MARTIN KASTE
For all the talk in the last
couple of years about reforming police, there are limits to what the government
can do. But there may be another way, and it involves insurance companies.
John Rappaport, an assistant law
professor at the University of Chicago, says he spent years studying police
reform before it dawned on him to ask a basic question: What were the insurance
companies doing?
"I just went on to Google
and started searching and was just instantly amazed with the stuff I was
finding," Rappaport says.
It turned out insurers were
trying to limit the liability of the police departments they cover.
"One of the first things I
found was this pamphlet from Travelers Insurance about how to do a strip
search, and I just thought people in my world have no idea that this stuff is
out there and it's really fascinating," Rappaport says.
It was fascinating to him,
because it seemed to offer a solution to a fundamental problem when it comes to
reform: police departments usually don't feel the financial pain of a lawsuit.
It's not the officers' personal money, obviously, and even the department
budget is not usually at stake when somebody sues. If the city has liability
insurance, on the other hand, the insurer does feel the pain — and it may try
to do something to lessen it.
"They look for ways to push
police departments in a direction of reduced risk," Rappaport says.
That's been the experience of
William T. Riley III. When he was chief of police in Selma, Ala., he says the
city's insurer made a point of getting together with him after a use-of-force
incident to see what could be learned.
"And one of the things that
we did when we had somebody sue us or whatever is we went over it with a
fine-tooth comb to see if there's some place that we fell short on," Riley
says.
Most of the time, the insurers'
role is informational. They send out bulletins to police departments about the
latest court precedents on, say, use of force. But some go further, paying for
special training for the police departments.
Steve Albrecht does that kind of
training in California.
"We're seeing
forward-thinking chiefs and forward-thinking insurance companies that are
working in partnership and I think that's a benefit. And I think if that's
driven by the business part of that then so much the better to get the changes
we need," Albrecht says.
This kind of hands-on approach is
most common with insurance pools, non-profit entities that cover groups of
police agencies, especially in Western states. As membership organizations,
they see it as part of their function to give advice to police departments.
Commercial insurance companies, on the other hand, take a more market-oriented
approach.
"Ultimately, the way we can
influence behavior does come down to price," says Tim McAuliffe, who's
with a commerical insurer called Ironshore. He's actually a little dubious
about this idea that insurance companies can promote reform. He says companies
like his don't really get into the minutiae of recommending best practices or
training to police departments.
"They may do, like, a
conference call if it was specific to a police incident. They may ask for a
conference call with a police chief but that's generally as far as I've seen
companies go," he says.
Still, insurers tend to
understate their own influence, in part because they don't want to be seen as
dictating policies to local law enforcement. Joanna Schwartz is a law professor
at UCLA who studies how police manage liability, and she agrees with Rappaport
that insurers can play the role of an honest broker to force a city to learn
from its police department's mistakes.
"They are highly motivated
to reform because it affects their bottom line, and they're not constrained by
any of the political counterforces that could prevent the city council or mayor
from pushing hard on a law enforcement agency to reform," Schwartz says.
These political counter-forces,
she believes, which have been at work in some of the nation's biggest cities —
such as Chicago — typically don't rely on insurance to pay out legal
settlements. In those cities, the payouts have simply been absorbed by the
larger budget over the years, and now the police find themselves in the middle
of major crises over the use of excessive force.
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