Law Enforcement
PROPOSED / DRAFT — NEUTRAL CHARGING REVIEW, TRAINING, LIABILITY & INSURANCE
Police officers are trained to investigate, preserve evidence, respond to danger, and document events. Most are not licensed attorneys and should not be expected to make the final technical decision about which criminal statutes and elements apply.
A neutral licensed prosecutor must independently determine whether reported conduct constitutes a crime, whether admissible evidence supports each required element, and whether any charge should be filed. The prosecutor must not merely approve an officer’s preferred charge and should document the evidentiary and legal basis for filing or declining a case.
Knowingly fabricating facts, deliberately omitting material exculpatory information, retaliating through the criminal process, or acting with reckless disregard for whether any crime occurred should create personal accountability when the misconduct is egregious and materially causes an unlawful arrest, detention, prosecution, or other injury.
Qualified immunity should be restricted so it does not bar civil liability for clearly unlawful conduct, deliberate fabrication, retaliation, evidence tampering, intentional material omissions, or objectively egregious violations that a reasonably trained officer would understand. Good-faith mistakes made under uncertain law or rapidly evolving emergencies remain distinct from deliberate or reckless misconduct.
Where the evidence proves the required criminal elements, an officer or other official remains subject to criminal prosecution under the same law and burden of proof as anyone else. Civil remedies should compensate people who suffer proven harm without treating every disputed judgment call as criminal conduct.
Law-enforcement officers and agencies should maintain professional liability coverage comparable in purpose to coverage used in medicine and other high-responsibility professions. Coverage may include an employer-funded base policy, but repeated verified misconduct may increase the responsible officer’s personal premium, deductible, corrective-training requirement, or eligibility for continued employment. Taxpayers should not automatically absorb every judgment arising from deliberate or egregious personal misconduct.
Insurance rules must not allow private insurers to control lawful police policy, conceal claims, evade public-records laws, or make necessary policing impossible in high-risk communities. Serious claims, settlements, premiums, exclusions, and loss-prevention findings should be transparently audited while protecting lawful privacy.
Police training should be substantially expanded and recurring. Required subjects should include constitutional law, criminal elements, report writing, evidence and disclosure duties, de-escalation, crisis intervention, mental illness and disability, domestic violence, trauma, interviewing, bias-free enforcement, use of force, medical aid, civil liability, courtroom testimony, digital evidence, and recognition of exculpatory evidence.
Officers should be rewarded for verified lawful performance: accurate reports, credible investigations, legitimate public-safety interventions, de-escalation, evidence integrity, professional conduct, community trust, successful training, and sustained service without serious misconduct. Rewards must not be based on arrest, charge, citation, search, seizure, or revenue quotas.
GOVERNMENT & POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY
A badge, government title, or public office should never place someone above the law.
MPA supports:
Independent investigation of serious misconduct
Strong evidence-preservation requirements
Body-camera standards
Professional police licensing
Nationally visible decertification for serious misconduct
Strong whistleblower protections
Accountability for deliberate evidence fabrication
Accountability for criminal constitutional violations
Stronger remedies for serious proven government misconduct
Police officers deserve due process and strong legal protection when lawfully performing dangerous responsibilities.
They should not receive immunity for conduct that would constitute a crime if committed by anyone else.
Same crime. Same law. Same justice.
LAW ENFORCEMENT
MPA is both pro-police and pro-accountability.
Police should receive substantially better:
Education
Training
Compensation
Supervision
Mental-health support
Professional licensing
Training should heavily emphasize:
Constitutional law
Civil rights
Use of force
De-escalation
Mental-health response
Medical response
Evidence
Communication
Ethics
Officers who lose professional certification for serious misconduct should not simply relocate and continue policing elsewhere.
Police officers deserve due process.
A badge should protect lawful authority. It should never protect criminal conduct.
PROPOSED / DRAFT — PROPORTIONAL POLICING & EXPLAINED USE OF FORCE
The purpose of policing is to protect the public, enforce the law, and resolve incidents with the least force reasonably necessary.
