Most of the time, people consider involving insurance companies in police action when it comes to cops covering their own losses in § 1983 cases. This arose as an unfortunate collateral error by those seeking to eliminate qualified immunity, who harped on cops “getting away with it” because of QI, which was extrapolated to losses being paid by the municipalities or insurance. That’s the cost of exaggerating and dissembling, but I digest.

There is another time when insurance comes into play, as reflected in a Washington Post  “Investigation” that begins with the requisite anecdote.

A patrol officer spotted a white minivan with an expired license plate, flipped on his lights and siren, and when the driver failed to stop, gave chase. The driver fled in rush-hour traffic at speeds of up to 90 mph, as other officers joined in the pursuit. Ten miles later, the van slammed into a green Toyota Camry, leaving its 55-year-old driver, Brent Cox, permanently disabled.

The point of the anecdote is to preface the St. Ann, Missouri, police department being told by its insurance carrier that unless it’s pursuit policy changes, it will pull its coverage.

Then, an otherwise silent stakeholder stepped in. The St. Louis Area Insurance Trust risk pool — which provided liability coverage to the city of St. Ann and the police department — threatened to cancel coverage if the department didn’t impose restrictions on its use of police chases. City officials shopped around for alternative coverage but soon learned that costs would nearly double if they did not agree to their insurer’s demands.

This is, of course, a heartwarming anecdote, since it’s well known that police car chases are very dangerous and too often result in injury or death, either to the person pursued or an innocent bystander. Constraining chases is smart policy, and while it might have been better had it been instituted for the right reasons, better that it be forced by the insurance company for monetary reasons than not be changed at all. Yay, a win! So insurance companies are the good guys.

And there are other benefits to police insurers, not the least of which is that they are more inclined to settle cases than to fight to the death for qualified immunity or risk a huge verdict due to the heightened public outrage at police violence.

Working with insurers, cities and counties often will write checks to settle claims of police misconduct to avoid the additional costs of fighting the allegations in court. The increased scrutiny of police has led them to settle cases more quickly to avoid jurors who also may now be more likely to second-guess officers and their tactics.

This, too, is a heartwarming outcome, also militating in favor of insurers getting more involved in the nuts and bolts of police operations. And for departments that seemed incapable of controlling their officers’ use of force, the threat of a carrier canceling coverage was very real.

In 2009, a local insurance risk pool warned the 60-officer Maywood Police Department in California that it would lose its coverage if it did not enact more than a dozen changes focused on reducing violent encounters with the public. When police failed to do so, the risk pool pulled its coverage, and the department disbanded.

But insurers are becoming more deeply involved in the functioning of police department, doing what “defund” activists were unable to do.

For some police departments, insurers are refusing even to provide initial coverage unless they change their policies on a variety of matters including body cameras and chokeholds, according to industry experts.

Commonly, groups of neighboring departments make up pools to lower premiums for the group, but are then at the mercy of each department’s policies, since the cancellation of any department that has a policy the insurer finds too risky means the premiums go up for the pool

For police departments within these pools, the serious risks they may take can also drive up rates and deductibles for other members. Because of this, the pool may threaten to expel a city, county or township if its police department refuses to take steps to minimize risk.

So far, it all sounds like the insurance companies are doing a great service by dictating that police departments stop engaging in improper conduct like chokeholds and high speed pursuits, and initiating salutary policies like body cams and de-escalation. So what’s the problem?

Insurance companies do not exist to make sure that the police perform the public services for which police departments exist. If we assume that domestic violence calls tend to result in empirically high risk of violent police encounters, what if insurance carriers dictate that police response to such calls not occur until fifteen minutes after the call comes in, when it’s empirically more likely that the domestic violence incident will be over and there will be significant reduced likelihood of policing having to deal with a husband beating his wife? By the time they get there, the wife is either beaten or dead, but the cop is far less likely to be engaged in risky  behavior?

Or another scenario where the cops are called for an active gunman, and are required to engage in 30 minutes of de-escalation efforts before use of deadly force. Except during that time, the active shooter kills a dozen people while the cops are trying to reason with him to no avail?

These hypos seem ridiculous, as there are situations where it’s obvious what the proper policy and police response should be under the circumstances, but insurers don’t care about such matters. They care about the risks they assume and the money they pay out. Once insurers realize the leverage they hold over police departments and their policy, and the public support they gain by dictating policies that the public tends to support, even if naively based upon a well-told anecdote, the power they hold will be used to their financial advantage despite what we expect of police.

Insurers will become the most powerful stakeholder in policing policy, and much as we may appreciate some of the choices they are imposing now, will we feel the same when we call the cops and no one shows up until the crime is over and there’s blood on the tracks?