has become a defensive position against people who have sworn to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
I can't even get personalized life insurance, so I think there's little chance of this working. At my height and weight, I'm considered "overweight" BMI, and they charge me for it. But I'm at 12-14% bodyfat with a 30" waist. I have diet logs to prove how healthy I eat, and training logs to prove how much I workout.
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.
There needs to be some collective or individual cost to being a bad cop or the incentives aren't there to behave well. That could be financial, it could be prosecutors actually charging cops; there are many avenues that would help align incentives. Of course cop unions will fight this every step of the way.
> There needs to be some collective or individual cost to being a bad cop or the incentives aren't there to behave well
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.)
Interesting idea... The resultant increase in salary may in fact attract better police, and that could head off a large range of systemic problems itself.
Or the increased salary might constrain the headcount of police departments and keep them below the staffing level where they have the resources to bother mostly law abiding citizens over minor stuff. Either way it's a win.
What matters for changing behavior is the marginal impact of a police officer's actions on their income, not the average income of a police officer. Even if all police officers would be paid more by the current amount that a city dishes out in damages each individual officer would still face an incentive to reduce their excessive use of force to increase their own take home pay. Which is exactly the incentive we're going for here.
I think we're going to start seeing this. Colorado just enacted a new law yesterday that removes qualified immunity from officers. Officers can now be sued personally for civil rights violations. They're going to need insurance. Let the actuaries decide who's a good and who's a bad cop!
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.
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! The whole point of removing qualified immunity is they no longer need to take criminal actions to be sued. Anything they do can be subject to a civil suit which the cop will now need to defend against.
> The whole point of removing qualified immunity is they no longer need to take criminal actions to be sued
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.
As user dragonwriter points out there are a number of reasons this likely won't help very much.
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.
We have a version of that in Ontario: The SIU, the Special Investigations Unit, which investigates every incident of police action that involves injury or worse in the province. It rarely finds anything wrong and can't really punish people. It's mostly staffed by former cops (because who else does investigative work? lawyers maybe? but would they work at their rates?)
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.
- independent investigations not carried by the police (to be honest I did a double take when I read that the US do things this way... my original country also has a systemic police brutality problem but we still have a completely separate branch of the police to investigate this kind of things)
They'd behave more like doctors who order hugely expensive tests, procedures, and medicine they know patients don't need for the purpose of indemnity. They'd never admit to mistakes which could be used against them in the court of law. Frivolous lawsuits would abound, and doubly so when successful suits impugn the integrity of officers' statements in criminal court (even after the fact). The policy holders would settle to save money because court is more expensive on average. In other words, we'd expect them to stop policing in general.
> They'd behave more like doctors who order hugely expensive tests, procedures, and medicine they know patients don't need for the purpose of indemnity.
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.
That's such a weird typical US way of looking at it. Find a way of using money to solve it.
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.
You're not wrong, but the US currently has a problem getting legislators to write laws that are effective.
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).
"You've beaten enough innocent people your premiums are going from $500/month to $50,000. Your choice."