Centenial Celebration

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Date: November 25, 2024 Mon

Time: 8:24 pm

Results for police-citizen encounters

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Author: Rappaport, John

Title: How Private Insurers Regulate Public Police

Summary: A string of deadly police-citizen encounters, made public on an unprecedented scale, has thrust American policing into the crucible of political conflict. New social movements have taken to the streets, while legislators have introduced a wide array of reform proposals. Optimism is elusive, though, as the police are notoriously difficult to change. One powerful policy lever, however, has been overlooked: police liability insurance. Based on primary sources new to legal literature and interviews with nearly thirty insurance industry representatives, civil rights litigators, municipal attorneys, and consultants, this Article shows how liability insurers are capable of effecting meaningful change within the agencies they insure - a majority of police agencies nationwide. The Article is the first to describe and assess the contemporary market for liability insurance in the policing context; in particular, the effects of insurance on police behavior. While not ignoring the familiar (and potentially serious) problem of moral hazard, the Article focuses on the ways in which insurers perform a traditionally governmental "regulatory" role as they work to manage risk. Insurers get police agencies to adopt or amend written departmental policies on subjects like the use of force and strip searches, to change the way they train their officers, and even to fire problem officers, from the beat up to the chief. One implication of these findings is that the state might regulate the police by regulating insurers. In this spirit, the Article considers several unconventional legal reforms that could reduce police misconduct, including a mandate that all municipalities purchase insurance coverage, a ban on "first-dollar" (no-deductible) policies that may reduce municipal care, and a requirement that small municipalities pool their risks and resources before buying insurance on the commercial market. At bottom, the Article establishes that liability insurance has profound significance to any comprehensive program of police reform. The Article also makes three important theoretical contributions to legal scholarship. First, it inverts the ordinary model of governance as public regulation of private action, observing that here, private insurers regulate public police. Second, it illustrates how insurers not only enforce the Constitution, but also construct its meaning. Among other things, in the hands of insurers, liability for constitutional violations and other police misconduct becomes "loss" to the police agency, which must be "controlled." Perhaps surprisingly, by denaturing the law in this way and stripping it of its moral valence, insurers may actually advance the law's aims. Finally, the Article helps to pry open the black box of deterrence. In fact, given widespread indemnification of both individual and entity liability for constitutional torts committed by police, an understanding of how insurers manage police risk is essential to any persuasive theory of civil deterrence of police misconduct.

Details: Chicago: University of Chicago Law School, 2016. 77p.

Source: Internet Resource: U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 562; University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper No. 746: Accessed March 5, 2016 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2733783

Year: 2016

Country: United States

URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2733783

Shelf Number: 138105

Keywords:
Police Liability
Police Misconduct
Police Use of Force
Police-Citizen Encounters

Author: Wetchler, Everett

Title: Fact Sheet: Officer-Involved Shootings and Custodial Deaths in Texas

Summary: Since 2005, there have been 8,730 deaths of civilians in the custody of Texas law enforcement. In the past decade, officer-involved shootings in Texas have been on the rise. Data obtained from the Texas Office of the Attorney General shows that since Sept. 1, 2015, there have been 466 civilians shot by Texas law enforcement, and 78 officers have been shot. Officers involved in shootings skew younger and male than the general population of Texas law enforcement officers. Overall, most deaths that occur in Texas law enforcement custody are due to natural causes, but that nearly half of all deaths of inmates housed alone in a jail cell are suicides.

Details: Austin, Texas: Texas Justice Initiative, 2018. 9p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 17, 2019 at: http://texasjusticeinitiative.org/publications/

Year: 2018

Country: United States

URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d2UBGXA_5YSv6TdcTZLrGe2X3zUBU3QR/view

Shelf Number: 154986

Keywords:
Deaths in Custody
Jail
Officer Involved Fatalities
Officer Involved Shootings
Police Accountability
Police Brutality
Police Shootings
Police Use of Deadly Force
Police Use of Force
Police-Citizen Encounters
Suicide