Yahuh… now do one for police unions.
Aw come on now, we can’t be holding our public servants to account for their actions now can we? You silly billy
Oh sweetie… They’re not servants of the PUBLIC…
Well unless by public you mean the public sector of the economy and their property, then yes they’re specifically intended to protect that (alongside private infrastructure owned by their lobbyists and benefactors) at the cost of everyone else.
Police should have to carry professional insurance just like doctors carry malpractice insurance.
Change my mind.
I don’t think it will work at all. I think it would make the problem much worse, not better.
Think about that for a second: Police are never convicted, and rarely officially sanctioned. They always get away with it. Insurance will never pay out, so the cost of insuring officers will be next to nothing.
But, now we have an insurer with a vested interest in clearing the officer of wrongdoing, lest they be forced to pay a claim.
We have a insurer with a vested interest in ensuring the officer doesn’t fuck up in the first place. Insurers don’t want claims at all, because whether they win or lose thats still money being spent, albeit more in the latter case.
Rates would go up due to the numerous claims against Officer McShooty (even if defended) and he wouldn’t be able to afford it. He goes to another department? If they have insurance he’s still in the system so…
I think what would actually happen is the the insurer would demand Officer McShooty sue these claimants for harassment, defamation of character, and receive the bulk of any awarded damages.
The overwhelming majority of absurd lawsuits, (like where an aunt sues her nephew for hugging her too hard) aren’t brought by the named plaintiff, but by the plaintiff’s insurer. The aunt isn’t actually suing the nephew. The aunt’s medical insurance sues the nephew’s homeowner’s or liability insurance.
I saw a video awhile back that presented a related argument. If everyone had life insurance, and those life insurance companies were all prepared to sue on our behalf, we would never have another wrongful death at the hands of a cop. Our insurers would sue the everyloving fuck out of the department to avoid being stuck with that bill. Facing formidable legal repercussions, police departments would finally have an incentive to clean house.
I think the implicit assumptions about the “Police carry insurance” thing are:
- Non-criminal Qualified immunity protections are replaced by insurance carriage
- LEOs have to pay their own insurance (presumably with a pay hike that’s the “average” insurance payment
Without QI, LEOs would be liable. Insurance companies can certainly force LEOs to fight court cases, but the costs of doing so will fall on the insurance companies. An LEO that’s constantly a problem will find themselves in court a lot, and will end up costing the insurance company a lot, regardless of whether it’s just legal fees, or massive damages to their victims in addition to legal fees. So the insurer will force them to pay ever increasing premiums, and eventually they won’t be able to afford to be in law enforcement.
Most of what you’re saying would undermine the existing professional insurance requirements for doctors etc. Hell, it’d undermine insurance requirements for driving!
Also remember insurance companies rarely insure just one thing. You may get a carrier that specializes in LEOs, but in practice like most insurers it’ll cover a wide variety of different types of liability insurances, directly or indirectly. So it’s not necessarily in its best interests to defend LEOs regardless of what they’ve done. That just encourages bad law enforcement, pushing up its costs elsewhere.
They’d have to work a week of overtime to afford the sky high cost.
Cause they don’t already abuse the OT system?
My joke was a little too subtle.
Fair enough. Text is hard to read sometimes. Cheers!
deleted by creator
Love that most of the world’s governments came together and said “collective punishment is bad, we should make it illegal during times of war” and shit like this can still fly within any first world country.
This sort of collective treatment seems awful “communist” for a system that claims to hate it so much.
Almost like they’re okay with it when it means forcing their will and their hardship onto a group that is powerless to resist…
Or they could just find the vandal with the security cameras they no doubt installed in every single hallway to protect themselves against their own customers should they have to go to court 🤷
Oh wait, I forgot, we’re trapped in tyranny.
I’ve been to several schools with zero cameras in residential buildings. I do not think they are as common as you think.
Hell, my school basically only had cameras in a few very specific areas inside any of the buildings on campus. The only ones I was aware of in our departmental building were, understandably, keeping an eye on the doorway into the explosives labs.
But that would require actual work and investigation! Why would they bother when they can just add on another $100 to everybody’s rent bill for “repairs”
The HRE ain’t gonna do shit since it hasn’t existed since 1806.
Voltaire would argue that even then it didn’t
😆 And he’d be right for all intents and purposes!
How do they know it is done by someone within that community and not some random person?
This happened to me in college. The dorms were “locked” over the holidays and student residents were not allowed to even access the dorm building, when we returned back to school after new year’s, the hallway and apartment doors had been vandalized. The university passed the bill on to each of the residents of the building, even without any way we could have stopped it, since campus police would’ve arrested anyone found attempting to get into our dorms.
Happened to me, too. Some unknown people caused damage to a common room and they billed everyone in the building. I tried to email about it, but they didn’t budge. I felt I had to pay it because the university threatens to withhold transcripts and stuff if you have outstanding fines.
Exactly what they did to me. I fought them on it. It was basically a shakedown racket and to get my diploma I decided it was better to pay and hold a grudge and have it written on my tombstone for posterity.
This definitely happened. Definitely not made up.
Username checks out
Yes. Shitty Reddit is better right now. Glad you can help confirm that.
