The 2014 killing by police of unarmed African American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri ignited the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement. Since this watershed sociopolitical event, policing has faced a public legitimacy crisis. In the current BLM era, public discussion has centered on the adoption of existing accountability mechanisms and reforms to address police misconduct, like the use of body cameras by officers or demilitarizing police. Following the recent murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which sparked worldwide protests, some US activists and community members have also called for defunding and/or abolishing the police. Meanwhile, policing scholars have identified new accountability mechanisms (e.g., critical incident reporting) to address the weaknesses of past police reforms. However, the police accountability mechanism of insurance has been largely overlooked in scholarly and public conversations even though, in recent decades, police liability has increased significantly.

For example, federal court decisions on civil lawsuits filed against police almost tripled from 1980 to 2005, and courts have awarded increasingly large financial settlements to citizens victimized by police. Furthermore, up until the recent COVID-19 pandemic and global economic recession, the overall economy had recuperated from the 2008 financial crisis, but many local governments continued to experience budget shortfalls. Some cities do not budget enough for police liability and shift money from budgets earmarked for education, social services, and infrastructure and/or borrow money from banks to cover payouts. To pay off debts owed to banks, some cities use funds from public services, raise taxes, and/or continually borrow money, which can perpetuate long-term debt cycles.

The three existing models municipalities use to satisfy police misconduct payouts include: 1) self-insurance, meaning payouts come from general budgets; 2) private insurance, which cities and departments buy from insurance companies;and 3) insurance risk pools, which spread risks across multiple cities that pay into a membership cooperative. My recent article, “Flipping the ‘New Penology’ Script: Police Misconduct Insurance, Grassroots Activism, and Risk Management-Based Reform,” analyzes a failed 2016 US grassroots ballot campaign that sought to make Minneapolis the first municipality nationwide to mandate professional liability insurance for police (like malpractice insurance for doctors).

Mandatory professional liability insurance—a fourth model and potential alternative to the existing three—would make officers financially responsible for their misconduct, which, currently, they are rarely personally punished or held financially accountable. Under the Minneapolis proposal, cities would cover the base insurance rate for officers, but officers would be the policyholder and individually responsible for premium increases due to misconduct, like car insurance premium increases after an auto accident. Officers who continue to engage in misconduct would eventually become uninsurable and, therefore, unemployable since carrying insurance would be a requirement of employment. Mandating such insurance would challenge the status quo of police impunity by circumventing labor protections against officers being fired. It would also shift discretionary authority from legal actors in the criminal justice system—who rarely punish problem officers—to private insurance companies.

Stephen Wulff is a PhD candidate in the sociology department at the University of Minnesota with research interests in policing, punishment, criminology, social movements, and sociological theory.