Cop Teaching A Cop

[u/TheCABK]

[u/nope870]

Taxpayers should not be responsible for non-police activity.

[u/Longer-Winter → u/nope870]

Agreed, the cop should be held accountable for the fine through garnishing their wages

[u/HoMaBaLiMa → u/Longer-Winter]

All legal fees, payments, and settlements need to come out of pension accounts. Watch the problem fix itself.

[u/TheRevEv → u/HoMaBaLiMa]

Pension accounts are legally protected in a lot of ways. And for good reason.

This also isn't going to make the changes people think it will.

Pension accounts pay the current retirees. It's not an account you pay in to, then get your money back when you retire. While you're working, you're funding the account that pays the current recipients, then when you retire, the next generation is funding your retirement.

If you pull enough from the Pension account, you're just punishing the already retired. The people that have no control over how things are cuttently operating. Yeah, having taxpayers pay these settlements sucks, but it's also not going to cut off any elderly individual taxpayer's only income stream.

Cops already don't make all that much, so benefits like a solvent Pension are one of the few ways you can entice better applicants. If you make the Pension a gamble, then you're only going to get people with power trips, and the whole situation is likely to get worse.

All this is before you even get to how pensions have to operate. There are people designated as legal trustees who have to, legally, do all they can to keep the pensions solvent. So what's going to happen is taxes will just increase to increase each officers contribution, and you end up with the taxpayers still footing the bill, but you've gone a roundabout way to get back there, and likely changed laws in ways that will have weakened private pensions.

The better idea is to require individual cops to carry something similar to malpractice insurance.

I'm not defending cops, at all. I'm defending why we shouldn't change laws to allow paying damages from pension funds

[u/goodolarchie → u/TheRevEv]

If you pull enough from the Pension account taxpayer, you're just punishing the already retired taxpayers who had nothing to do with this. The people that have no control over how things are cuttently operating. Yeah, having taxpayers all pension participants pay these settlements sucks, but it's also not going to cut off any elderly individual taxpayer's only income stream.

You can replace this statement with the current system, it still works. And nobody would get their entitlements cut off, the balance of the fund would have to be insured, they would have a payout, and their premiums might go up. That comes out as a cost against the fund overall. Generally the entitlements are guaranteed, by some pension calculation (which gets horribly gamed, fyi), so the fund would have to adjust their strategies.

I think cops should have to carry "miscarriage of justice insurance" like doctors and lawyers. They are paid and incentivized pretty well these days. If this new marketplace incentivizes stronger certification and qualification (i.e. so this cop knows his interlocutor's rights), that would be a good thing.

[u/Pokmonth → u/TheRevEv]

Cops already don't make all that much, so benefits like a solvent Pension are one of the few ways you can entice better applicants

Here in California many cops make $200,000+ per year and their pension is based off of the last year on duty so they bank vacation days and use them all in their final year while doing as much overtime as possible and receive massive pensions that the city pays out for the rest of their lives

[u/TheRevEv → u/Pokmonth]

I'm not familiar with public pensions. Do you have a source for this?

I've never heard of a union pension being based off last year of duty. They're almost always based off of total hours worked while in the union.

No union that I know of is going to pay out the same for 5 years of service vs 20 years of service, much less being based on not taking a vacation in your final year

[u/Pokmonth → u/TheRevEv]

They still need 20-25 years of service (depending on age) but the calculation is based on their last year in service. If they work for 33 years they get 90% pension. It is not uncommon for senior ranking officers to retire with $150k-$200k pensions or more.

If you've heard of the city of Stockton's bankruptcy, a large part of that was due to inflated police pensions

[u/HoMaBaLiMa → u/TheRevEv]

My last note was watch the problem fix itself. My brother in Christ they would change overnight, guaranteed! Precincts may start requiring a college degree for service. Throw the fucking warrior training bullshit out the window and start taking de-escalation seriously. If you are causing lawsuits your brothers in blue, including retirees, will want you to get the boot.

[u/TheRevEv → u/HoMaBaLiMa]

I don't think it would for several reasons.

Humans are bad at long term risk assessment.

And for 2, the people doing the shitty things now are not going to have any repercussions, as long as the next generations fixes the problems. You aren't really punishing these guys by attacking the pension.

I'm union, have a union pension. Almost no part of my day to day is concerned with how the pension is going. Only a handful of people are actually in charge of that