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The purpose of these lawsuits isn't so much to make the victim whole as it is to serve as a deterrent for future bad behavior. No, a police officer probably isn't ever going to be able to pay a two million dollar judgment. But in some ways that's a stronger deterrent—any officer who gets such a judgment against him will spend the rest of his life hiding from it. He wakes up every morning not knowing if the contents of his bank account will gone, the subject of a court levy. Any property he owns will have liens on it. If he lives in a state with wage garnishment, he'll see 25% of his paycheck cut out until the judgment is paid off. And since he's never paying it off, it's going to accumulate interest at a statutory rate (usually around 6%) every year; on a cop's salary, he won't be able to even service the interest on a multi-million dollar judgment let alone make a dent in the principle. And bankruptcy? Judgments for intentional torts aren't dischargeable. And if by some grace of God it's not an intentional tort, he better pass the means test for Chapter 7 because he's over the debt limits for a 13 and will be forced into an expensive and grueling personal Chapter 11.
The thought is that police departments will be forced to provide liability insurance to cover such verdicts, and as such will be under pressure from insurance companies to make sure that officers with a ton of complaints will be too risky to insure and this will force police departments to either get rid of them or put them on desk jobs where they can't do any real damage. The reality is that joint and several liability would largely protect individual officers anyway; since most lawsuits will also name the department as a defendant the department will be liable for the whole award regardless of its individual contribution to the damage. The vast majority of states have limited this doctrine under the guise of tort reform, but one area where it's still largely unchanged is intentional torts. That being said, if departments can offload the insurance burden on to individual officers, they might do it.
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