Reading a recent Opinion Piece article on Marketwatch.com exploring the idea that "Police departments - not taxpayers - should pay the bill for misconduct settlements" raises a number of interesting ideas.
The writer notes that the $27 million settlement between the city of Minneapolis and the family of George Floyd is the largest pre-trial settlement in a civil rights wrongful death case in U.S. history. They also note that these payouts don’t actually achieve accountability, nor do they serve as a deterrent for police misconduct, because the funds almost never come from police budgets, but rather coming from insurance policies or settlement budgets, where taxpayers rather than the wrongdoers or the institutions that fail to correct practices that perpetuate misconduct, are left footing the bill.
Certainly, making those who are directly involved in the misconduct foot the bill for their actions is a well-established approach, indeed it’s the basic foundation of any system of monetary fines imposed on those who break the law – think parking tickets.
The key difference of course is that unlike parking fines, the incidents we are talking about here involve someone being grievously injured, or worse still, losing their life. And while a financial penalty on the perpetrators is often the only viable course of action after the fact, it seems self-evident that the better course of action would be to invest in in prevention rather than cure.
By undertaking programs focused on fundamentally changing the culture of policing away from the ‘warrior model’ and retraining the entire organization to adopt a ‘guardianship / consent-based’ approach to policing will have financial and operational benefits. In the short term it will be cheaper than the inevitably rising insurance premiums and in the longer-term lead to better policing outcomes and considerably fewer lethal incidents between police officers and the communities they serve.
The guardianship model has been shown to be successful in environments and in Northern Ireland it has been shown that it is indeed possible to re-imagine and transform a Police Service from a highly militarized and confrontational organization to one that bases its interactions with its community on consent and mutual respect. Police organizations could benefit greatly from the experience and expertise of police officers from Northern Ireland who have led this transformation, identified the challenges and the pitfalls and designed the solutions that work for both the community and those charged with the guardianship of that community.
In the current climate it is easy and it feels good to say “let’s punish the Police” for the actions of their officers. Indeed, individual officers who violate the norms of our communities should be punished for their actions. But punishing the Police organization will only lead to fewer resources and poorer services from those organizations.
Rather, we should be investing in better training and changing the fundamental culture of these organizations so that they better reflect the norms of the communities they are sworn to protect and serve. And as any business executive will tell you, if you are going to invest in new ideas and approaches, it best to seek out the world leaders in the field and learn from them.
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