I ran across this suggestion on FB and simply shared it as something to think about, and, well, it’s made me think.
Presently, the ultimate responsibility, and the entity on which punishment falls when a cop engages in bad behavior, is the employing institution: City, County, or State. They will attempt to pass on some of the responsibility to the perpetrating cop, of course, but that is weak tea, especially when a police union is involved. Locally, the Minneapolis Police Dept (MPD) has blamed a lot of its problems on the local police union and its President, Officer Kroll.
This proposal shifts responsibility from the police department to the insurance companies, and while city management is made up of people who have many responsibilities, including the requirement that they provide policing, insurance companies labor under the requirement that they make money – and not necessarily from providing insurance to police.
That means that if they choose to dip their toes into this pool, they can do what insurance companies do best – price risk. They can do the research and develop the tools and strategies necessary to find officers who will fulfill their duties properly, and detect those who shouldn’t be officers. For those that slip past initial screenings, the increasing price for their required insurance will force out those who cannot be a good officer.
Of course, the devil will be in the details, especially legislative. Unions will push for laws shielding their officers from pretextual lawsuits, which inevitably will result in shielding some bad actors from justified lawsuits; they’ll demand control over the rates charged by the insurance companies, which cannot be permitted; and they’ll scream about the pension provision, which I happen to think is sheer genius. But there will be objections raised in the administrative realm as well, and then the problem of cops covering for cops comes up; such behavior is in itself worthy of punishment in the form of steep insurance rate rises – or refusal to coverage.
And the insurance companies, as part of risk minimization strategy, will develop a database for tracking officers, thus reducing the problem of ‘gypsy cops‘; reduction correlates with the number of employing entities.
The libertarian in me, which I’ve learned to regard with some suspicion, rejoices in using the machinery of the free markets to resolve a problem. I await the necessary and helpful critiques of Miller’s idea, and I wonder if an entire State could be persuaded to pass laws requiring all entities under their jurisdiction to use this model for employing officers.
