Stop Subsidizing Misconduct:
Why Your City Council Must Adopt The Higher Standards, Safer Streets Act.
For too long, our community has been told that meaningful police reform must come from Washington, D.C. But the truth is, the power to fundamentally restructure how our police department operates sits right here in this room. Mayors, city councils, and local police chiefs are the ones who control our municipal budgets, negotiate police union contracts, and dictate local hiring standards.
It is time we stop treating law enforcement as a protected class and start treating it as a rigorous profession. As taxpayers and residents, we are calling on this council to adopt the three core pillars of The Higher Standards, Safer Streets Act.
1. Demand Education First: 12 Credit Hours of Constitutional Law Currently, the educational bar to become a police officer in the United States is alarmingly low, with over 81% of local law enforcement agencies requiring nothing more than a high school diploma or a GED. Our recruits are then sent to academies that prioritize tactical skills, providing roughly 50 hours of firearms training but less than 10 hours of de-escalation training. We are placing officers on the street to make split-second decisions with a severe lack of deep legal knowledge.
This council must raise our local hiring standards to require a minimum of 12 credit hours of college-level constitutional law before an officer is granted the power to restrict freedom or use force. Officers must understand the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments so they can distinguish between behavior that is genuinely unlawful and behavior that merely makes them uncomfortable. We do not even need to find new money in the budget to achieve this; our department, like many across the country, likely already spends funds on “after-the-fact” tuition reimbursement for active officers. The city council should simply reallocate those funds to pay for this education upfront, ensuring we do not price out lower-income recruits while raising the intellectual floor of our force.
2. End Taxpayer Subsidies for Misconduct: Mandate Malpractice Insurance Right now, taxpayers are being forced to subsidize institutional failure. Because officers are “virtually always” indemnified by their employers, they personally pay almost nothing for their legal defense or the resulting multimillion-dollar civil settlements when they commit misconduct. To afford these payouts, cities are forced to drain general funds, slash essential public services, or issue municipal debt known as “police brutality bonds,” which allow Wall Street to profit off of police violence through interest and underwriting fees.
This council has the power to change local employment contracts to mandate that every sworn officer carry individual professional malpractice insurance, just like doctors and lawyers do. By adopting a “split-premium” model, the city can agree to cover the standard base rate for liability coverage, but refuse to subsidize the penalty rates of high-risk officers. Under this market-driven system, insurance companies act as objective regulators. If a bad officer acts recklessly or racks up excessive complaints, their individual premiums will skyrocket. Because the city will not pay the difference, repeat offenders will eventually become completely uninsurable and therefore permanently unemployable. This allows the city to permanently rid its force of dangerous officers without fighting prolonged, expensive union battles over discipline.
3. Prevent Burnout and Stagnation: 10-Year Limits on Beat Patrol Finally, we must recognize that leaving an officer in the exact same high-stress, street-level patrol role for decades is a recipe for complacency, burnout, and broken community trust. This council must work with the police chief to cap street-level tenure at 10 years.
Limiting beat tenure transforms policing from a stagnant job into a dynamic, upwardly mobile profession. After 10 years, officers would be structurally forced to advance their careers by moving up in rank, specializing as detectives, or mentoring younger recruits. This ensures that the officers interacting most frequently with the public remain alert, ambitious, and actively engaged in continuous professional development.
Conclusion We can no longer afford to accept a system that drains our city’s budget to pay for constitutional violations. We are demanding proactive education, strict personal financial liability through the insurance market, and continuous professional growth. Adopting The Higher Standards, Safer Streets Act locally is the ultimate risk-management strategy—it protects the taxpayers, rewards excellent officers, and protects the civil rights of our community.