zlacker

>>dtagam+(OP)
The thing that really makes things worse is that the police are causing most of these protests and riots with their violent, unwarranted behavior.

This triggers riots and protests, which require the police to work overtime.

They get paid for causing all these problems, and well paid. Their overtime costs must be tremendous. And who ends up paying? We do.

We should claw back police overtime pay for any protests or riots that are caused by the police themselves. I think that's fair and equitable.

>>jennyy+1j
Additionally, the civil rights suits later brought against them get paid by taxpayers, not the offending officers.

Their abuse is literally publicly subsidized.

Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.

>>sneak+MQ
> Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.

No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents.

If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authority.

Absolving the public authority and the public of responsibility just means that there is reduced incentives to address systemic problems.

>>dragon+AR
> supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights

I'm pretty sure that that's what I just proposed, by causing the results of supervision and discipline to trigger negative consequences.

>>sneak+Z21
Not really. It doesn't create negative consequences for the individual wrongdoers, or even the police collectively except perhaps extremely indirectly. It is symbolic collective punishment, but substantively it's just a way for the public authority to defer its own consequences so they are distant from the problem, since a pension fund is literally just the fund out of which the public authority pays it's pension obligations to retiring police before having to resort to using other funds. Depleting the fund for unrelated purposes doesn't reduce the public authority’s contractual obligations to each retiring officer.

You may be mistakenly assuming that exhausting the pension fund directly cuts pensions for those covered, which would still be remote just in targeted individuals and time, but there is no necessary relationship there. It just makes it more likely that the public authority would be forced to declare bankruptcy because it can't meet it's pension obligations, at which point it might be able to shed pension obligations for employees (not just those covered by the fund, if the police have a distinct fund!) as part of the bankruptcy, but that could happen as a result of direct settlement payments, as well.

In the fairly common case where the police don't even have even have their own pension fund but contribute to a common fund with other employees, perhaps not even from the same local jurisdiction (e.g., California local governments where often both police and other employees are covered by CalPERS), taking it out of the fund would even lack the symbolic sense that it has in the more simple case.

If you want direct liability for the people doing the immediate wrong, you want an end to, or limitations on, qualified immunity, not redirecting public authoriry liability to pension funds. That, of course, would make the public authority not responsible, but to would mean that individual cops would also be responsible on civil suits.