Bodycam: Pregnant woman accused of shoplifting shot by police

WorldWideLem@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 1087 points –
Bodycam: Pregnant woman accused of shoplifting shot by police | CNN
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Somehow this is the only country on earth where this seems to happen. When talking about shootings involving guns, okay, fine, the US is certainly an outlier there, but every country has cars and police.

This is murder.

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Fun fact, they actually have no duty whatsoever to protect people :D

"In the 1981 case Warren v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Court of Appeals held that police have a general "public duty," but that "no specific legal duty exists" unless there is a special relationship between an officer and an individual, such as a person in custody.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that police have no specific obligation to protect. In its 1989 decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the justices ruled that a social services department had no duty to protect a young boy from his abusive father. In 2005'sCastle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sued the police for failing to protect her from her husband after he violated a restraining order and abducted and killed their three children. Justices said the police had no such duty. "

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/do-the-police-have-an-obligation-to-protect-you/

There's also of course the case with the Uvalde school shooting where not only did cops wait outside for hours as students were being picked off, but prevented parents from going in to try to get their kids out.

ACAB

I’ve seen this before and I think it is worth adding some context too.

Let’s start with, yea, it leads to absurd result like the clown show in uvalde where I wouldn’t trust that police force to rescue cats from trees.

But… the other way you can’t have a right to a scarce resource (police protection). Police calls while not exactly random can’t be accurately predicted. It doesn’t make sense for a police force to be liable for failing to protect when they might literally not have the ability to protect. Or, through chance, there are no police officers that can get to the location in time.

Instead, the point is to rely on the police wanting to actually do their job and have a legal doctrine accordingly. But in our culture it seems that perhaps that is not necessarily a warranted assumption anymore.

"It doesn’t make sense for a police force to be liable for failing to protect when they might literally not have the ability to protect."

In what way does this excuse them not defending people when they have the chance?