Underwriting Key West’s
Police Brutality
Martha K. Huggins, Ph.D.*
Tulane University Emerita
The
Key West Citizen wrote on January
30—after The Blue Paper had broken this news many hours before—that
a $900,000 settlement had been “hammered out” in the Charles Eimers’ wrongful
death suit against the City of Key West.
Key West’s Police Chief Donie Lee finds the payout a “difficult decision
to accept” but understands that the city’s insurer made a “business decision.” Spokeswoman Allison Crean claims that, “No
taxpayer dollars are involved in the settlement.” She adds that,
“Mounting legal costs were the reason the city’s insurance carrier ‘made a
business decision to settle’.” Chief
Lee and his police will not have to assume responsibility for the deadly
outcome of Eimers’ police Taser take-down and death-by-smothering. Who’s left to
clean up this civil rights case? The taxpayers!
Taxpayer
monies absolutely are part of Eimeirs’
wrongful death settlement. Between 2011 and 2013 Key West City government used our
taxes to pay Preferred Government Insurance Trust $142,118 for law enforcement-related
liability insurance policies. This
insurance does not cover rank-and-file police; it protects only Key West
government and its officials--and very likely Chief Donnie Lee as well—against police
brutality’s possibly expensive economic blow-back. The combined annual cost of the city’s four police
liability policies increased just a little over $2K between 2011 and 2012, but
the total cost shot up $15K between 2012 and 2013, in other words, by
more than 11% in one year. One can
expect a similar or even larger escalation for 2015 and thereafter due to the
Eimers’ settlement and any other police abuse suits the city loses or mediates
away.
But
not all
Key West taxpayers bear an
equal economic burden. As in other US
cities, it is Key West’s poorer and struggling middle class families who pay
disproportionately the taxes--excise, food, rental, property—that protect Key
West government against known police lawlessness. The Conch Republic’s richer residents have a
lower proportion of their family incomes
burdened by such taxes. Historically,
nationally and in Key West wealthier Americans are proportionally much less
likely to be victims of police brutality
while poorer and middle-class people are far more likely to be such victims.
An
additional cost of police misconduct results from the fact that most liability insurers stipulate (and state
law usually requires) that an insured state, county, or municipal
government must also set aside each year
a mandated amount--often between one-third
and two-thirds of the previous two- or three-year’s real or expected
police brutality payouts--to cover the next year’s potential losses. This self-insured retention (SIR), as
insurers call it, goes into the insured government’s ‘reserve’ fund to pay
possible court judgments, settlements,
and legal fees related to police violations of
civil rights, up to the amount at which a government’s insurance policy kicks in above the SIR
(‘deductable’). All of Key West’s law
enforcement liability policies have such a SIR, hence the city must use its
taxpayer-fed reserve to pay part of the Eimers’ lawsuit indemnification.
While
writing a book, Underwriting Police
Brutality, I’ve plodded through US city, county, and state laws, struggled with
opaque and misleading municipal and state budgets, and pestered large corporate insurers to release some
well-guarded facts. Through a public
records request last April that I learned of Key West government’s four law
enforcement-related insurance policies: General Liability and Law Enforcement
Liability, and Public Officials’ Errors and Omissions (E&O), and Directors’
and Officers’ (D&O) insurance. Key
West thus insures against its executives
against its cops’ expected
lawlessness.
The
cops themselves have to purchase their own costly liability insurance—although
most do not. When a suit is brought
against police they either hire their own attorney or they get one from their
powerful Police Benevolent Association (PBA)—as
Key West’s Officer Lovette is reported to have done. Some US law enforcement officers have let
themselves be represented by one of their state or local government’s own attorneys,
only to realize too late that this is a serious conflict of interests. A government’s interests are usually at odds
with those of its defendant cop, whose illegalities--if well-documented-- could bring down political and police superiors. Someone’s got to take the fall and in the
Eimer’s case, Officer Lovell is doing that.
This ‘one bad cop’s’ ultimately well documented actions could well divert public attention from the real foundations
of police lawlessness—powerful exclusionist real estate and tourism pressure
groups and the politicians, government officials who work for them, and the voters who support this faction—leaving
police with the onerous task of controlling at any expense those excluded from civil
society.
‘Avoid a trial at any
cost,’ is the mantra of police brutality insurers and their government clients.
Therefore, they assign to law enforcement the initial work of covering up
evidence. Clearly
Charles Eimers’ death by Key West police was quickly (and literally) “slabbed”—laid
to rest—when his body was taken to a mortuary rather than for forensic evidence
collection . Thereafter, evidence
that came to light was ignored or hidden in bureaucratic finagling, crucial
facts were denied, and other alleged facts were cooked up. If Key West’s Blue Paper had not short-circuited media,
police, state, and Key West city government efforts to kill serious investigations
into Eimers’ slaying, his death by police would have remained, at best, a
mystery. Key West’s Blue Paper
acted as a free
and critical press which is our best asset for holding local governments to a
democratic standard.
