Police departments respond to insurers before citizens
This police killing from Colorado is still troubling me this morning:
After getting stuck on a dirt road in Clear Creek County in June, Christian Glass called 911 for help.
Instead, the 22-year-old was killed while locked inside his own car after a long, tense, confusing and chaotic confrontation played out between him and Clear Creek deputies and a handful of other agencies. Video footage was released by his family’s lawyers.
“From beginning to end, the officers escalated and proactively initiated force,” Glass’ family lawyers, Siddhartha Rathod and Qusair Mohamedbhai, said, in a release. “And yet, these officers, including the one who killed Christian, are still in uniform and have paid no price for their conduct. Our country cannot continue to tolerate this level of extreme violence by law enforcement. The act of simply calling 911 for help cannot be a death sentence.”
The amateur geologist was having some sort of panic attack locked inside his car after running off the road. Glass was not suspected of any crime, a Colorado State Patrol sergeant advised its offices on scene, saying. “If there is no crime and he’s not suicidal or homicidal or a great danger, then there’s no reason to contact him.”
But by then officers from five agencies were on scene. A local deputy shouted that Glass needed to step out of the car. The young man refused, apparently paranoid and confused. The 911 call for help ended about 80 minutes later with Glass dead.
Public outrage at police excessive force tragedies involving choke holds, gunfire, and high-speed chases has not brought reform to how police are trained or deploy force, nor to the judicial policy of qualified immunity. When cops kill civilians, few face prosecution or dismissal. Their departments face lawsuits. When departments lose, taxpayers foot the bill and insurers backstop the police.
Departments that chafe at public calls for reform are being forced to change. Money speaks louder than unnecessary deaths and injuries. Insurers are beginning to balk (Washington Post):
The movement is driven by the increasingly large jury awards and settlements that cities and their insurers are paying in police use-of-force cases, especially since the 2020 deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Those cases led to settlements of $12 million and $27 million, respectively. Insurance companies are passing the costs — and potential future costs — on to their law enforcement clients.
Larger law enforcement agencies — like the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department or the New York Police Department — handle it in different ways, often by creating a special fund to finance settlements or by paying those costs from the county’s or city’s general fund. This insulates them from external demands by insurers.
Departments with a long history of large civil rights settlements have seen their insurance rates shoot up by 200 to 400 percent over the past three years, according to insurance industry and police experts.
Even departments with few problems are experiencing rate increases of 30 to 100 percent. Now, insurers also are telling departments that they must change the way they police.
A high-speed chase over an expired tag in St. Ann, Mo. left an uninvolved driver, 55-year-old Brent Cox, permanently disabled. The department whose motto is, “St. Ann will chase you until the wheels fall off,” had a history of high-speed chases involving crashes.
The St. Louis Area Insurance Trust risk pool — which provided liability coverage to the city of St. Ann and the police department — threatened to cancel coverage if the department didn’t impose restrictions on its use of police chases. City officials shopped around for alternative coverage but soon learned that costs would nearly double if they did not agree to their insurer’s demands.
St. Ann did, finally.
John Chasnoff, a local activist, had tried for years to urge St. Ann to change its policies.
“It’s an indictment on St. Ann police and their priorities that the voice of their insurers spoke louder than human lives,” Chasnoff said.
The Post’s coverage is lengthy, part of its ongoing Unaccountable investigative series.
A wrongful death settlement in Springfield, Ore. handed the city department’s insurer oversight over police reforms:
In addition to de-escalation training and a new process for reviewing use-of-force incidents, the city agreed to create an awards program that recognizes officers who peacefully resolve potentially perilous encounters with civilians. The department also agreed to adopt a policy stating that officers “value and preserve human life” and “strive to use the minimum force necessary to accomplish their lawful objectives.”
Lauren Regan, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center who represented Black Unity protesters over police response, described a longstanding “cowboy culture in the department.” Authoritarian arrogance and “To Protect and to Serve” go together like oil and water.
We’ve written for years about the “warrior cop” culture and the “officer survival” movement. Each new tragic excessive force death or injury — they are by now legion — reinforces the need for retooling how police do their jobs. But it is clear that that starts by hiring fewer authoritarian personalities to start and then training them to serve as guardians instead of warriors. It is pathetic that cities are more responsive to the cost of insuring departments than to human tragedy.
But here we are.
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