The recent story is that the City of Minneapolis settled with the family of George Floyd for a few dollars more. This, of course, means that the taxpayers of Minneapolis have had the burden of Officer Chauvin’s misconduct laid upon their shoulders, which seems a bit unfair.
The guy who fixed my broken arm had to carry fuck-up insurance. The place that sold me a sandwich had to be insured. For that matter, I had to have insurance to drive my car to the place that sold me that sandwich. Insurance seems to be the marketplace tool to get things done well and properly.
So, given the extreme potential for ugliness surrounding law enforcement, why is it that the constabulary escape this burden. Doctors deal with life and death, but so do the police. Requiring personal liability insurance to accompany the wearing of the badge would fit the greater social standard: if the rates become too high for a given individual, the city is relieved of the burden of dismissing that officer, because they will be forced out by economics, to hopefully seek other employment that they can afford to do.
I submit that we need to stop insulating our police officers from the potential costs of doing their jobs improperly.
Would any insurance company on earth be willing to cover police department misconduct? I’m thinking that the premiums would be sky high…until the first incident causes the policy to be rescinded and the department to be totally uninsurable.
l am not speaking of insuring entire departments. I speak to insuring the individuals that work for them, with the policy being the responsibility of the individual officer (including detectives and chiefs).
No insurance company would cover 37M claims, without cray high premiums, and if cops had to get that insurance, we just have to pay them more, thus the taxpayer would pay for it anyway. And even if the cops did have insurance of course they’d sue the Deep Pockets.
So, Each LEO would pay maybe $5000 a year, the government would cover that, and then when it came time to sue, the suit would sue both, one for $1M (the limit) and the other for $36M.
Why do you think that the City should be blameless for hiring , training and not firing such a bad cop?
It could potentially require an overhaul of hiring and training.
Which is part of the point, really.
Police officers who are financially responsible for their own misconduct are going to have incentives for better conduct. They will want cheaper premiums and will be more willing to do the kinds of insurance-mandated training that would lead to lower premiums, which would increase their take-home. Have a body-cam that’s always on, to demonstrate you always stay on the right side of the line? Do your annual training about conflict de-escalation and pass all related testing? Then lawsuits are simply not the same level of worry. They’ll be much cheaper to dismiss if officers are better trained and can prove it every time they’re in court.
No guarantee for any of this but it’s at least plausible that such a system would lead to better results, rather than the current system of their being able to hide behind qualified immunity for practically any level of negligence – which let’s keep in mind is not statutory protection but a made-up thing the courts pulled out of their asses.
The city is kind of hamstrung by the power of the Police Union, which does not actually excuse them as such, but an insurance requirement might make the task somewhat easier.
In the UK and elsewhere, large organisations frequently insure themselves. Police authorities would certainly fall into this group. They do however have to demonstrate that they have sufficient funds to cover possible claims.
The theory is that the cost of the premiums would have to be greater than the cost of settlements since there is no pool of insured to share it around.
This is why National Treasures like Hampton Court, St Georges Chapel in Windsor Castle and York Minster are not insured against fire.
I have to correct some things. First , only about 7 states require doctors to carry malpractice insurance. Other entities such as hospitals or insurance companies or employers may require may require it but those conditions will not apply to all doctors. Second, it is not uncommon for an employer (such as a hospital) to carry malpractice insurance that covers all employees. And third, it is very common for governments to self-insure for all claims - so that doctors at a government-run hospital very possibly do not need to have malpractice insurance.
The Floyd suit was against the city and the officers. I don’t know specifically what accusations were made against the city, ( my guess is either negligence in training or supervision) but the settlement didn’t just involve the officers and the city might have been found liable even if the officers were personally liable. It’s not clear from the article exactly what the settlement covers - it might be only the claims against the city or it might also be the claims against the officers, and it makes a difference.
