| 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... |