The Board of Aldermen of a Mississippi town voted nearly unanimously to reinstate a police officer who shot an 11-year-old boy inside his own home earlier this year, the officer’s attorney told CNN.
Cops should have to carry malpractice insurance like doctors. That way citizens don’t have to pay out when they hurt someone, and they can be labeled uninsurable if they’re too much of an asshole.
That’s a very capitalistic or even libertarian view - i don’t like it but what horrifies me is that in the current US political climate it sounds more feasible than making the police, you know… Not kill people (sigh)
While I believe that police reform deeply needs to happen, the need to insure police departments will never go away. It could be due to something so unfortunate as mechanical failure leading to an injury or death.
Ether way I feel like it’s unfair for the public to always pay because the police or any other public department fails and there isn’t a direct recourse/motivation to fix it. The general public loses in every step of the current process. We had the bad employees, we’ve been harmed by their tactics, we pay the legal bills for defending them, we pay the settlement cost, most the time those employees are still there to repeat the issues, and now the budge is potentially reduced making it harder to fix things. This feels fundamentally broken.
To be fair I don’t view that as just a police issue, but any public servant job that can lead to the city/school/gov being sued for millions. I know of a small town that got sued for police issues, paid, and to make up the deficit hired more cops with the intent to make the town a speed trap, to raise money. No one won.
Cops should have to carry malpractice insurance like doctors. That way citizens don’t have to pay out when they hurt someone, and they can be labeled uninsurable if they’re too much of an asshole.
There is, unfortunately, no sane underwriter who could look at ANY part of that and go, “Yeah! That’s a great risk! That’s exactly where I want to put my cash!”
And police departments are already responsible for vetting their new hires and expelling unsuitable officers; as long as someone else, anyone else, is paying these settlements they will just continue to shirk that duty, along with all the others they’ve shucked off that involve protecting and serving working-class citizens.
It’s a great idea, but for that to work it would necessitate exactly the reform the cops have been fighting all along. These cop-murder settlements are moving into high 8-figures now. Just one bad shooting could wipe out a single insurer. The states could underwrite it, but they’re already doing that by paying out court-awarded settlements; it would be moving money from one budget to another with no gain.
So in essence, that’s State Farm looking at Florida and going, “Yeah . . . absolutely not.”
Cops should have to carry malpractice insurance like doctors. That way citizens don’t have to pay out when they hurt someone, and they can be labeled uninsurable if they’re too much of an asshole.
That’s a very capitalistic or even libertarian view - i don’t like it but what horrifies me is that in the current US political climate it sounds more feasible than making the police, you know… Not kill people (sigh)
Americans won’t solve a problem unless they can create an entire new rent-seeking industry out of it.
See also: Health care and higher education
While I believe that police reform deeply needs to happen, the need to insure police departments will never go away. It could be due to something so unfortunate as mechanical failure leading to an injury or death.
Ether way I feel like it’s unfair for the public to always pay because the police or any other public department fails and there isn’t a direct recourse/motivation to fix it. The general public loses in every step of the current process. We had the bad employees, we’ve been harmed by their tactics, we pay the legal bills for defending them, we pay the settlement cost, most the time those employees are still there to repeat the issues, and now the budge is potentially reduced making it harder to fix things. This feels fundamentally broken.
To be fair I don’t view that as just a police issue, but any public servant job that can lead to the city/school/gov being sued for millions. I know of a small town that got sued for police issues, paid, and to make up the deficit hired more cops with the intent to make the town a speed trap, to raise money. No one won.
There is, unfortunately, no sane underwriter who could look at ANY part of that and go, “Yeah! That’s a great risk! That’s exactly where I want to put my cash!”
And police departments are already responsible for vetting their new hires and expelling unsuitable officers; as long as someone else, anyone else, is paying these settlements they will just continue to shirk that duty, along with all the others they’ve shucked off that involve protecting and serving working-class citizens.
It’s a great idea, but for that to work it would necessitate exactly the reform the cops have been fighting all along. These cop-murder settlements are moving into high 8-figures now. Just one bad shooting could wipe out a single insurer. The states could underwrite it, but they’re already doing that by paying out court-awarded settlements; it would be moving money from one budget to another with no gain.
So in essence, that’s State Farm looking at Florida and going, “Yeah . . . absolutely not.”