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No, it should never be a crime to fail to act. Otherwise would be literal slavery, simple as. Justify your knee-jerk vengeful reaction to dead children all you want. Yes conscription is wrong too.
I don't care how much training he had. Don't care that he was on premises. I could have training myself. I could have been passing by myself. Don't care who was signing his paychecks.
It should never be a crime to not act.
There exists zero jurisdictions in which it is a crime to not be a police officer. Police officers are not drafted. Being forced to do your job, that you volunteered to do and get paid to do, isn't slavery.
Once you've signed up to do certain jobs, not doing those jobs should certainly be criminal. If you call 911 and the EMTs show up just to watch you die, I'd certainly be in favor of a legal regime that sees them charged with something.
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UCMJ Article 99: Misbehavior Before The Enemy
Is a thing.
Also
The 15-year-old German girl who knew the Uvalde shooter's plan and failed to alert the authorities was prosecuted for her inaction. She was found guilty of "failing to report planned crimes," she was issued a warning and required to undergo "educational measures".
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The military has dereliction of duty - if you refuse to perform your duty or are willfully negligent, that's a UCMJ charge. I think you could apply a similar argument to police. This is not slavery or conscription. A soldier who voluntarily signs up for the military, knowing what it entails, can do a significant amount of harm by simply refusing to do their job in a critical moment. The time to make that call is before enlisting, not months or years later when lives are on the line. By commiting to performing an action and then intentionally failing to perform it in a way that cases harm, that creates liability, potentially criminal liability.
Another good example is fraud. If you pay someone $10k to fix your roof, and two weeks later they "refuse to act" and keep the money, that's a crime. This case is less black and white obviously, but police officers receive pay and benefits in excess of comparable jobs because of the potential danger. Police officers who defect on this social contract should be punished accordingly, whether that's administratively or through criminal charges in the most extreme cases.
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So... abolish "criminal neglect" as a concept?
Also does the combination of refusing to act, while also forcefully preventing others from acting not strike you as deeply perverted?
Central examples of criminal neglect usually refer to reckless driving or a doctor incompetently misdiagnosing a patient to catastrophic effect. Would you convict the doctor in the next room over who could have prevented it by eavesdropping and intervening?
What? I'm unfamiliar with the particulars of the Uvalde shooting response. Did he turn his gun on his colleagues and order them to stop? If he did something like that, shouldn't that have been more central to our discussion here, and not job expectations?
Central examples of criminal neglect are parents refusing to feed or otherwise take care of their children, or generally speaking - people refusing to take care of others who are under their custody. You could probably also find examples of neglecting the maintenance of buildings and machines being criminal.
Uh... then maybe lower the levels of confidence with which you are speaking?
It wasn't just him, the entire police force deployed to the location was forcefully preventing parents from entering the school to save their children. Some of the parents were armed, so they could have taken on the shooter.
Though I think one officer who wanted to enter was also prevented from doing so.
As a reminder, here's the comment I responded to originally. It in turn is responding to "Is the binary really criminal or national hero?" and "But convicting them of a crime seems too far."
I don't think it's terribly productive to add to the tragedy of a passed child by dragging the parents into prison, no. They've been punished enough. There's one example that comes to mind where the parents declined medical interventions for their sick child, who died. The state decided that children are actually the state's, and not the parents', and the state disagreed with that child-rearing decision, so off to prison. Yes I disagree with that. Yes I disagree with "turn this wrench or you come with us downtown."
Child handcuffed to her bed and starving to death? Sure send the boys in to liberate her. Is handcuffing inaction?
It's not like I'm opposed to other solutions or repercussions. I just think bringing the physical force of the law to bear on those who decline to do things is obviously wrong.
Did the parents have legal access to the property? If they did, did the police batter the parents to keep them out? If they did, were battery charges brought against any police? If there were, I don't think my statements about inaction would apply. Do you agree?
It's not much of a tragedy if they do it knowingly, and it's productive to deter other parents from acting the same way.
How about a child that's simply too young to leave on their own? Or even one that leaves, but just ends up being more abused by people they encounter on the streets?
And I'm saying you're obviously wrong. There are cases were people are obligated to act, under penalty of law, that's a good thing, and this case should obviously be included.
The access not being legal just confirms my point that the state was preventing parents from entering. In itself that's not wrong, but in doing so, the state assumes responsibility for what happened in the area they restricted. This is exactly what creates the obligation for the police to act against the shooter.
Yes, they were tackled, handcuffed, and pepper-sprayed.
I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Why would they? The police are generally allowed to batter uncooperative people in order to detain them.
I don't. I think you these questions are completely irrelevant to what you said about inaction.
Your comment was so extreme that whatever you responded to doesn't really matter. Again, you said: "It should never be a crime to not act", twice.
It is a tragedy, actually, and in addition it's an aberration of the natural order of our communities--it's not this incredibly common fact pattern that parents' impulses regularly steer them into; it's the opposite in fact. No I don't concede that the state should be invited into all our homes to prescribe to us the standard of care under pains of imprisonment. I don't concede that no matter how many children's graves you point to. Yes it's sad.
To boot, it's a slippery slope. Next people will move on from children and start insisting that we should imprison those who are unwilling to charge into gunfire!
I agree it creates the obligation. I disagree failure to meet the obligation justifies imprisonment of this police officer.
It's precisely how we avoid inviting the state into our homes. You're not being watched 24/7 but if you starve your child you get criminally charged. The people who want to flood the streets with CPS and social workers sound a lot closer to your idea of "It's not like I'm opposed to other solutions or repercussions" than to me, in my opinion.
Nonsense, such a thing would be unthinkable.
If there is no penalty for not meeting the obligation, then there is no obligation.
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