Insurance Companies Could Force Cops To Stop Their Abusive Behaviors

It is no secret that killings by police officers are on the rise, with the number already topping 700 deaths this year. Additionally, more and more suspects are being left with severe injuries after run-ins with law enforcement, which is costing departments loads of money. Now their insurance carriers are threatening to drop coverage if they don't change their ways, and this could be the key to reforming policing in the United States. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Police officers in the United States. So far this year 2022 have killed, have killed police officers have killed more than 700 people in the United States. So far this year, they are on track on track. Excuse me, to make this the deadliest year for police killings in the United States. And the big question has been for many decades now, how do we fix this? How do we get rid of the murderous cops? How do we hold them accountable? How do we change the culture of these police departments across the country to make this behavior stop? Because it's not just the killings. I mean, that's obviously the worst of the worst, but you have incidents where police are leaving people, paralyzed, leaving them with permanent damage or otherwise costing them tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills because the police decided, well, let's just beat the hell out of 'em anyway.

And so far, unfortunately, while we have held some individuals accountable individuals, we haven't been able to change the culture. So enter an unlikely ally in this situation that unlikely ally that's actually having some success with changing the culture of police departments happens to be the insurance industry because here's what's happening. Whenever police departments or individual police officers get busted, you know, with murdering somebody or they beat the hell outta somebody. And then there's the lawsuits. And the settlements that we see from that, the individual officers aren't paying that money. The police departments aren't paying that money. Do you know who pays that money? It's the insurance groups that actually represent these, uh, police departments kind of like your health insurance, right? You go to the doctor, you pay your part. The insurance company comes in and pays the rest. That's kind of how it works.

These police departments pay their premiums to have this insurance coverage that will pay out whenever they have to make these, you know, 27 million payments, uh, 12 million payments, uh, in the case of, uh, Brianna Taylor and George Floyd, that's what those numbers were. The insurance companies cover that and to make up for it, what the insurance companies are doing are saying first and foremost, if you don't change your culture, if you continue doing these things, beating people up or killing them, we're gonna drop you. And guess what? There's no other insurance coverage in your area. We're literally the only provider. So if you don't change, if you keep doing this to people you're done. So that means the next 27 million payment that you pay out is literally coming out of your pockets.

So there have been instances across the country with smaller police departments that have said, we're gonna force our officers to go through more deescalation training in order to not lose our insurance coverage. You have also seen areas where the insurance coverage prices have increased, uh, by 200 to 400% over just the last three years. And those are the ones who have, you know, histories of civil rights violations of police murders. They're seeing the biggest increases, but even those that do not have those issues, they have seen their premiums increase from 30 to 100%. So even the, you know, police that aren't doing the horrible things, they're still having to pay more to make up for all of the other bad apples.