[drbscl]

> They could just buy insurance. > the police get sued all the time anyways. It's just that the burden currently falls on the taxpayers.

I fail to see how this would change anything other than increasing taxpayer costs further in the form of insurance profit margin.

[infinite_spin]

Malpractice insurance might increase the cost of policing, but I'd wager the malpractice itself is costing tax payers even more.

[JuniperMesos]

I'm not necessarily opposed to requiring something like malpractice insurance for being a cop, but I'm genuinely not sure how that would affect the cost of policing compared to the status quo (and I'd be skeptical of any research attempt to estimate it without actually trying it). But I'm also not necessarily opposed to spending more taxpayer money on policing in return for better policing.

[vajrabum]

Make the police officer like the Doctor pay for their own insurance.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The doctor's own fees just rise. You, the patient pays for it. There's this 10-20% of revenue parasite on the entire industry, and you're paying that while complaining that prices are too high.

Now you'll do the same thing with police, as if police wages and salaries won't increase proportionally, but 20 years from now you'll wonder why that costs so much. It's bizarre how economically imperceptive everyone is.

[jazzypants]

No, the people who can't afford their insurance wouldn't be able to work as policemen. Ideally, they would also eventually lose a license of some sort-- just like the doctors who commit malpractice.

We are already paying increased taxes to deal with all the lawsuits we already incur because these people know they are above the law and they think it isn't their problem.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I explained the problem in very simple terms. But your rebuttal is "nuh uh, here are all the details that irrelevant that I think are really cool".

The people still pay for it. They pay for all the settlements, plus they pay another big slice on top for the insurance industry (since they do nothing for free). Then cops do the same thing, and lobbyists push on the insurance industry to allow them to keep breaking heads because "you can't do this job without breaking heads once in awhile". And nothing changes, except to get worse.

I'm sure the idea seems really clever to you. I mean, you invented it. Or maybe just read a blurb about it on reddit once.

In the medical world, insurance premiums have never forced an incompetent quack out of the field. They have their licenses pulled by the board (but only after some small number of tragedies). And you can't use that model on police either, because there's a big difference between a professional/academic who must study and train over a decade to even be able to operate independently, and grunts that you need in large numbers to go insert themselves into fights, troubles, and disputes. It's very likely that if there is a sophisticated, intelligent solution to our problems with police you wouldn't even like the proposal upon hearing it. I will search the rest of this thread for things you criticize, since that might be a good signal that it's worth reading.

[canyaread]

The parent poster is suggesting the cop needs to pay for the insurance. Cop salaries aren't going to rise to meet the most uninsurable person, eventually a cop will be unable to afford their insurance based on their salary.

You, in fact, argue in support of their idea -- there's lots of people who want to be cops. That keeps salaries lower, making a ballooning insurance cost impossible for a bad cop to continue to pay.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>The parent poster is suggesting the cop needs to pay for the insurance.

If you told McDonald's that they had to pay a 10¢ tax on every cheeseburger, and then you turned around and told me "Hey, it's ok, McDonald's will pay the tax, you don't have to!" it'd mean that you were intellectually defective. You can see that right? That McDonald's would instantly raise the price of the burger not even 10¢ but probably 11¢ or 12¢. No one needs to be told this, of course, but I need to lay everything out perfectly clear because not everyone is a non-idiot.

If this is true of McDonald's, how do you think it's somehow not true of cops? Do you think they will just take a $20,000/year hit in their effective income? Do you think that there is some mechanism that will prevent them from forcing the prevailing salary/wages higher until the cost is born by taxpayers? If you think there is such a mechanism, please explain how you came up with that bizarre notion. If you don't think there is a particular mechanism that will do this, please tell me that you're not just assuming there must be one.

>You, in fact, argue in support of their idea -- there's lots of people who want to be cops. That keeps salaries lower

I have never implied, let alone argued, that there are people who "want to be cops". There is generally supply sufficient to meet the demand for that particular occupation. Even that might be a little strong, these are people who earn far more than most Americans would guess, and definitely more than you'd believe given that there is no dire shortage of potential recruits.

>That keeps salaries lower, making a ballooning insurance cost impossible for a bad cop to continue to pay.

All doctors pay hefty malpractice insurance premiums. It is not "bad doctors" who pay it. All pay it, bad ones too... assuming that "bad" does not sink so low that they lose their license (the bar is truly low here, people need to die or suffer really horrible outcomes in ways that they can't make excuses or find scapegoats).

All cops would (hypothetically) pay these hefty malpractice insurance premiums. Not just "bad cops". All. But they really wouldn't pay them, because their salaries just aren't as high as, say, a pediatric surgeon or an anesthesiologist. So their pay would balloon higher through well-understood and uncontroversial principles of economics. Enough that, after several years, we would expect the difference in average salaries between the two time periods to be roughly equal to the average insurance premium.

You already posit that bad cops would be forced out because they can't afford insurance. This means that the burden of the payouts for settlements plus the burden of the value extracted by the insurance industry will be born entirely by non-bad cops. These cops won't just take a $20,000/year hit to their incomes. The candidate pool will shrink, making it more difficult to hire, and municipalities will be forced to raise their offers until they are able to hire to whatever level they had already decided upon.

Bad cops will be hired too (remember, the mechanism you are proposing is that bad cops will be forced out after being bad, because insurance will drop them). So we don't see an improvement in outcomes... bad cops do what they do until they are forced out (just as now). And we won't see an improvement in taxpayers footing the bill for their abuse, instead of paying directly, there will be another layer of indirection where the cops pay for the insurance company to do it (and the insurance company adding a fee on top for all their "work"), but then turn around and tell us to pay them more so they can afford the insurance. And you won't get to say "nope, not paying more", because you only make decisions indirectly, by voting every few years.

All human beings over the age of 11 and iq 95 should be able to reason this out from first principles.

[switchbak]

Change the incentives, you change the behaviour. Granted, this might have lots of unintended consequences, many of them bad.