Is privatising ethics enforcement like this a good idea?

It's not "privatising ethics enforcement" at all - it's just letting the free market put dollar amounts on the actual cost of staffing reckless officers. The actuaries won't be reading textbooks on ethics, they're going to look at the same thing they do for drivers: history of violations, incidents, etc.

That depends on what you think of existing liability insurance coverage, such as the one commonly sold to physicians.

The way I see it, if you are not granting immunity, and also creating the possibility of financial penalties, then you're creating an opportunity for arbitrage via pooling risk. I'm not horny for the "free market", but I think there have to be cogent reasons to ban such insurance, and I can't think of any.

Municipalities would be free to put up the money to insure officers whom they wished to hire, but which insurance agencies find too expensive/problematic to insure.

Alternatively: Make the insurance come out of the collective pensions of the police department.

The trick is to somehow ensure all the other officers (A) care about avoiding the cost while (B) are not motivated to collectively lie for one-another.

It's not hard to imagine: Officer X does something bad through incompetence, Officer Y tells the truth about it, and then all the other officers take revenge on Y for "being a snitch" and "screwing our pensions."

Once that pattern is in place, it continues even when Officer X is committing crimes, not just making mistakes.

Except that’s how cops already act even without that incentive.

My point is that it's quite possible add the pension mechanism and make things even worse, if it isn't done carefully in conjunction with other policies.

Yes, it's a good idea to try it as an a/b test in a finite run of municipalities.

Otherwise we are just doing the same things and expecting different results.

Right now in many police abuse scenarios there is no system in place that is recognizable as a working ethical system, bringing policing into some ethical system, even if just financially self motivated is definitely an improvement over nothing.

versus what we have now, no or minimal ethics enforcement.

We had a police officer run down a young lady in a crosswalk while responding to a non-critical call without running lights or sirens. The officer was eventually fired but only because body camera evidence from the vice president of the officers guild surfaced where he was mocking the victim.

Ended up costing seattle taxpayers $29m.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/family-student-killed-by-sp...

Heaven and earth had to be moved in order to get the officer off the force.

... the officier is apparently suing to be let back onto the force. I guess his year long paid vacation wasn't enough severance for him.

Seems better than the status quo, where there is no enforcement at all and instead taxpayers are hosed.

The public sector has been failing at this for decades. How can privatization be worse?

As opposed to doing nothing?

less ethics and more accountability. But a public audit committee is more than welcome to join in as well.

Municipal insurers already do that

For municipalities --- requiring that individual officers secure their own insurance would have far more effect on behaviour and standards.

It seems like municipalities just past the insurance costs onto taxpayers.

The problem is that if elected officials are not comfortable confronting police unions about their conduct then any cost you pass on to the union or the officers is potentially just passed on to tax payers. Not that I disagree with any idea to hold police more accountable. You just have to address the issue from more than one direction.

Or barbers.

The reason we have licencing for barbers is that existing barbers wanted it and persued regulatory solutions to protect their market.

Existing police officers do not want this.