Want to cut down on police brutality? Make police pay for their own misbehavior.

It would be good for taxpayers — and justice

Police brutality
(Image credit: (Yana Paskova/Getty Images))

Eric Garner's family plans to sue the New York Police Department for $75 million. Tamir Rice's parents have filed a wrongful death lawsuit. Michael Brown's family may likewise launch a civil suit against the St. Louis police.

No matter the outcome of these three legal actions, they're already guaranteed to have at least one thing in common: Any settlement award would be overwhelmingly (if not completely) paid by taxpayers, while the police officers responsible for the deaths of Garner, Rice, and Brown would be mostly or entirely let off the financial hook.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.