This seems…unlawful…
Edit - for anyone who actually knows stuff about things, is it?
A lot can be legal if you agree to it. But they absolutely can’t unilaterally declare this rule into effect.
Just don’t pay, what are they gonna do? Sue you for damages that they admit themselves can’t prove?
In a general sense, you are completely right, but this seems to be a college. By being a student, you’ve agreed to ALL the terms they hand you. If you decline, then you aren’t a student anymore. Even if you pay EVERYTHING you owe except the unfair vandalism fee, you’re not getting a diploma.
Fairly certain you could take something like this to court. You didn’t agree to this when you first signed the paperwork to live there, to turn around and say “okay, now you also have to pay us a surprise $10k or you don’t get the diploma you paid for” sounds hella illegal.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s shitty as hell, but they could easily implement the rule in between semesters. You’d be agreeing to all the terms when you registered for the next set of classes.
Again, it’s a super slimy thing to do, and it should be illegal, but you’d spend more fighting a University in court then you would just paying the fees, and you’d be at a MAJOR disadvantage when they show up with your signed agreement to abide by ALL campus policies.
How do you think it works in condo buildings and residential co-ops?
They generally try to find a responsible party and bill them, file an insurance claim, use the general maintenance budget, and special assessments as a last resort.
This. They should be going through insurance for this.
Of course, the insurance rates would rise, and they’d still be passing on that increase to the residents, but residents would be slightly less bitchy about it since the extra layers of opacity would make it seem like “just more of the usual greed and inflation.”
Insurance is only needed if things get really bad. What should happen is just having like 2 weeks of janitor time dedicated to powewashing graffiti in their annual budget.
Or in the wider world with public infrastructure and taxpayers
That’s… how public infrastructure works?
You try to find the responsible party. If yes, they have to pay for repairs/damages.
If not, the tax money has to pay for it, as the infrastructure is needed.🥲 sadly not when the public infrastructure is maintained by a private company that goes bankrupt
R.I.P. my city’s previous bike share scheme, ruined by vandals wrecking the charging docks and stealing the bikes. Our tax money could not save it due to corruption laws AFAIK
R.I.P. my city’s previous bike share scheme, ruined by vandals wrecking the charging docks and stealing the bikes
Where do you live where people were vandalizing bike shares??
And how is this substantially different?
Wasn’t that their point?
My solution would be this:
Have a running total for damages caused by vandals and call it a “Vandalism Lottery”. When someone is caught vandalizing in the community, they win the lottery, but instead of getting money, they pay whatever that lottery amount is up to. $700,000? To bad! Work the rest of your life to pay it off.
And to keep it fair, the starting amount should be no less than $20,000.
On top of that, they should be required to clean up any identified vandalism for at least the next year.
It should NEVER be at the loss of residents, students, or taxpayers to recoup damage caused by idiots.
And yes, I’m salty because vandals caused over $50,000 to a brand-new waterfront park we had open this past year, and the Vandalism Lottery would have been a wonderful prize to the jackasses who got caught!
Even this I disagree with. It sounds like a good idea until the total cost is substantial, and they don’t want to foot the bill. So they watch for someone who does anything that can be misconstrued as vandalism and force them to foot the bill.
Not to mention, fining someone for $100 in damage nearly a million is honestly more unethical than the vandalism.
There’s a reason we don’t do this type of thing in the legal world, it’s easily taken advantage of, and unethical as fuck.
So they watch for someone who does anything that can be misconstrued as vandalism
Vandalism serious enough to be brought to court would be enough to win the lottery. If it’s something petty, like doodling on a park bench with a pencil, then they don’t win, but they should still do XX months of community cleanup.
As an alternative to the lottery, how about we charge the scumbags 2x the actual cost to repair the damage they caused. And 1 year community cleanup as a sign of goodwill.
Either way, the cost to society far outweighs the current cost of committing these crimes. Flip it around and see what happens.
Are you proposing that doodling on a bench with pencil should warrant months of community service?
Yes, a month of community cleanup sounds fair.
We’re not talking 24/7 enslavement, btw… “months of community service” could mean “20 hours of community service over four months.”
Mask out the vandalised area and put up a posting "free space available for graffiti art, email your sketch to blabla to get it approved "
The problem with this is it takes a while to normalize and self regulate. It demonstrably works, but it takes a long time for the dickheads and edgelords to stop making poorly drawn swastikas every day. Longer than any institution is willing to commit to anything.
Approximately 30 days before students are charged, a notice will be sent to community members in an effort to identify the responsible individual(s) for additional investigation.
Ah, so if you don’t rat out the vandals, you have to pay
Weird that you wouldn’t snitch on the dude who smears poop on the walls.
I’d like to think everyone would give you a pass for that.
Yeah I have a feeling this is more about paint on walls and that kind of thing. The phantom shitter has no friends.
That assumes you know who did lol
What a great way to ensure you’ll never get donations from some specific alumni
What is HRE?
Holy Roman Empire.
The Holy Roman Empire.
I drew the dicks!
Penisman?
Just send them all the bills you have because “this acacemic year, you are implementing a You Pay For Me Policy”.
In fact, you could right away send them bills for every incident you don’t exactly know that they didn’t cause it…
