What improvements, if any, would you like to see in your local police service?

The biggest improvement you can make to policing isn’t to defund it but to require LEOs to purchase professional liability insurance. Why? Because defunding the police doesn’t change incentives; requiring them to pay for their own liabilities, instead of tax payers, does. And if it’s good enough for doctors and teachers it’s good enough for other public service jobs that don’t require nearly as much education and training. The alternative is that cities (I.e. taxpayers) are on the hook for millions when LEOs are sued for violating the rights of their constituents.

Between 2008 and 2017, excessive force, police misconduct and false imprisonment cost Pittsburgh taxpayers $11, 281,178 in civil settlements. Often the officers that caused the civil damages were allowed to keep their job, like the cop that shot Leon Ford or in the more disturbing case of an off-duty officer assaulting a civilian.

Between 2011 and 2017, police brutality cost Baltimore tax payers more $13 million nearly half of which came from the civil settlement for the wrongful death of Freddie Gray in the back of a police van.

More recently, police malpractice has cost Chicago tax payers $15 million including a high profile civil settlement from 1991 in which Chicago detectives coerced a confession to murder from a 15 year old suspect.