Civil litigation basically means that the taxpayers are on the hook for any damages. I am betting if there were to be personal responsibility, these types are acts would be history.
Medical costs and insurance are already absurdly high
Police force is the largest expense for local governments, doubling or tripping the costs seems like an unwise and inefficient thing to do for a society
> Should computer programmers also shoulder responsibility and be insured like doctors?
Computer programmers aren't authorized and licensed by the government to inflict violence like police officers. Computer programmers are not licensed by the government to prescribe dangerous medications or perform surgeries.
The post office scandal wasn't the programers fault, the fault was on the post for prosecution of individuals for something that was the result of a known bug that they chose to try and cover up instead of getting it fixed. Its also the fault of the law makers for passing law that assumes the computer is always right unless the accused can show otherwise but not letting the accused have access to the program needed.
It’s almost like blaming Glock for police shootings…
It has nothing to do programmers and everything to do with Post Office’s management. If they bought buggy software they had years to seek recourse for that.
And yet many computer programmers and hardware developers, with or without any kind of license or certification, write or design systems that are critical to life and limb; everything including medical systems, airplane systems, automotive systems including drive-by-wire and 'self-driving, engineering systems for design of life critical structures, etc., etc., etc. It's not all low-consequence or recoverable like front end web dev or accounting software. And conversely, many actions of physicians and cops are inconsequential (while many are also life-or-death).
Ordinary developers are effectively just construction workers with a bit more creative freedom.
In al critical systems they are just one part of a chain and all their work has to be verified/validated by at least a few additional actors.
A policeman can just decide to randomly murder someone (and often face no repercussions). While a construction worker or a software developer can cause significant harm as well they almost never have near complete autonomy.
To use a similar example, in my state, you can build your own custom car or airplane from scratch and get it approved, no mechanic or engineering license needed.
Also, if you aren't working as an engineer for another company but are self employed, it's not a bad idea to get some form of errors and omissions insurance, which is comparable to the malpractice insurance doctors get.
I have a note on my desk "If there is a bad tech option." It's a reminder not to get mad when my boss or their boss decides something stupid. Like using GraphQL to upload large amounts of data. Or deciding a 5 person team should be developing micro-services. Or moving everything to tailwinds.
As a developer I don't have the power to stop these bad decisions. I just have to stew in them. Holding me responsible for the bad code that gets written to kludge past the bad decisions.
Better I suppose than the company that had me build a rails app to move millions of records an hour, hosted on their personal windows laptop. (yeah rails on windows)
>Front end web dev? Nah, who gives a shit. Embedded system that's fail deadly? Um, yes.
More likely that a frayed power cord (or one of a thousand other things) on your laptop will catch fire while you're on the client premise, causing thousands in damages, or that same laptop has some sort of trojan/virus that you spread through the client network, and you're on the hook for remediation.
IME, most of the time that's why an independent consultant needs business insurance. The quality of the work is generally handled by the contract.
This scenario seems borderline Palsgraph v. Long Island Rail Road [1].
There is liability / duty of care / grounds to sue for negligence only when the injury / damages were directly related to the nature of the business, not when there is an incidental freak accident which happens to occur on the premise.
What does front end dev work have to do with the statistical random chance that wires somewhere in the building are frayed?
Was “ adversarial oversight” a typo? Why would you want an adversarial anything with a department as crucial as the police? A solid working relationship with faith and trust running both ways is maybe what you meant.
In this sense "adversarial" has the same meaning that it does with respect to the relationship between the defense and the prosecution in a courtroom setting -- the best outcome is going to be achieved from the equilibrium of distinct organizations with incentives balanced against each other.
It's precisely because of the importance of policing that we don't want the people responsible for oversight and discipline of the police to have a "solid working relationship with faith and trust running both ways" -- there needs to be an arm's length relationship, with the watchdogs incentivized to monitor for wrongdoing, and the police somewhat afraid of being called out by them, certainly not buddy-buddy with them.
