[logfromblammo]

I am not a lawyer, so forgive me for trying to apply logic to the law.

What set cardinality would be minimally necessary to generate a police duty to protect a group, if it is not one? "The public" is, after all, nothing more than a set of individuals. Two? Three? Ten? A million? Are police subject to some selfish calculus where they are not obligated to risk their own lives unless it would save more than N non-police individuals?

Since this does not make sense by common definitions, I suspect that somewhere in the law, it defines "the public" to be the municipal corporation that employs the police, meaning essentially that the police don't ever have an obligation to do anything at all, unless a madman is threatening the city's articles of incorporation with a shredder or lighter.

That seems to me to be madness. But I am not a lawyer.

[saraid216]

> I am not a lawyer, so forgive me for trying to apply logic to the law.

Your first mistake is presuming that you're applying logic. That's not what you're doing.

Your second mistake is presuming that you're commenting on the law. You're commenting on an interpretation of the law. With, I might add, your own interpretation based explicitly on admitted ignorance.

> What set cardinality would be minimally necessary to generate a police duty to protect a group, if it is not one?

It is one. It's simply not specific as to which one. If two criminals threatened two different civilians, a policeman is not at fault for choosing to save only one of them, especially when failing to act would mean saving neither.

A policeman who patrols one neighborhood over another, ceteris paribus, is not liable for crimes that occur in neighborhoods he failed to patrol. If it can be shown that he has done so for discriminatory reasons, then he is at fault for discrimination, but not for the crimes which occurred.

[logfromblammo]

You really should read the details of Warren vs DC. Your response implies that you have not.

I'll summarize for you.

A woman with a toddler was the subject of a home invasion and sexual assault. Her two upstairs neighbors called 911 to report a crime in progress.

Police arrived on the scene, but then left without investigating.

The upstairs neighbors called 911 again, 20 minutes later, as they were still hearing screams from Warren being raped downstairs. The police did not return.

The intruders then noticed that other people were present in the house, and sexually assaulted the upstairs neighbors, too. FOR FOURTEEN CONSECUTIVE HOURS.

The court literally ruled that the police were not even obligated to show up for the five minutes that they spent on the call, utterly failing to notice the screaming rape victim being assaulted in her own home.

They weren't off saving someone else from a more serious crime. Because what would that be, really?

This is not a matter of the police being held to too high of a standard, or being blamed for not stopping all the crime in their city. It is a matter of police being held to no standard at all, with no responsibility for any crimes in their city.

And you can bet that everyone that gets a ticket in DC will forever after be comparing the diligence their cops show toward sitting in their cars with radar guns with that shown when people whose lives are threatened actually want their help.

[saraid216]

You're right. I haven't read it. I'll do so.

Aaaaand nope, I still agree with the court findings. I think that the dispatch officer and the officers who checked the house should be disciplined by an internal affairs investigation, and possibly that the procedures followed by officers should be updated to respond more usefully to claims of burglary. I can't be exactly sure which of these things I would have liked to happen because I'm unfamiliar with the details of how and why the DC Metro Police operate, and I'm therefore not sure exactly where the blame of incompetence actually lies.

But to suggest that the officers in question had a special duty to the women is still wrong. The dispatcher was informed that a burglary was in progress, not a rape. I have no idea why Warren decided this was a wiser course of action, nor any idea if the dispatcher simply heard or recorded it incorrectly; given that the dispatcher also used the wrong code, I'm inclined to give Warren the benefit of the doubt over the dispatcher.

So yeah. It's strange and possibly suspicious that the officer who knocked on the door failed to notice screaming from the second floor. It's not clear to me that an officer should break into a private home to prevent a burglary, but I am also not a lawyer, so I'm not familiar with the case law on when a policeman should or should not force entry. My instincts say that it would be a Fourth Amendment violation.

If he heard the screaming, then the lack of forced entry is the failure. If a Code 2 burglary merits forced entry, then that is the failure. But presuming good faith on his part--i.e., that he didn't hear anything--then I find his actions entirely reasonable and your demand that he stop a crime that he had no idea was going on completely unreasonable. To suggest that his time was best spent doing nothing but verifying that Douglas or Warren, specifically, was not being raped is to suggest a special duty over and above the general duty a policeman has to the general public.

Source: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9108468254125174...