Police Misconduct, Monetary Sanctions, and Insurance Models in the Modern Police Accountability Era
2024-05
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Police Misconduct, Monetary Sanctions, and Insurance Models in the Modern Police Accountability Era
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2024-05
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Despite many police accountability efforts underway in the contemporary United States, financial immunization of officers continues to enable police impunity. Legal scholars have examined these issues from the vantage points of law and how governments pay for misconduct (Schwartz 2014, 2016); they have also mapped the police liability insurance terrain (Rappaport 2016, 2017). Yet little is known about how police accountability activists and municipal actors—e.g., public officials, police leaders, risk managers—approach and perceive the overlapping issues of insurance, risk management, police accountability, and police misconduct settlements. Furthermore, despite pioneering research in this area by legal scholars, few in-depth municipal case studies currently exist, especially from a sociological and sociolegal perspective. My qualitative case study of municipalities in Minnesota operating with and without market-based insurance elucidates how activists and key municipal representatives approach and perceive these issues and examines a potential insurance alternative. My dissertation grapples with a fundamental paradox: policing as an institution is charged with social control of the general public; however, police violence reflects a breakdown in the social control of what sociologist Howard Becker (1963) refers to as “rule enforcers.” To understand contemporary efforts to stem police violence, my project examines the role that insurance and risk management strategies play—or could potentially play—in regulating police departments and individual officers. I extend the sociology of punishment literature by reinterpreting Feeley and Simon’s (1992) classic “new penology” paradigm through a social movement lens. They argue that a late-twentieth-century penal shift occurred away from rehabilitation toward managing aggregates of dangerous criminal categories (e.g., violent offenders) using risk management approaches. I extend their thesis by examining how police accountability groups are implicitly inverting the new penology onto police in an effort to manage aggregates of dangerous police categories (e.g., violent officers) using risk management approaches. My study also extends the sociology of punishment literature on “monetary sanctions.” Existing research focuses on all the costs imposed by the criminal legal system on denizens accused and/or convicted of a crime (Harris 2016). Instead of focusing on how cities (like Ferguson, Missouri) budget for revenue generated from monetary sanctions and the micro-level predatory effects these sanctions have on traditional offenders, my project illuminates: 1) how police misconduct payouts contribute to tax revenue shortfalls, which can trap cities in long-term debt cycles; and 2) how financially immunizing officers and departments has meso-level predatory effects on cities by diverting tax revenue from the public sector to cover payouts. Since the 2014 killing by police of unarmed African American Michael Brown in Ferguson, policing has faced a public legitimacy crisis. To address core issues raised by Black Lives Matter and other racial justice movements in response to such killings—namely, racial injustice and police impunity—public debate has centered on adopting existing accountability mechanisms and reforms (e.g., body cameras, police de-militarization) (Weitzer 2015). Following the 2020 murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some activists and community members have also called for defunding and/or abolishing police (Coleman 2020). Meanwhile, policing scholars have identified new accountability mechanisms (e.g., critical incident reporting) to address the weaknesses of past policing reforms (Walker and Archbold 2019). However, insurance as an accountability mechanism has received scant attention in both scholarly and national debates. My study seeks to add to the existing sociological and related interdisciplinary literatures, while shedding light on the salience of this accountability mechanism, by: 1) Elucidating key stakeholders’ approaches to and perceptions of existing and potential insurance models and risk management strategies for regulating police behavior. 2) Uncovering and/or further elucidating municipal, non-profit, and/or private sector insurance and risk management practices that either perpetuate or reduce police impunity and police violence. 3) Informing scholarly and policy discussions on reforming police via insurance. 4) Examining the implications of a potential insurance alternative.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2024. Major: Sociology. Advisor: Christopher Uggen. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 366 pages.
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Wulff, Stephen. (2024). Police Misconduct, Monetary Sanctions, and Insurance Models in the Modern Police Accountability Era. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/264375.
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