I know of a related analysis / overview of a similar situation. It's an episode of Radio Lab titled No Special Duty. The story goes: a man uses a New York City subway train. The carriage is (from...
I know of a related analysis / overview of a similar situation. It was told in an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, though for the life of me I can neither remember its title nor find it via the podcast site's (otherwise sharp) search function. If you know which episode that is, please link it. It's an episode of Radio Lab titled No Special Duty.
The story goes: a man uses a New York City subway train. The carriage is (from what I remember) mostly empty, safe for a few people. The carriage is also the very first carriage of the train, and from the inside you can see a bit of what's happening inside the driver's room. Inside the room, there are the driver and two police officers.
The man telling the story describes the train starting to move, but it was moving so slowly as though a single person was pushing the entire train from behind. At some point, another man on the carriage stands up, walks to a woman sitting some distance away from him, and proceeds to stab her viciously, multiple times, with the ferocity of an animal. The police officers in the driver's room stay in, despite seeing clearly what is happening outside the room.
The stabber may or may not then hurt other people inside the carriage (from which no one can leave, since the train is moving), and then comes up to the man telling the story – and stabs him viciously multiple times.
The man wakes up at the hospital, with his family around him. The damage from the stabbings is massive, but he survives. His sister, a police officer, balks at hearing police slang (the exact phrase I forget) which means (as she tells her brother) "the victim is unlikely to survive". The man'd heard the slang term from the police officers on the train as he was blacking out from the blood loss.
As the man later finds out, what happened on the train was: the police knew about a mass murderer on the loose in the vicinity of that particular train station, and have speculated that the murderer might board a train there. So, two officers were dispatched on that train in order to make sure the murderer gets caught. It was not among their goals to protect any possible victims; in fact, it has been speculated that they were using the people on the train to bait the murderer, in other to catch him quicker. The police officers on that train stayed inside the driver's room because they felt they could get hurt.
It may or may not be the same episode, but 99% Invisible also touches on the two cases Legal Eagle brings up in his video.
The conclusion of the episode was: while the interviewed police officers say specifically that "[their] duty" is "to protect and serve", the law does not see it that way. The conclusion was that no police officer has any obligation to protect any individual from harm.
Which was a deeply disheartening thing to hear. From a purely rational standpoint, I understand it: okay, their duty is to enforce the law, and the law does not prevent a person from being harmed: it simply punishes those who harm someone, as a measure of deterrent. But it does feel beyond fucked up that one cannot rely on anyone but themselves in order to protect their life because ultimately, the police is not there to help with that.
It's also beyond fucked up that they're prevent people from taking matters into their own hands. Imagine firefighters handcuffing volunteers who run into the burning building to safe someone. How cruel would that be? (Granted, firefighters don't fuck around with fire, and if they don't want to go into that building, no unprotected and untrained civilian should. But then, I'd trust the firefighters' judgement and I wouldn't trust the police's. There's a reason there's no rap song called "Fuck the Fire Department", and all that.)
Then again, the more I hear about the police in the US, the more depressing the thought of living there becomes. It's a nightmare what they can do and what they can get away with scot-free.
You know, I find very weird that in a country so fascinated with the idea of individual heroism law enforcement is drilled so hard on putting self-preservation above all else. Don't get me wrong,...
You know, I find very weird that in a country so fascinated with the idea of individual heroism law enforcement is drilled so hard on putting self-preservation above all else.
Don't get me wrong, it is extremely important for law enforcers to guarantee the safety required to perform their functions, but when you choose certain professions you must understand that you're implicitly accepting its inherent risks. Officers are trained to shoot first because "what if the wallet is a gun", IDK, I don't wanna be crude, but there seems to be a lot of cowardice behind all the macho posturing. This is something I've noticed way before this current event.
Everything I learn about police training in the US tells me that there's an excessive focus on self preservation to the detriment of society.
I can begrudgingly accept the judgment that the law as written doesn’t require them to protect the public. In some ways I might even sympathise with a judge making that call; I can imagine a truly...
