https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-mom-says-police-held-face-pile-fire-ants-covering-head-neck-hund-rcna152250
Taylor Rogers said her 2021 arrest "underscores ... the absence of empathy and human compassion" among some law enforcement.
It doesn't work like that at all. They get a paid vacation, maybe have to change precincts, and the taxpayers get a bigger bill.
People keep acting like this is some sort of gotcha, but I don't see it. The police are a part of the government, every dollar in the system is taxpayer money.
The complaint that the money isn't taken directly from the police department budget is a Red Herring. The state violates people's rights, the state pays the damages. Fair's fair.
Would I like to see damage taken from police budgets and pensions? Sure, but we actually need the government to make that the rule. What better way to convince them by making police settlements cost a fortune for the government?
If you have a case to sue the police, even for a little bit, you should do it. Let the state deal with the chaos law enforcement brings them. It's honestly a great use of your tax dollars to sue the police and win. Do it enough and you might convince others in government to give a shit and consider the current state of policing to be an actual liability. Money seems to be the only language these assholes speak.
And if we do one day see police hold the liability for their actions, there will undoubtedly be larger budgets assigned to police departments to handle that, but then we actually get to see the massive cost police are to taxpayers, and we might actually convince the so-called fiscal conservatives to slash police budgets.
This doesn't actually work in reality because governments are constantly underfunded and nobody is going to tie a funding shortage in, say for example, 2024 to a lawsuit settled in 2022 over a crime that happened in 2018.
We saw the response to the George Floyd protests in that nobody is going to change their mind about the issue when they're fed a constant stream of propaganda from police, Facebook, YouTube, the news, etc painting police as heroes because that's what they portray in movies and TV.
They'll just whine about how crime is so bad because they don't have enough funding, and they need more officers/equipment. All they have to do to convince people of this is simply not do their job and every Karen in the city will be screaming on Facebook about how "you get what you vote for" and "this is what happens when you defund the police." Before too long they're awarded half the city budget and go back to breaking the law and trampling people's rights.