Officers should identify themselves where feasible, explain the reason for a stop or enforcement action, provide clear lawful instructions, allow reasonable time to comply, and use de-escalation, distance, cover, communication, and additional resources when safe.
For nonviolent, low-level offenses that do not present an immediate danger, officers should ordinarily prefer warnings, citations, summonses, civil fines, scheduled court appearances, or other noncustodial enforcement. Physical arrest or hands-on force should not be used merely for convenience, punishment, disrespect, verbal criticism, or passive noncompliance when a safe and effective alternative exists.
Physical custody or force remains permissible when objectively reasonable and necessary to address an imminent safety threat, active assault, dangerous resistance, flight presenting a material public-safety risk, destruction of critical evidence, inability to identify a person when identity is lawfully required, or another legally mandated custodial action.
Force must be proportional to the threat and resistance actually encountered, must stop when the justification ends, and must never be retaliatory. Deadly force is reserved for an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.
Officers have a duty to intervene against clearly unlawful force, promptly render or summon medical aid, report force accurately, and preserve body-camera and related evidence. Agencies should publish use-of-force policies and aggregate data while protecting victims and legitimate investigations.
PROPOSED / DRAFT — PROSECUTOR-CONTROLLED CHARGING & ARREST LIMITS
Police officers should investigate incidents, preserve evidence, protect people from immediate danger, identify involved persons, and prepare complete and accurate reports. Criminal charges should be selected, approved, and filed only by a licensed prosecuting attorney acting through the appropriate district attorney or public prosecutor’s office.
Police should not independently determine the final criminal counts. Prosecutors must review the facts, available evidence, legal elements, defenses, proportionality, public safety, and likelihood of proof before deciding what charge—if any—should be filed. Charging decisions and declinations should be documented under consistent office policies, with safeguards against favoritism, retaliation, and political influence.
Custodial arrest and jail booking should ordinarily be limited to violent offenses, assault, actual or attempted harm, credible threats of violence, serious danger to the public or a victim, flight risk, evidence tampering, or another circumstance in which a court-authorized detention is reasonably necessary. Nonviolent matters should ordinarily use reports, citations, summonses, warrants, or court notices.
Police may take lawful noncustodial protective or evidence-preservation actions—including towing or impounding vehicles, securing property, separating parties, serving orders, or temporarily controlling a dangerous scene—when supported by law and due process.
Nothing in this proposal prevents an officer from stopping an imminent threat, making a lawful emergency arrest, or holding a dangerous person for prompt prosecutorial and judicial review.
IMPLEMENTATION & ACCOUNTABILITY
Establish statewide professional licensing with minimum recurring training, transparent discipline, due process, and a national decertification record for serious misconduct.
Require body cameras for enforcement contacts where practicable, clear activation rules, secure retention, prompt defense access, and penalties for intentional evidence destruction or disabling.
Create independent investigation and prosecution procedures for deaths, serious bodily injury, alleged evidence fabrication, and credible conflicts of interest.
Require written, reviewable charging decisions by prosecutors and prohibit arrest, citation, search, seizure, and revenue quotas.
Publish agency-level data on stops, searches, force, complaints, discipline, lawsuits, settlements, response times, clearance rates, staffing, training, and officer assaults, with privacy and investigative safeguards.
Expand co-response and crisis teams where evidence shows they safely improve outcomes, while keeping armed response available for genuine danger.
PROPOSED / DRAFT — NATIONAL CERTIFICATION HOLD & DECERTIFICATION STANDARD
A person should not be able to escape a serious misconduct investigation by resigning, retiring, transferring, or taking another law-enforcement-related position.
National Investigative Hold
Any peace officer, corrections officer, detention officer, probation or parole officer, or public or private security officer who resigns, retires, transfers, or otherwise leaves employment while under investigation for serious misconduct must have every related peace officer, corrections, detention, or security certification placed on a national investigative hold. The same hold applies when an officer is fired before the certification authority completes its review.