I can begrudgingly accept the judgment that the law as written doesn’t require them to protect the public. In some ways I might even sympathise with a judge making that call; I can imagine a truly principled person feeling their hands were tied by the law despite their own feelings, although given the unprincipled behaviour we’re seeing exposed in some US courts that may also not have been the case here at all.
Of course, this doesn’t absolve the cops hiding behind the excuse in any way - “didn’t legally have to” doesn’t mean they were in any way prevented from doing the right thing.
Either way, though, the answer seems very clear cut: “Oh shit, the law doesn’t actually say what everyone thinks it should and thought it already did. Let’s draft and pass a fix for that immediately, with total bipartisan support”. The fact that didn’t happen within a few months of the original verdict seems absurd to me.
I feel like if your action is "let's make the police enforce the law and that's it", it doesn't matter what your word is. You're already telling your citizens "We're not here to take care of you,...
I feel like if your action is "let's make the police enforce the law and that's it", it doesn't matter what your word is. You're already telling your citizens "We're not here to take care of you, but also, don't you dare take matters into your own hands". Intentional or not, the results matter more than the intent when it comes to anything at the scale of an entire nation.
So the lack of a vote is not all that absurd. If you want a scared and compliant populace, you give the police all the power and none of the responsibility.
This may be on the cynical side, but then, nothing I've seen inspires optimism about this.
What I really want to see is any effort that's been done to curb the overwhelming power of the police. Legislation, campaigning, that sorta stuff. I feel like just seeing effort being made to make a society better would inspire others to join the cause, or at least find their own way to help. Talking about the terrible truths helps, but having it go without also shedding light on the good nature of the people fighting oppression and injustice just makes people fuckin' depressed.
A common response in the US to public servants abusing their authority is to pass laws removing discretion. The problem is that human judgement is still necessary. Rules can’t substitute for...
A common response in the US to public servants abusing their authority is to pass laws removing discretion. The problem is that human judgement is still necessary. Rules can’t substitute for thinking about what’s right in specific circumstances. There are also limits on the volume of rules that people can learn.
In practice, changing laws may mean in practice that judges have more discretion to decide what the police should have done, and inflict penalties. That might not be a bad idea, but this deterrence is only going to have an indirect effect on what people do.
Deciding what sort of risks to take to protect the public in a dangerous situation seems like the sort of thing where human judgement is going to be important. In a crunch, people are still people. They’re going to rely on their training.
When there are failures, it seems important to figure out what to learn from them, and then to change how the police are trained and led. These changes need to be made by people too. Getting the right leadership and the right teachers to make deep cultural changes is a lot harder than changing a rule.
Also, these are jobs, so this is also a recruiting problem. You need to figure out why someone would join the police, what sort of sacrifices they’d be willing to make, why they would make them, and why they wouldn’t pick a less demanding job.
But I’m no expert on the police and these are generic arguments. You can make similar arguments about other important, demanding jobs including teaching and healthcare.
I think we're coming from a similar place here; I can definitely think of situations where legislation is misused or overused as a reaction to a specific situation or crisis, and of course at the...
I think we're coming from a similar place here; I can definitely think of situations where legislation is misused or overused as a reaction to a specific situation or crisis, and of course at the extreme end of that are zero tolerance policies that remove all human discretion, but we have enough examples of reasonably functioning laws around negligence and malpractice that I'd say there's a good template to work from. From doctors, to the military, to engineers, to social workers, to teachers there are binding requirements in place that they act in the interests of those in their care - and most seem to have broadly workable definitions around reasonable expectation rather than specific actions for specific situations.
All that said, you're quite right that it's one small part of a large puzzle. I think enormous overhaul of the US policing system is needed and I think most here would agree with that; changing a rule won't do much in and of itself.
What I do believe is that changing the rule is an important tool in making those reforms, for two reasons: first, as a statement of intent and unifying ethos - an unambiguous reminder of where their responsibilities lie. Second, as an effective and functional way to weed out those people who shouldn't have been doing the job in the first place and ensure that space is made for those who will.
Yes, there are laws about malpractice and negligence. But do you know of a law requiring someone to risk their life? In the military it’s possible, but I’m guessing the actual law someone might be...