While I agree that we need to not insulate police officers from the costs of doing their job improperly , requiring police officers to buy some sort of insurance is not the only way. Governments often indemnify employees, which means that the government pays the settlement/damages for employees. Typically, they only do so when the employee was acting within the scope of their employment and within policy. My employer will indemnify me as long as I am acting within policy - and since placing someone in a chokehold violates my employer’s policy, if I do so, they will not defend me or indemnify me and I am on my own for the legal fees and any settlement or damages awarded. If Minneapolis indemnifies employees who violate the law and policy - well, maybe that’s the first thing that should be fixed.
Was your doctor required to have insurance? Because there’s no federal law that requires your doctor to have malpractice insurance and only 18 states that do. Other than worker’s compensation insurance, what insurance is the owner of your sandwich shop required to have?
I imagine you’d have to give every officer some compensation for requiring them to carry personal liability insurance. If you actually wanted to be able to hire and retain police officers of course.
It could potentially require an overhaul of hiring and training.
Then why not just get on with doing that, rather than insert an intermediary with their own agenda? All that does is complicate what is ultimately going to have to be accounted for to the general public anyway.
There is currently a rule against murder, even for police. There are rules against brutalizing people.
Does the existence of the rule indicate it will be followed?
Does the existence of the rule mean there will be legitimate consequences if the rule is not followed?
What is needed is a separate authority – something outside the current criminal justice system – that has the power to enforce consequences against a set of actors uninterested in regulating themselves. The idea in the OP is one possibility. There are others, some very strong.
Allowing members the general public to begin criminal prosecution of the police – without requiring approval of a DA whose job requires maintaining cordial relations with the department – is another possibility. The details would have to be finagled.
But what is required is some sort of enforcement authority that exists independent of current power structures. What is required is not just a new set of rules, but a new authority with the incentive to follow and enforce those rules. It doesn’t have to be civil litigation. But it needs to be something.
Any such organisation, to have legal powers, has to depend on the existing power structures that write laws. But do you not have a concept of independent non-partisan “arms-length” agencies?
I’d hardly suggest we’ve got it right over here, but would these be a starting point:
One of the things that insurance companies will do is settle cases based on thir own assessment of their financial risk.
But their assessment of their financial risk may not match up with the policy position of the police and the municipal government, who may consider that a particular action was fully consistent with their legal authority and law enforcement policies.
So the insurance company, for private financial reasons, gets to override that assessment of legal authority and policies and require a settlement.
Do you want a private financial company deciding those types of public policy issues?
Sounds like a variant on how private health insurance works in the US - let the financial interests of the private company decide what gets covered and what doesn’t.
This is why reform of any power structure is always unlikely. But sometimes, rarely, it can happen.
I don’t think there will be any notable police reform in the US, at least not at the moment. The loudest voices on the topic right now are the least serious, which is how we got calls to “abolish the police” showing up in our most important media platforms during what might have been the sharpest single-year rise of murder rates in the historical record.
Empty moral posturing is fun but won’t lead anywhere.
That would be something.
But police powers in the US are (mostly) state-level. There are 50 sets of rules. It’d be nice to have independent inquiries, a good start, but they’re going to have to be politically fought over 50 times.
But it has to be done.
A hard look at administrative incentives is apparently less fun for people than cool sound-bytes, but it is simply unavoidable. A single city with competent administration might have some success in reforming their department, but that won’t scale. Only broad institutional reform is going to work in a way that is scalable across many different jurisdictions.
This depends entirely on the nature of the “market”.
It’s not a thing that can dictated in advance. It has to be analyzed.
In the US, what police officers have is “qualified immunity” from civil lawsuits. Which means they can be negligent on staggering levels and still face no worry about a civil lawsuit, in addition to other benefits often including less worry about job security despite misdeeds, and often even no great worry about criminal prosecution despite flagrantly violating the law. This “distortion” already exists: it is the power to act with legal impunity.
Removing qualified immunity removes the already-existing distortion.
Police officers should not be engaging in acts outside the normal course of their duties that would result in civil liabilities for other people. This is true regardless of whether they decide to insure.
Given the fact that the topic has not really even been mooted TTBMK, the unions have not had an opportunity to offer an opinion on an idea that has not been suggested elsewhere.