RACHEL M. COHEN
If settlements for police
misconduct on citizens came out of the funding for police, incidents of abuse
would be reduced, experts say.
As the national conversation
around racism and police brutality quickly fades—ramped up briefly in the wake
of Michael Brown’s death—U.S. taxpayers remain stuck footing the bills for their
local law enforcement’s aggressive behavior. This week alone, Baltimore agreed
to pay $49,000 to man who sued over a violent arrest in 2010, Philadelphia
agreed to pay $490,000 to a man who was abused and broke his neck while riding
in a police van in 2011, and St. Paul agreed to pay $95,000 to a man who
suffered a skull injury, a fractured eye socket, and a broken nose in 2012.
In 2013, Chicago paid out a
stunning $84.6 million in police misconduct settlements, judgments, and legal
fees. Bridgeport, Connecticut, paid a man $198,000 this past spring after video
footage captured police shooting him twice with a stun gun, then stomping all
over him as he lay on the ground. And in California, Oakland recently agreed to
pay $4.5 million to settle a lawsuit a man filed after being shot in the head,
leaving him with permanent brain damage. You get the picture.
It’s the taxpayer, not the law
enforcement agency, who pays the price.
The thing is, these steep
payments rarely come from the police department budgets—instead they’re
financed through the city’s general coffers or the city’s insurance plan. It’s
the taxpayer, not the law enforcement agency, who pays the price.
“That’s why these enormous
financial penalties do not seem to actually impact what police do,” said David
Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in
criminal justice issues. “Conceivably, if cities didn’t want this to happen,
they could say this will come out of your [police] budget.”
Other scholars have proposed
this, too. Between 2006 and 2011, the total number of claims filed for offenses
like false arrest and police brutality in New York City increased by 43
percent. So Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA, suggested the city could
take money from its police budget to pay the associated legal costs. “Perhaps
if the department held its own purse strings, it would find more to learn from
litigation,” Schwartz wrote in the New York Times. This past June, Schwartz
published a study that concluded individual cops almost never pay for their
misconduct—rather, “governments paid approximately 99.98 percent of the dollars
that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law
enforcement.”
But the politics of pushing
police departments to change or make concessions can be difficult. A recent
Gallup poll found that across the country, 56 percent of adults hold “a great
deal or quite a lot of confidence” in the police as an institution. If a
majority of Americans feel positively about law enforcement, gathering the
political will needed to compel change becomes tough.
“Most political leaders don’t
have the guts for it, or the stomach for it, so we go around and around and
cities pay out buckets of money from their own funds or they buy insurance,”
said Harris. “As a result, the settlement costs do not act as a deterrence.”
Video footage might help to
change this: The vast proliferation of video recording devices—ranging from
individual cell phones to police surveillance cameras—have forced many citizens
to watch incidents they might have otherwise tried to deny ever happened. Law
enforcement and city officials, too, can’t as easily obfuscate brutal incidents
from the record.
It’s possible that the
combination of accessible video footage and increasingly expensive lawsuits
might at last force cities to re-evaluate the cost of police brutality. This
month, a disturbing video surfaced of a Baltimore police officer repeatedly
punching a man in June; a $5 million lawsuit was then filed against the cop and
the footage will be used as evidence. After seeing the video, Baltimore Mayor
Stephanie Rawlings Blake criticized the police department and directed the
commissioner to develop a “comprehensive” plan to address his agency’s systemic
brutality.
The following week, two city council members
proposed legislation that would require every Baltimore police officer to wear
a body camera, in order to reduce instances of improper behavior.
This is all mildly encouraging,
but as long as the cost of the jury verdicts, settlements and legal fees fall
outside of the police budgets, the economic incentives for departmental reform
will stay low. It’s also important to note that filing a civil rights lawsuit
is not easy; the overwhelming majority of claims do not result in huge payouts
nor is it easy to secure legal representation—even if the plaintiff was clearly
wronged, notwithstanding all the new technological means to collect evidence.
The cases take a long time and the pay can be precarious. David Packman, a
private researcher who established The National Police Misconduct Reporting
Project says that both the lack of financial penalties “sufficient to outrage
taxpayers” and the fact that “fewer and fewer lawyers take on police misconduct
cases” helps explain why localities don’t feel much pressure to introduce
meaningful systemic reforms.
Unfortunately, as long as these
trends persist, the taxpayer bill is likely to grow.