Yet
why wouldn’t a city’s executives want police
brutality law suits to disappear? Payouts,
a volatile expense for state and local governments and their taxpayers, can
quickly devolve into new expenses. In
most US municipalities if the government cannot disperse its part of a lump-sum
settlement it is required to pay the awardee annual interest on the settlements
remaining debt. Cities with lawsuit payouts that exceed their ability to pay
issue bonds to cover the exponentially higher settlement costs and interest attached to them—Chicago, no stranger
to police violations of civilians’ civil
rights, recently sold almost $1 billion in
general obligation bonds—these and other such bonds are usually backed by property tax payments--just to pay the law
suits resulting from Chicago’s ‘finest’ torturing largely poor, often older, black men. Los Angeles officials tried unsuccessfully to
divert federal funds slated for a ‘No Smoking’ campaign to cover the city’s police
violence lawsuits. And in 2013,
Fullerton, California, with a predominately urban population of almost 139,000,
had to sell over $7 million in bonds to
cover two liability suits--one of these a $1 million settlement involving police
brutality. Issuing such bonds to pay settlements
and court judgments resulting from police violations of civil rights, locks a city’s taxpayers into decades of debt
service payments. Fullerton City’s bonds,
with an interest rate of up to 6% to be paid over a 20 year period, left that
city’s taxpayers forking out $550,000 in debt service annually. Police brutality creates the ponding headache
that that never goes away: As taxpayers foot the bill for old settlements and
court judgments, new police brutality suits are added and these along with
older ones often come with interest payments.
Using
tax dollars to pay police brutality settlements and judgments turns Key West’s taxpayers
into police brutality underwriters. In
my opinion, we should instead be dedicating tax monies to Key West’s
underfunded and racially segregated schools and toward creating adequate public
workforce housing. The next time Key
West claims it is without funds to invest in the improvements you want, ask what
portion of your taxes go instead toward paying expected and actual local police
brutality’s costs.
Insuring
Key West against the economic costs of police brutality is predicated upon the
actuarial assumption that police civil rights violations are inevitable. Indeed, Eugene O’Donnell, former NYPD officer and
prosecutor, who is a professor at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal
Justice, argues that “Brutality is part of the police job.”
Yet
by buying into this mind-set tax payers become partners in allowing and hiding
police violations of civil rights: Impunity, fed by a lack of consequences for
police brutality, breeds more police lawlessness. And while it seems--as
liability insurers and city managers often claim--that law suits have become a US
“cottage industry,” in fact only a small
fraction of police brutality’s aggrieved victims even file a suit, with few of
these suits ever becoming viable, and then
only a small portion of these receive a court-mandated
judgment or settlement. Meanwhile, those
risk-managing public images of blame for lawsuit costs promote the claim that, ‘Everyone
wants to sue and predatory lawyers reap the gains.’
In fact,
insurers and their actuaries know that police civil rights violations occur
regularly in the US. Corporate liability
insurers recognize that police lawlessness is institutionally rooted in what
some criminologists call a “defensive bureaucracy,” which is why police
organizations do not yield to transparency.
This protects illegal police actions which often emanate from the
implicit and explicit commands of higher-ups. If police brutality were merely an unusual, atypical action of ‘a few bad cops,’ as we are regularly told, then
there would be no need for corporate insurers and their agents to develop new
police liability insurance lines, or to tweak existing ones to enhance client affordability,
or to--as insurers say-- “prospect” for
new government clients. Police liability
insurers need police lawlessness, or
at least a government’s fear of its consequences, to grow their client liability
insurance base. In turn, police liability
insurers protect themselves against catastrophic losses—as these are defined by
the profit/loss expectations of their boards of directors—by taking out a “reinsurance”
policy that transfers some of their risk to other
insurers or alternative institutions.
And of course police liability insurers
also off-set risk by wagering on the stock market to (hopefully) fatten their
holdings against multiple insurers’ catastrophic disasters.
Key West’s
Citizen Review Board (CRB) is right to finally request an FBI investigation
into Charles Eimers’ death. The Monroe
County Commissioners should support this initiative; it might uncover and disclose
new information for the CRB, the latter is yet another, albeit small, taxpayer cost generated by the past police lawlessness
in Key West. All Keywesters will continue paying the moral costs of Eimers’
death. Lawless police, with their Superintendents,
Chiefs, and Commanders, and the other public officials who enable and hide
police lawlessness, as well as bystander taxpayers who fail to question where
their taxes are going, weaken the quality of America’s already very imperfect democracy.
Using city revenues
to manage and thus hide, rather than eliminate, police lawlessness is one of
the greatest threats to democracy on streets, parks, and beaches where most
Keywesters live. Public police actions
powerfully communicate for all to see, which people have rights—“good citizens”--
and which people do not—the apparent and actual homeless, the assumed and
actually mentally ill, and poor people
of color whose status as ‘matter out of place’ offends business and public
consciousness.
*Martha K
Huggins’ 8 books and numerous articles have been published in the US and
internationally. Writing on human rights, her 40-year research and college and
university career (Union College, Schenectady, NY and Tulane University, (New
Orleans, LA) have focused on police violence in the US and Brazil.