During the hold, every affected certification is inactive by operation of law. The person may not be hired, transferred, recertified, or employed anywhere in the United States as a peace officer, corrections officer, detention officer, probation or parole officer, public or private security officer, or in another substantially similar law-enforcement or public-safety position until the investigation and certification review are completed.
Covered Serious Misconduct
Covered serious misconduct includes:
false arrest, unlawful detention, unlawful imprisonment, kidnapping under color of law, or knowingly prolonging custody without lawful authority;
fabricating probable cause, warrant information, criminal charges, reports, testimony, or evidence;
knowingly or recklessly conducting an unconstitutional search or seizure;
retaliatory arrest, detention, citation, search, seizure, or prosecution for protected speech, criticism, complaint activity, or lawful recording;
unlawful or excessive force, knowing constitutional violations, evidence concealment or destruction, false reports, or perjury;
corruption, bribery, theft, fraud, sexual misconduct, other serious criminal conduct, abuse of authority, or unlawful discrimination or retaliation;
deliberately failing to intervene in or report serious misconduct; or
knowingly concealing, assisting, directing, facilitating, or materially participating in any covered misconduct.
Investigation Continues After Departure
Resignation, retirement, termination, or transfer does not end the investigation. The original agency must preserve the evidence, complete the investigation, and report the result to the certifying authority and a nationally searchable certification registry. No agency may close a case merely because the person left, or use a resignation agreement, confidential settlement, administrative classification, or transfer to conceal the investigation or avoid mandatory reporting.
Pay Status
The employing department determines whether the person remains paid, is placed on unpaid leave, or receives another lawful employment status during the investigation, subject to governing law and any valid employment agreement. Pay status does not remove or weaken the certification hold and does not authorize work in a prohibited position.
Evidence, Due Process, and Deadline
A complaint alone does not create the national hold. A preliminary written finding of credible evidence is required, except that an immediate short-term hold may be imposed when reasonably necessary to protect the public, witnesses, or evidence.
The person must receive notice, access to the allegations and evidence consistent with legitimate witness and investigative protections, representation, an opportunity to respond, an independent decision, and an appeal. The investigation and initial written decision must be completed within 30 calendar days. An independent appeal must be decided within the next 30 calendar days. A complaint or final independent review must conclude within the following 30 calendar days. On day 91, administrative remedies are exhausted and the person or government may seek judicial review.
Final Result
If the allegation is not substantiated, the hold must be removed immediately and every registry record corrected. If serious misconduct is substantiated, the certification must be suspended or permanently revoked according to the severity, intent, harm, and complete record, with ordinary due process and appeal rights.
Federal Implementation
The federal government should apply this standard directly to federal law-enforcement and corrections personnel, establish the national registry, require covered employers to check it before hiring or transferring personnel, and condition relevant federal law-enforcement funding on state and local compliance.
WHAT MPA WILL MEASURE
Violent-crime clearance rates; emergency response times; use-of-force injuries and deaths; complaints sustained and reversed; body-camera compliance; training completion; officer injuries and retention; repeat misconduct; civil judgments; prosecutorial review times; and community trust measured through transparent, methodologically sound surveys.
Constitutional Rights and Government Accountability
Civil Accountability for Constitutional Violations
Any law-enforcement officer, corrections officer, prosecutor, judge, elected official, appointed official, regulator, public employee, or private party exercising delegated government authority who knowingly violates a person’s clearly protected constitutional rights should be subject to a civil statutory award of not less than $50,000 and not more than $20,000,000 for each injured person.
This statutory award does not cap recovery of proven medical costs, lost wages, property loss, attorney fees, or other damages authorized by law.
Criminal Liability for Willful Constitutional Violations
A person who knowingly and willfully uses, directs, or materially assists the use of government authority to violate clearly protected constitutional rights should face imprisonment ranging from 1 day to 20 years for this offense, based on duration, severity, intent, harm, abuse of authority, and prior misconduct.
