In virtually every state there is the State Patrol or Highway Patrol, one layer. Then there is usually a County Sheriff (My state has ~93 of them), then each city or town of much size has the traditional police force, college and university forces, Brand Enforcement, tribal police, on and on. My extremely sparsely settled, rural state has 225 law enforcement agencies, so police powers are very much NOT mostly state level. It’s a morass and tangled and I’d bet almost every one of them has a lobbyist on speed. How is that going to be reformed?
What?
In my province, we’ve got:
- about a dozen municipal police services;
- the Mounties, for rural areas and small towns that don’t have their own police service, plus some federal law enforcement;
- two railway police services;
- some 1st Nation police services.
That’s it.
I knew that in the States police services tend to be very decentralised, but over 200 in a sparsely populated state? Wow. Reforming the police would be very hard in that context.
In theory, a state could probably pass legislation to centralize police powers into one or more state organizations putting them in charge of enforcing laws throughout the state. But I don’t think there’s any political will behind such an idea at this time.
States can pass laws that apply to all of those agencies. It doesn’t all have to be centralized into one. And in my state at least, and probably many if not all others, a state agency or board sets the qualifications and training standards for obtaining and maintaining qualification as a law enforcement officer. That qualification can be revoked for bad conduct, and new training can be required.
There are all kinds of things that the state can do, if the political will exists.
Interesting. The UK has long (too long?) had, in general, a trend towards centralisation of a lot of government business. Policing has been no exception. About 50-60 years ago there was a massive re-organisation of local policing into regional forces. Scotland and Northern Ireland have only one, Wales has only four, and there are noises about unifying all of England’s (though that would be a battle). On the other hand, I don’t think there was ever much resistance to having a common inspectorate of services, or to collaboration over training, technical and behavioural policies and standards, and so on.
The thing to remember here The yearly budget for the Minneapolis PD is almost $200 mil, and the budget for the the city is ~$1.5 bil. So while this settlement seems outrageously big it’s actually just a small percent of the budget. Misconduct settlements like theses are seen, in big cities, as the price of doing business. There’s no incentive to require the individuals to carry their own insurance.
I’m not saying that’s it’s not outrageous that it’s the taxpayer who ultimately shoulder the burden of officer malfeasance. It absolutely is! It’s just that “solving” this problem is only going to save the taxpayers a hand full of coins each, and expend a lot of political capital in the process.
And the solution to any failure is not to try to re-organise the financial liability, it’s to do everything possible to make sure the failure doesn’t happen again. Eyes on the ball, and all that.
Planet Money did an episode on attempts to change police departments by insurance companies.
Transcript:
I’ve always found this a fascinating topic. I think I come down on the side that @PatrickLondon expressed:
And this is because we already have a perverse incentive with crime and punishment in the US. Just like sickness and disease, this isn’t an industry where we gain by incentivizing.
The market should be prioritizing prevention in crime/punishment and sickness/health, but is it ?
And while the free-market solution of creating a cost for the worst offenders makes some inherent sense, it also allows the bean counters and UberCapitalists to come in (in larger numbers) and do the calculus that X is worth the Y that it cost.
Offenders are supported. Premiums go up. Taxes go up to pay those premiums. One group of bums gets thrown out of office. Another group follows on their heels.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Spreadsheets belie humanity. Corporate American tends to do The Right Thing when it makes financial sense, not when it’s clear that it’s the right thing to do. Absent smart and effective government regulation, Corporate America’s mission is clear, and it isn’t always in line with the interests of those it serves.
It isn’t always even decent. It isn’t always even humane. Let’s leave ‘compassionate’ to the side for the moment.
Ditto law enforcement.
The first time I heard “defund the police,” I cringed. Hard. I remember remarking to my wife – often a captive to my editorials – that “reimagine policing” was a dramatically better slogan.
And it is.
Putting the insurance companies more directly in the crime-and-punishment equation probably has unintended consequences, probably along the lines of what we see in health care (where many of us agree: they add absolutely no value (at best)).
I feel like law enforcement in much of the US – probably the major urban centers most acutely – needs to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt from whole cloth.
while the free-market solution of creating a cost for the worst offenders makes some inherent sense
It makes simpler sense to adopt the more proactive/responsible/accountable management approach of creating a direct cost by disciplinary measures/retraining and so on (rather than adding a layer of indirect cost and additional disputation).
The second part of this sentence, after the comma, is in direct contradiction with the first part.
If I had “one wish” for reform, I wouldn’t use it to open civil liability for US police officers. (Though qualified immunity in the US should be ended, as a matter of simple justice for those victimized by the police even if not as part of any broader reform effort.)
