Imagine being seriously injured by a truck driver as he rushes to finish a job. When you bring a lawsuit seeking compensation, you aren't limited to recovering damages from the driver individually; after all, he might lack the resources to pay. Instead, you can recover from the driver's company under a centuries-old legal doctrine that makes employers liable for injuries caused by their employees. It's called "respondeat superior" — Latin for "let the master answer."

Now suppose you're seriously injured by a police officer who uses excessive force and violates your civil rights. Although the officer, like the truck driver, probably doesn't have the money or insurance to pay a sizeable award, the law usually lets police departments off the hook.

In the wake of Ferguson, Eric Garner, and in-depth Justice Department critiques of several of America's largest police departments, this unfair rule should be changed in order to fairly compensate victims and prevent such abuses in the first place.

Change is already in the air. Police departments – including in Houston and Harris County — are rapidly moving to expand officers' use of body cameras. Several states are debating proposals to change how grand juries and prosecutors investigate officers. And Attorney General Eric Holder has suggested revising federal law to lower barriers that often preclude prosecutions.

But we should also update the law governing private civil suits against police departments. It is nearly impossible to hold a department civilly liable in some places.

Why? Because the Supreme Court interprets the applicable, Reconstruction-era federal law to limit a department's legal responsibility for an officer's excessive force to cases where the department itself has a policy that violates citizens' rights, or where it was "deliberately indifferent" to those rights. Employing the officer who perpetrated the violation – or even committing obvious and gross negligence in training or monitoring him – isn't enough.

This legal bar is too high, and it has bred a lottery-like system of widely disparate decisions. Like many elastic standards invented by judges, "deliberate indifference" means one thing to some and quite another thing to others.

A recent police shooting case I handled in Houston illustrates the problem. In fewer than seven years on the job, the officer involved amassed ten complaints from other citizens for using excessive force. At one point, he led the entire department in the number of times he Tased people. Then he shot and killed a suspect who several witnesses said had stopped resisting arrest and was standing unarmed several feet away. Some witnesses said he had his hands in the air.

Before the shooting, the department "investigated" the complaints against the officer by taking statements from the people involved, but it never reached a decision one way or the other as to what happened, let alone disciplined him for excessive force. Still, because he had four complaints in a single year, the officer was supposed to be considered for a special program of extra training, monitoring and counseling. Inexplicably, this never happened.

The officer disputes witnesses' accounts of the shooting, and so the victim's family's case against him is proceeding to trial. But a significant verdict against the officer alone will almost certainly go unpaid.

Meanwhile, Texas federal courts ruled that the case against the department wasn't even strong enough to reach a jury. The department's weak internal investigations and failure to abide by its own policy on retraining officers didn't add up to "deliberate indifference," according to these judges. Yet previous similar cases suggest that courts in other jurisdictions may well have reached a different judgment.

Given this patchwork of civil rights protection and the stringent-but-hazy legal standard, any changes to federal civil rights law should include language clarifying that police departments will be liable if their officers are found liable — just as with every private employer. At the least, departments should be liable for their own negligence.

After all, police departments are supposed to make sure their officers avoid trampling on civil rights. What greater incentive could we give them to meet this basic goal and reduce violations than holding them liable for monetary awards imposed by juries when their officers use excessive force?

Alternately, Texas and other states can enact laws providing that police departments will pay the full amount of awards assessed against their officers, or require departments to fully insure them. Many states and localities already have such provisions.

In Houston, though, an ordinance limits the city's payment of judgments against police officers and other employees to $100,000 per plaintiff. This is far too low to compensate victims of serious abuse, especially when much of it has to cover legal fees and litigation expenses. Nor would changing the rules threaten the city's finances; individual officers enjoy immunity from liability in many cases, and verdicts against them are rare.

Of course, the vast majority of police officers here and elsewhere respect citizens' civil rights and do their jobs admirably under hazardous conditions. They deserve our vocal praise and respect.

But private civil lawsuits are a crucial check on the few who cross the line. One way or the other, our federal or state representatives should make police departments take responsibility for their officers. The just and longstanding principle of "let the master answer" should apply to everyone, especially those we entrust with guns and the right to shoot.

Martin J. Siegel, a Houston appellate lawyer, has represented plaintiffs in excessive force cases, including Robbie Tolan, an African-American baseball player shot by a Bellaire police officer in front of his parents' home. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tolan's favor last year. While an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York City, Siegel also defended federal law enforcement officers in excessive force cases and investigated such claims against local police.

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