The same accountability applies to anyone who knowingly orders, authorizes, directs, assists, facilitates, causes, prolongs, conceals in furtherance of, or otherwise materially participates in the violation. An official who has a legal duty and reasonable opportunity to intervene is covered when the official knowingly allows the violation to continue. Mere presence, employment, supervision, or learning of the conduct only afterward is not sufficient by itself.
Matched Sentences for Unlawful Loss of Liberty
When a knowing and willful constitutional violation unlawfully deprives a person of liberty for at least one hour, the person responsible should receive a mandatory minimum term tied to the duration of the unlawful confinement:
One hour through 24 hours: at least 1 day.
More than 24 hours: at least 1 day for each full or partial 24-hour period of unlawful confinement.
Ten days of unlawful confinement: at least 10 days.
No term under this matched-duration rule may exceed 20 years for this offense.
A stop or detention lasting less than one hour is not a safe harbor. It may still be unconstitutional, may still trigger the $50,000 to $20,000,000 civil award, and may still be criminally prosecuted when the required knowing and willful intent is proven. The one-hour threshold applies only to the special matched-duration minimum.
Good-faith mistakes, reasonable legal disagreement, and genuinely unsettled constitutional questions should not be criminalized. Separate crimes, bodily injury, fabricated evidence, retaliation, kidnapping, sexual abuse, attempted killing, death, or other proven harms may support additional charges, damages, or sentences. Government authority should increase accountability, not reduce it.
Police Dereliction of Duty
Police retain legitimate discretion.
However, knowingly refusing a clearly mandatory lawful duty for corrupt, discriminatory, retaliatory, or partisan reasons may constitute official misconduct.
Examples may include:
refusing to respond to an active violent felony when reasonably able;
intentionally refusing to execute a valid court order;
deliberately refusing to document serious crimes;
knowingly permitting politically favored groups to commit serious criminal acts.
EQUAL CONDUCT, PERSONAL SPACE & OFFICER-CREATED ESCALATION
Law-enforcement officers may approach people, control a scene, establish a safety perimeter, and issue lawful movement instructions when an objective public-safety, investigative, or operational reason exists. Authority to control a scene is not authority to manufacture a confrontation.
Conduct Expected of Officers
An officer should not deliberately crowd a person's face, chest-bump, shove, touch, block a safe path, scream at close range, or display a weapon merely to intimidate, provoke, punish disrespect, or create a justification for force.
When feasible, an instruction to move or “back up†should state the required distance or location and the lawful safety or operational reason for the instruction.
Recording, observing, criticizing, asking a question, requesting a badge number, or maintaining a safe distance does not by itself constitute interference, obstruction, aggression, or a threat.
A startled movement, flinch, raised hands, step backward, verbal objection, or attempt to create distance should not be described as assault or resistance without objective evidence of intentional threatening or obstructive conduct.
An officer who unnecessarily closes distance or initiates unlawful physical contact may not rely solely on the person's proportionate defensive reaction to justify escalation or a resisting charge.
Documentation and Review
Body cameras should be activated before an enforcement approach when feasible and remain active through the end of the encounter.
Use-of-force review must consider who initiated physical contact, whether the officer created unnecessary jeopardy, whether clear instructions and time to comply were provided, whether the person had a safe way to comply, and whether the officer ignored a reasonable opportunity to disengage or de-escalate.
An unjustified failure to record or preserve available video should be documented and considered with the other evidence rather than automatically resolved in the officer's favor.
Repeated substantiated violations should require corrective training, discipline, suspension, or decertification according to severity. Intentional unlawful assault should be investigated and charged under the same criminal law applied to anyone else.
Core MPA standard: Officers receive lawful authority and strong protection while performing dangerous work. They do not receive a special right to initiate aggression and then treat the other person's defensive reaction as proof that the officer was the victim.
