&gt; ...or at least in the interests of the city that would regularly have to pay out presumptive damages...<p>Key challenge with this strategy is the big latency between paying out damages and consequences for the police officer or even department. The bigger the metro, the bigger the latency. Large metro budgets can temporarily cover for the few million dollar payouts that happen to make the daunting gauntlet all the way through to a final, no-appeal judicial judgement, even a few every 3-5 years over a long, long period of time. There is a natural impedance in metro political circles to &quot;protect&quot; the police unless an incident is sufficiently egregious.<p>I&#x27;m believe this adverse behavior pattern won&#x27;t stop until a legal concept similar to the corporate veil is established for police officers (all the way up to and including police chiefs). Some kind of legal doctrine that spells out when certain conditions are met, individual officers must be deprived of city and departmental support; their &quot;blue veil&quot; so to speak is &quot;pierced&quot;. They can still obtain support from private sources like the union, but they are on as much the same footing as a civilian as can be legally established. As a society we can hash out what those conditions are. Some might argue just destroyed dashcam data is sufficient. Others might argue for a much, much higher bar.