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I disagree. I think a police officer has a duty to not be a coward. When you accept that job, that role, you promise to do the right thing and stand up to evil in exchange for money and prestige and being put on a schedule filled with people who have made that promise. So that when an emergency happens, we have people who we can count on to stand up and be the hero because they have made that promise. That's what you've been being paid for all this time. You are the insurance and the emergency is happened and now you have to pay up. It is your obligation. You don't get to claim to not be a coward in order to pass a job interview and then get paid for months and months not putting your life at risk only to back out as soon as your life is at risk.
I'm not sure that I would have the courage to put my life at risk to stop a shooter or other criminal. So I'm not a police officer. They're not paying me to do the job that I'm not doing. And it's not just about the money, it's about the slot. We need people who can stand up to criminals, and if there aren't enough we go to further lengths and recruit more and pay more until we can hire enough of them. If you make a promise to stand up to criminals and then don't, you are taking up a slot that someone else could have filled. When they called the police and four officers arrived at the scene, they could have called four brave officers instead of cowards, if we as a society had done a better job of screening and training and there weren't any coward police officers because it disqualified them from the job.
It's fraud, dereliction of duty, to take up the position that requires you to not be a coward. I don't think it's criminal for just a random person to be a coward. It's criminal to voluntarily take up a legal duty and then renege on it after the fact.
"you promise to do the right thing and stand up to evil in exchange for money and prestige and being put on a schedule filled with people who have made that promise."
This is not an adult understanding of LEO.
It is not dereliction of duty. That is a military standard that applies to the military. And it would be impossible to prove he knew in advance that he would behave like a coward once he faced real danger.
He is a disappointment as a human being. That is not a criminal offense. The punishment for being a poor excuse for a person is public shaming. Which this trial caused -- his cowardice and disregard of children's lives was exposed via mass media to the entire world. His face was on every newspaper front page, like he was a depraved criminal. He has been punished with the ultimate shaming; beyond tar and feathers and scarlet letters.
People died.
Shaming is an appropriate response to things like shouting racial slurs, or cheating on your partner, or being a coward and backing down from a domestic violence abuser who is not immediately threatening anyone's life.
No. This was mild. Tar and feathers causes massive physical trauma and can result in death. Scarlet letters require you to physically carry it around with you and everyone who sees you knows what it means and what you did. Anyone who doesn't watch the news isn't going to recognize this guy on sight. If he moves to another town then a year from now no one he meets on the street will recognize him. This was a medium sized shaming. In sheer total number of people who hate him now sure it outweighs anything anyone would have experienced a hundred years ago, because the news is so widespread. But in relative terms, the percentage of people he meets in his daily life who will even recognize him is probably less than 10%.
More importantly, shaming can't undo what he did, and clearly it can't pre-emptively disincentivize it. People died here. People died because the police were cowards instead of heroes, and taking the place of the real heroes who could have been there if people had known there was an absence. If these individuals did not exist, or refused to apply to the job, then someone else could have taken their place and saved lives.
I'm not a legal expert, I'm not concerned with the pedantic details about what the law literally says their obligations are in the specific jurisdiction this took place in, but what it should be. The police should be legally required to do their jobs, and their jobs should legally require them to intervene in this sort of situation, and police who enable this sort of mass shooting should face criminal penalties for failing to stop it. If what they did is not technically against the law then the laws should be changed, and then all the cowards can stop larping as police officers because they're be afraid of getting in trouble, and make room for people willing to do the job and save lives.
If the only consequence is shame then cowards are going to keep being police officers, cross their fingers, and hope and hoping they don't ever encounter a shooting. Departments are going to keep poorly training people, because they won't face legal consequences either. If we want this to not happen again (because it's happened before too) there needs to be consequences.
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