Reporting, Privacy and Compliance
A covered employer must report the opening of a qualifying serious-misconduct investigation, a departure during the investigation, a firing, and the final disposition to the certification authority and national registry within five business days.
Every covered employer must query the national registry before hiring, transferring, promoting, assigning coercive authority, or permitting unsupervised public contact. The employer must preserve the result and its final suitability decision.
A collective-bargaining agreement, resignation agreement, settlement, confidentiality clause, personnel classification, or record-destruction schedule may not defeat required evidence preservation, reporting, certification review, or a lawful registry entry.
Knowingly failing to report, concealing a qualifying investigation, falsifying a disposition, or hiring a person subject to an active hold may result in civil penalties, leadership removal after due process, certification consequences, loss of relevant federal funding, and criminal referral when the conduct constitutes obstruction, fraud, or another offense.
A pending investigative hold is available only to authorized investigators, certification bodies, and covered hiring authorities. The public registry should disclose only final substantiated dispositions and must protect victim, witness, medical, juvenile, classified, and legitimate operational information.
When an allegation is not substantiated, the active hold must be lifted immediately, public and hiring records must be corrected, and any necessary audit record must remain sealed from ordinary employment queries.
An independent annual audit must test reporting timeliness, missing records, improper access, hiring checks, overturned findings, reinstatement accuracy, and agency compliance. An unclassified aggregate report and corrective deadlines must be published.
Related detailed policy: Constitutional Rights, Official Accountability & Victim Compensation.
ACTIVE POLICE SCENES & THE 15-FOOT RULE
A person who is not directly involved in an active arrest, search, traffic stop, evidence collection, tactical response, or immediate-hazard response should remain at least 15 feet from an officer after receiving a clear lawful instruction, when a safe and practical place to stand is available.
The rule protects working space. It does not create a 15-foot zone in every police encounter and may not be used to suppress lawful speech, observation, journalism, recording, criticism, or presence on property where the person has a lawful reason to be.
A person does not violate the rule merely because:
An officer approaches the person or closes the distance.
The person was already within 15 feet when police arrived or when the situation became active.
A wall, crowd, traffic, terrain, disability, police position, blocked path, custody, or another circumstance prevents safe movement.
The person is a victim, witness, property owner, passenger, resident, worker, caregiver, or person seeking or providing emergency aid and cannot reasonably leave the area.
The officer gives inconsistent directions or fails to identify a safe place to move.
Before enforcement, the officer must identify the active situation, give a clear direction, point out a safe location when reasonably possible, and provide a reasonable opportunity to comply. Refusal after warning may support proportionate removal, citation, or arrest only when the conduct materially interferes with lawful duties or creates an objective safety threat. Mere proximity, words, criticism, or recording are not enough.
An officer may not create the violation by advancing on a stationary person, blocking the person’s retreat, ordering movement into danger, or using the rule as a pretext for a search, identification demand, detention, evidence seizure, or retaliation. Video and surrounding circumstances must be considered in any review.
MANDATORY PROFESSIONAL LIABILITY COVERAGE
Every sworn law-enforcement or corrections officer with authority to arrest, detain, search, seize property, or use force must maintain at least $1 million in individual professional-liability and legal-defense coverage as a condition of certification and employment. The policy must cover insurable personal-capacity civil claims and legal defense arising from official duties. It does not erase criminal liability, civil liability beyond policy limits, decertification, discipline, or victim remedies.
All individual officer coverage within the employing department must participate in a shared departmental liability pool. For a covered incident, the available $1 million officer limits may be combined to provide compensation of up to $20 million per injured person. Pool participation does not establish fault, create a disciplinary strike, increase a premium, or impose personal liability on an officer who did not participate in, direct, knowingly enable, or conceal the violation.
A department with fewer than 20 covered officers, exhausted limits, or otherwise insufficient pooled coverage must obtain excess coverage or participate in a regulated state or federal excess-liability pool sufficient to preserve the $20 million per-person maximum. Multiple injured people retain separate per-person protection. The department, insurers, and excess pool may determine their respective shares after payment, but compensation to the injured person may not be delayed by disputes among them.
