Police take revenge on a shooter who surrendered

The point is to encourage less “Thin Blue Line” covering for each other, as the bad apples cost the less bad apples money.

There is currently no incentive to rat out a fellow LEO. A financial incentive doesn’t rely on the morality of the LEO, it relies on something much easier to quantify and see the results of.

You beating people up would just fall under the usual “it’s already illegal” umbrella, and as a citizen with no qualified immunity, you’d probably suffer financial losses from missed work, or a civil suit (which doesn’t work to correct individual LEO behavior.

Think malpractice insurance, but for police. If a doctor is killing patients repeatedly, his insurance goes up. If he remains employed by the hospital, their insurance goes up. Eventually, he’s forced out by the workplace, his insurance costs, and unlike LEOs, probably won’t be hired the next town over.

I don’t disagree that the threat of reducing a cop’s pension would provide incentive for them to behave legally. I just don’t think it goes far enough. It amounts to simply paying a fine, which is not sufficient punishment when you’re guilty of things like beating up people and violating their civil rights (not to mention outright murder).

I also fail to see the incentive to rat out a fellow cop: doing so just means the guilty cop (assuming they are even found guilty) gets a reduction in pension. How does that benefit the one who turns them in? Cops don’t take kindly to snitches in their ranks, so even a financial incentive to snitch (i.e. a reward) doesn’t hold much power when the other side of the coin is potential retribution.

If you’re thinking the fines would come out of the general pension pool, which would affect all cops’ bottom lines, I think the fines would be distributed among so many cops that any individual one would hardly notice the difference. It might also backfire by causing the pension funds to serve as an effective slush fund whereby financially secure cops (or just those who didn’t give a damn) would continue to cause mayhem, since they simply wouldn’t care about losing money they don’t really need anyway.

My remark about my beating people up was not meant to be taken literally. It was to illustrate that if the law was applied equally, a civilian guilty of the same crimes as a bad cop would suffer very little.

I see your points, but still maintain that multimillion dollar judgements are better paid by those who did them than the taxpayers currently footing the bills, especially since no matter you vote for isn’t changing this situation because of the outsize power held by the police unions.

I would hope that cops would want troublemakers and financial liabilities out before it goes too far. Perhaps they could anonymously inform on their fellow officers to the insurance company, since internal affairs are mostly useless, and civilian oversight groups have little teeth.

I agree, the tiered justice system is never more apparent than with LE.

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