Police should be forced to carry professional insurance like doctors do. Absolute insanity that taxpayers end up footing the bill anytime the cops fuck up like this.
Man, I just spent this morning looking up the officer who (illegally) denied one of my FOIA requests. Turns out he was terminated for falsifying detail slips and lying about it (he was paid for an eight hour shift monitoring traffic at a construction project but spent 6 of those hours at town hall doing something for the police union and then tried to cover it up). Well, somehow he got reinstated with back pay to the tune of $500k. EVEN THAT came out of the town's general budget and not the police department budget-- backpay for police wages. Absurd.
Edit: Since his reinstatement in 2018 he's been promoted multiple times and is now the Deputy Police Chief rofl