I don’t think this is quite right. I think the point is that they will end the practice of absolving the individual officers of liability. So if a judge says an officer made a million dollar mistake by killing someone and the department made a million dollar mistake by training their officer to kill people, then the current practice is that the city pays $2M. The new proposed practice would be that the city pays $1M and the officer is on the hook for the other $1M. Obviously that would probably mean the plaintiff gets less, but not nothing.
The city can stop paying to cover the officer, but it can’t push it’s own burden off to the officer.
Actually that makes me think of another possible consequence of this system. Under the current system if you get sued your best interest is to close ranks and argue there was no fault; minimize the damages the city pays. Under the new system, there’s an alternate strategy: instead of trying to say there was no fault, you try to argue that he fault was a co-defendant’s rather than your own. So an officer who was accused of wrongful death might bring in training materials to show that they were trained to shoot people to say, “See, it’s not my fault, it’s the police department’s fault for training me to behave this way!”
Something like that happened relatively recently in my city when an officer was being criminally charged for a death. Pitting officers against their departments might be interesting to see.