The shared pool is intended to strengthen professional accountability within the department. Officers, supervisors, and leadership have a common interest in correcting unsafe practices, reporting serious misconduct, preserving evidence, intervening when lawfully able, and preventing known repeat offenders from exposing the public, fellow officers, and the department to avoidable harm. No officer may be retaliated against, denied protection, or penalized for making a good-faith report, preserving evidence, refusing an unlawful order, or cooperating with an independent investigation.
The employing agency must separately maintain institutional coverage for agency policy, training, supervision, staffing, equipment, recordkeeping, and other systemic or organizational failures. An agency may purchase group coverage or fund an ordinary base premium. After a final substantiated finding and due process, an officer may be required to bear experience-rated premium increases, deductibles, exclusions, or added training costs attributable to that officer’s misconduct. A complaint, allegation, arrest, or pending investigation alone may not increase the officer’s cost or count as misconduct.
Public funds may not pay a punitive amount, personal deductible, or experience-rated increase assigned to deliberate or egregious personal misconduct. Coverage must follow the officer across employing agencies, and claims history relevant to lawful underwriting and certification must be reported through the national certification system with privacy, accuracy, correction, and appeal protections.
Insurers may not direct police policy, charging, arrests, searches, discipline, certification, or investigative outcomes. An insurer may not conceal a claim, retaliate against a claimant or officer, or deny lawful coverage in bad faith. Intentional criminal conduct and some punitive damages may be legally uninsurable, so victims retain all civil remedies and the responsible agency remains accountable for institutional fault.
Small, rural, tribal, territorial, and financially limited agencies must have access to a regulated federal or state group pool so that coverage requirements do not eliminate legitimate departments or create unaffordable local burdens.
Preliminary Cost Estimate
Using approximately 842,000 full-time federal, state, and local sworn officers and currently advertised federal professional-liability premiums of roughly $290 to $490 per officer per year, the individual base-premium component is approximately $244 million to $413 million annually. A conservative base-premium planning range of $250 million to $500 million allows for administration, broader mandated terms, and market differences. If public reimbursement were limited to $150 per officer, the maximum direct reimbursement for that base layer would be approximately $126 million annually.
These figures do not price the shared departmental pool or the excess layer required to guarantee as much as $20 million per injured person. That cost depends on claims history, department size, covered conduct, exclusions, deductibles, aggregate limits, reinsurance, and loss experience and cannot responsibly be estimated from retail individual premiums alone. An independent actuarial and procurement review must establish the pooled and excess premium before implementation, with the estimate and assumptions published for public review.
SUPPORT FOR OFFICERS HELD TO A HIGH STANDARD
Higher professional standards require serious support. Law-enforcement and corrections employers should provide competitive pay, dependable benefits, safe staffing, modern equipment, reasonable schedules, adequate recovery time, paid training, earned leave, confidential counseling, trauma care, peer support, family support, and timely treatment for physical or psychological injuries.
Seeking lawful counseling or mental-health care must not by itself end an officer’s career or create stigma. Fitness decisions must be individualized, evidence-based, focused on actual ability and safety, and subject to due process. Agencies must measure forced overtime, vacancies, injuries, assaults, burnout, turnover, leave use, counseling access, training completion, and whether staffing and support are adequate for the duties imposed.
Core MPA standard: Give officers clear authority, safe working space, excellent training, fair pay, and real support. Hold them to the same Constitution and criminal law as everyone else.
Related policies: Search Warrants, Raids & Home Entry; Surveillance, Facial Recognition & Location Tracking; Courts, Trials, Appeals & Timely Justice; Criminal Justice, Prison, Jail & Detention Reform.
Status: Proposed / Draft — not yet formally adopted.
Originally published: August 15, 2026.
Last updated: October 4, 2026.
Version: Draft 0.13.