![]() ![]() In New Mexico, the largest risk pool - which provides coverage for one-third of the state’s police officers - hired an instructor last year to travel the state and retrain officers in de-escalation skills after private insurance rates climbed by more than 60 percent. Vallejo officials did not respond to a request for comment.Įntire states are having to adjust to insurers’ demands. ![]() Because of increased demand from troubled departments for its services, the California group has begun offering coverage nationwide. The city instead joined a high-risk insurance pool in California. In Vallejo, Calif., the city’s insurance risk pool threatened in 2017 to end coverage because of mounting police use-of-force claims unless officials agreed to a higher deductible - a jump from $500,000 per claim to $2.5 million per claim. But the changes are widespread, affecting thousands of departments, according to interviews with more than two dozen insurance analysts, police reform experts and a review of hundreds of pages of insurance documents. There is no public data tracking how many police departments have made policy changes at the behest of their insurers. Louis risk pool, which has required each city to overhaul its police pursuit policy. The city is just one of a dozen in the St. Ann police also affected departments beyond this blue-collar town of about 13,000 people. Ann police and their priorities that the voice of their insurers spoke louder than human lives,” Chasnoff said. Ann to retool its chase policy, said he is dismayed that the catalyst for change was money - not the injuries to people including Cox. John Chasnoff, a local activist who fought for years to get St. “If you’re a proactive police department and you go out there and you search for a crime, your stats are higher because you’re fighting crime, you’re chasing more cars, you’re making more arrests,” he said. Jimenez attributes that drop primarily to officers’ inability to chase motorists for minor infractions. While dozens of arrests have been made using the GPS technology, overall arrests in the city have fallen more than 30 percent since the change. ![]() Sticky darts containing GPS trackers are shot from the front of patrol cars onto the backs of vehicles that speed away, so officers can fall back and catch up with them later. The forced changes prompted Jimenez to equip his patrol cars with new technology to help nab motorists who try to outrun police. So far this year, the department says, there have been three crashes with no injuries. Since the retooling, which took effect in January 2019, the number of police pursuits annually has increased slightly, but crashes during pursuits have dropped: from 25 in 2018 with eight injuries to 10 in 2021 with three injuries, according to data provided by the department. Now, insurers also are telling departments that they must change the way they police. This insulates them from external demands by insurers.ĭepartments with a long history of large civil rights settlements have seen their insurance rates shoot up by 200 to 400 percent over the past three years, according to insurance industry and police experts.Įven departments with few problems are experiencing rate increases of 30 to 100 percent. Larger law enforcement agencies - like the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department or the New York Police Department - handle it in different ways, often by creating a special fund to finance settlements or by paying those costs from the county’s or city’s general fund. Insurance companies are passing the costs - and potential future costs - on to their law enforcement clients. Those cases led to settlements of $12 million and $27 million, respectively. The movement is driven by the increasingly large jury awards and settlements that cities and their insurers are paying in police use-of-force cases, especially since the 2020 deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Where community activists, use-of-force victims and city officials have failed to persuade police departments to change dangerous and sometimes deadly policing practices, insurers are successfully dictating changes to tactics and policies, mostly at small to medium-size departments throughout the nation. I was going to have to lose 10 officers to pay for it.” “If I didn’t do it, the insurance rates were going to go way up. “I didn’t really have a choice,” Jimenez said in an interview. Jimenez’s attitude swiftly shifted: In 2019, 18 months after the chase that left Cox permanently disabled, the chief and his 48-member department agreed to ban high-speed pursuits for traffic infractions and minor, nonviolent crimes. The Post’s podcast investigates no-knock search warrants. An examination of policing in America amid the push for reform. ![]()
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