But surely the individual they threatened can sue, right?
I mean how is it NOT actionable?
Sure, they are immune from being sued, but how does a police force operate when they are the brunt of constant ridicule? They’re a meme, a joke.
I assume some clever lawyers will identify who is ultimately responsible for the safety of children in schools. Maybe the city or county if they own the building.
On the other hand, maybe nobody is responsible or accountable. Everybody can cover their ass except citizens.
From a legal perspective, the police have no specific duty to protect citizens.
Maybe not by default, but I don’t think that can be absolute. Even an ordinary citizen can take on a duty of care over another, and once that happens, they can’t easily relinquish that duty. I can see a lawyer arguing that if the police had just stayed at their station, they’d be blameless, but by showing up and taking charge, they assumed responsibility. Especially once they started actively preventing others from helping.
What I’d actually LIKE to happen would be for the courts to re-examine the question of police duty entirely, because if (as courts currently hold) the police have no duty to protect us, then they’re completely useless. But I don’t hold out much hope, for that.
John Oliver gave some pretty damning evidence on Sunday’s show that SROs (School Resource Officers) not only don’t help, but probably do more harm. I would love to see them all removed and use the money for a useful position.
Besides not stopping all but one shooter, they make a lot of arrests of kids that then get dismissed as nothing the DA wants to prosecutes but this is now on the kids record and does hurt them in college applications.
In general, they do more harm than good.
Link to the most recent Last Week Tonight episode about school resource officers. (And, BTW, why are they called that?)
I believe it is to downplay the idea of police in school and to emphasize the iffy concept that they are educators, mentors, and support figures for students …
Why yes, I got that from their site.
HMO - Handcuffing Minorities Officers - was already taken.
When DARE started I warned people it was a terrible mistake but of course no one listened because they heard it was a good idea on TV. I actually saw how this idea fails years beforehand, the local police in the town where I spent my teenage years started a program ostensibly about working on cars for fun and promoting safety. Then they expanded into an outreach program to get teenagers to spend more time with the police and get to know them. Then, as should have been obvious to anyone but turns out it wasn’t, the kids involved in this began a minor crime wave. Minor stuff really, underage drinking, weed, shoplifting, traffic violations, but eventually one of the cops became embroiled in scandal involving one of these crimes. Sorry I forget the details on that last part. Kids don’t need to be friends with the police. That led these kids to think they could get away with these things, that Officer Friendly will help them out. I assume he did a few times before the problem was even recognized. Kids need a healthy fear of the police. They need to want to avoid them, not because a policeman is going to give them a beating, because they should want to avoid activities that end up involving the police. Want to drink when you are a teenager? Go out in the woods where no one can hear you. Don’t get noticed. Want to smoke weed, be paranoid about it, don’t brag and show off, some people just can’t keep quiet. Want to shoplift? Then you’re an asshole*, just don’t do it. Policemen palling around with teenagers, letting them hang around the police facilities, and generally breaking down the wall that should have kept them on the other side of the wall are all reasons this approach will inevitably fail in that way. I’ll mention these incidents followed teenaged boys exclusively. Teenaged girls in our town already knew they should avoid the police for other reasons.
*If you happened to shoplift something when you were a teenager it doesn’t permanently make you an asshole. It’s a readily curable condition.
Initial case is against the shooters estate, but I assume that is just a foot in the door. Perhaps some of our legal informed posters will clarify the process.
Generally speaking, the police only have a duty to protect someone in their custody which doesn’t apply to any of the children. I’m not a lawyer, you’d have to look up past cases were the courts have upheld that the police have no duty to protect you, but I suspect some of your same arguments were used in the past.
I would humbly suggest that maybe this is something that can be legislated rather than dependent on court rulings.
Even as a straight laced kid who didn’t drink or do drugs, I could see that DARE was bullshit. That’s why it was a terrible mistake.
And I would counter with the fact that handling it that way makes it easier for congressional opponents to block it by never letting it come up for a vote.
There are two cases I know of that are normally cited for the idea that the police have no duty to protect an individual person. DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services and CASTLE ROCK v. GONZALES. Both cases were decided on 14th amendment grounds and really apply to those grounds only . In fact, one decision said
It may well be that, by voluntarily undertaking to protect Joshua against a danger it concededly played no part in creating, the State acquired a duty under state tort law to provide him with adequate protection against that danger.
while the other said
Although the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1871, did not create a system by which police departments are generally held financially accountable for crimes that better policing might have prevented, the people of Colorado are free to craft such a system under state law.
But the chances that any state has done that IMO are between slim and none.
Warren v. District of Columbia isn’t a Supreme Court case, but it’s one of the decisions I used to hear cited rather frequently to remind people that the police have no duty to protect you.
I thought of that too. But the courts are bound to current laws and precedent, aren’t they?
A heartbreaking interview with Arnulfo Reyes, a teacher in one of the rooms who was shot but survived. He heard police officers outside the room just after the gunman entered; they took fire and retreated. He told his 11 students to pretend they were asleep. All of them were killed.
Thanks for the link. I think the training we undergo periodically says hide/flee/fight. But from the teacher’s description, it might have been better for the kids to try to escape off the bat. At least they would present moving targets…
It is amazing how even a reasonably detailed article like this can fail to provide full info. For example, it doesn’t really say how often he was shot (2?) and exactly where in his body (arm, back and lung?). It doesn’t really describe the layout of the room, and where the shooter was positioned when he shot. Yeah, I’m asking for a lot. But phrases like, “Then I heard more shots” really doesn’t tell the story. It may seem gruesome for me to wish for such details, but without them, it is hard to get my mind around what happened, and what could be done differently.
Heck, I was surprised to hear there was a guy teacher. I thought 2 female teachers had been shot - which I thought were the 2 teachers for the adjoining classrooms. And all 11 of this teacher’s kids were shot? What class has only 11 students?
I assume in time we’ll see floorpans and timelines and such. But at the time, it is still a very confusing picture for me.
I saw another article that said there had ben an end of year event earlier in the day and some students went home after it so that may have been why there were only 11 in the classroom.
I have been wondering about that too. Our workplace active shooter training (which consists of watching a video) says the first option should be to flee the scene, otherwise hide, and fight back as a last resort. But it appears that students are taught hide first.
The two female teachers who were shot died. There were only 11 students in his class because it was near the end of the school year and some students had been dismissed early.