But police need better incentives to avoid misconduct. No longer shielding them from civil liability provides one such avenue. It’s not the only way, and I doubt it’s the best way. But it’s still a good way. Making criminal prosecution easier for guilty officers is also a good idea, for exactly the same underlying reason. This would be a good supplement to other structural reforms. The logic is both simple and strong: people who do wrong should be subject to civil suit from the victims of their misconduct. Law-breaking police should be subject to criminal prosecution.
This is obvious for literally every other profession.
It is no less obvious here. People should be liable for damages if through negligence or malice their behaviors lead to harm for others. Law enforcement is not some weird exception. We have a group of people who are, quite literally, above the law in a wide variety of contexts. And how do they act? Quelle surprise. They act like people who are, quite literally, above the law in a wide variety of contexts.
And people wonder why.
If the fuckers are forced to endure training created by those who actually care if they act in accordance with that training, for fear of justifiably losing a civil lawsuit as a result of flagrant misbehavior not in accordance with that training, THEN THAT’S A GOOD THING. That’s exactly what we want. It’s not the only thing we want. I can think of other potential reforms that would likely work better. But this is still a good idea and likely to help, even if it’s not top of the list.
People making the perfect the enemy of the good is yet another reason why substantive reform is so difficult.
This is an important concern. Police violence was never an issue until suddenly everyone and their sister had a camera in their pocket. Clearly the cameras were causing these problems, which were never there before. /s
We see we have a problem (though some of us continue to blame it on criminals and/or “black-on-black violence”), but fixing it looks difficult and scary. Meanwhile, the police seem to be making the problem worse, which makes it harder for us to address.
I am not convinced of my own premise – perhaps not even when I wrote it – but to me it looks somewhat accessible. We might create independent authorities to counterbalance the qualified impunity of the police, but can we? How would that work? And would it result in a tightening up of the gaps in the blue wall?
I think something needs to be done. The other possibilities (apart from a big one in reforming drug laws) seem all but unreachable. I thought that perhaps a liability insurance requirement might be a step capable of gaining some consensus traction.
At the risk of putting words in PatrickLondon’s mouth…I think the point they’re trying to make (and it’s one that I agree with) is that shifting the financial burden of bad behavior to the perpetrator, doesn’t necessarily fix the problem. Shifting the blame doesn’t fix the problem Fixing the problem, fixes the problem
Making individual cops pay for “malpractice” insurance out of their own pocket doesn’t stop the behavior. Quite the opposite, imo. If I am forced to carry insurance whether I’m a good cop or a bad one, actually might encourage me to get my money’s worth out of it.
How would you do that?
Or the opposite take no action that might result in your costs going up. That no make lady at the bank in Houston, she’s too likely to sue so let her go about her business. Guy robbing the bank over there that might be dangerous, better let the detectives try and find him later, then it’s on someone else’s insurance.
It’s a lot like engineering I know a lot of engineers who refuse to stamp things because it might fall on them if there was ever a problem. They all carry insurance but there are even speciality firms that handle stamping for people who don’t want to be liable for stuff
I believe reforming drug laws would go quite a long way towards mitigating a lot of the police violence. The militarization of the police and the prevalence of no knock warrants and dynamic entries are a byproducts of the war on drugs.
Pretty much in violation of the Constitution, etc. Even the Grand Jury has cases brought to it by “The People” and The People" is the DA.
The DA is elected by the People, not the PD in any case.
Every honest cop would be sued out of work. You dont think mobs and crooks can bring lawsuits?
And they arent. All public servants have qualified immunity.
Yes, exactly, and too many bad cops come out of Vice.
I’m not at all sure that most people actually know what qualified immunity is. I’m not going to say the doctrine is always applied properly ( because I’m sure it isn’t) and changing it is certainly possible.
But getting rid of it entirely is a different story - I started to post a long story which probably no one would be able to follow. but the problem with qualified immunity is not that an individual person is immune from liability unless the right that they are alleged to have violated is a clearly established one about which reasonable person would have known.* The problem is that courts have decided that a precedent that found it unconstitutional to sic dogs on a suspect who surrendered by lying didn’t clearly establish that it’s unconstitutional to sic dogs on someone who surrendered by sitting down. That problem can be fixed without throwing out the concept entirely. It apparently won’t be the Supreme Court that fixes it though, because although two justices seem to be eager to reexamine the issue (Sotomayor and Thomas, an unlikely pair) they apparently can’t get two more to agree to take a case. If it gets fixed, it will have to be by Congress or individual state legislatures.
- So Miranda couldn’t have sued the police who didn’t read him his rights, because before his case, there was no requirement to inform him of his rights.