Yes, there are laws about malpractice and negligence. But do you know of a law requiring someone to risk their life? In the military it’s possible, but I’m guessing the actual law someone might be court-marshaled for is disobeying orders. It’s also a special case compared to civilian jobs. Is there anything similar for fire fighters?
Article 99 - Misbehavior Before the Enemy run away; shamefully abandon, surrender, or deliver up any command, unit, place, or military property which it is his duty to defend; through...
any service member may be subject to prosecution if they:
run away;
shamefully abandon, surrender, or deliver up any command, unit, place, or military property which it is his duty to defend;
through disobedience, neglect, or intentional misconduct endanger the safety of any such command, unit, place, or military property;
cast away his arms or ammunition;
is guilty of cowardly conduct;
quit his place of duty to plunder or pillage;
cause false alarms in any command, unit, or place under control of the armed forces;
willfully fail to do his utmost to encounter, engage, capture, or destroy any enemy troops, combatants, vessels, aircraft, or any other thing, which it is his duty so to encounter, engage, capture, or destroy; or
does not afford all practicable relief and assistance to any troops, combatants, vessels, or aircraft of the armed forces belonging to the United States or their allies when engaged in battle.
Any member of the military would have absolutely broken the law if they did what the police did in Uvalde.
Beyond the military, medical staff are the first example that springs to mind, and the one I'm most personally familiar with - there's a fine balance between their right to personal safety and...
Beyond the military, medical staff are the first example that springs to mind, and the one I'm most personally familiar with - there's a fine balance between their right to personal safety and their obligation to their patients, and while that article is specific to a pandemic situation it's something that also comes up regularly when dealing with violent patients, particularly in the mental health field.
The only times these kind of things will actually be litigated are going to be the complex situations, and the laws I'm aware of almost always make allowance for the balance between the safety of the professional in question and the safety of the public, so depending on the hypothetical law's wording it may even be the case that in this specific scenario (directly engaging an active shooter at risk of life to the officers) they wouldn't have been found liable. If that turned out to be the case, so be it, I still want us to have the framework in place to probe those questions with the force of law and to act as one pillar among many in police reform. A verdict accounting for the realities of police work and concluding that they weren't negligent because the situation was too dangerous would be one thing, a shrug and "they had no obligation to help if they didn't feel like it" is quite another.
I believe you are thinking of the Radio Lab episode No Special Duty which references the video from Cracked "Why The Cops Won't Help You When You're Getting Stabbed". Both are worth the listen.
I know of a related analysis / overview of a similar situation. It was told in an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, though for the life of me I can neither remember its title nor find it via the podcast site's (otherwise sharp) search function. If you know which episode that is, please link it.
That's the episode. I think, then, that the reason I remember it being from 99% Invisible is because they retranslated the Radio Lab episode, as they tend to do every once in a while with similar...
I believe you are thinking of the Radio Lab episode No Special Duty
That's the episode. I think, then, that the reason I remember it being from 99% Invisible is because they retranslated the Radio Lab episode, as they tend to do every once in a while with similar educational shows.
No worries. You're probably right about that description needing a refresh though. It's been an age since I glanced across to that blurb; I'd forgotten the exact wording of it. We'll see if Deimos...
No worries. You're probably right about that description needing a refresh though. It's been an age since I glanced across to that blurb; I'd forgotten the exact wording of it.
We'll see if Deimos gets round to re-working it, as I seem to recall he has an apathy towards this particular ~group. 😉
I know of a related analysis / overview of a similar situation.
It was told in an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, though for the life of me I can neither remember its title nor find it via the podcast site's (otherwise sharp) search function. If you know which episode that is, please link it.It's an episode of Radio Lab titled No Special Duty.The story goes: a man uses a New York City subway train. The carriage is (from what I remember) mostly empty, safe for a few people. The carriage is also the very first carriage of the train, and from the inside you can see a bit of what's happening inside the driver's room. Inside the room, there are the driver and two police officers.
The man telling the story describes the train starting to move, but it was moving so slowly as though a single person was pushing the entire train from behind. At some point, another man on the carriage stands up, walks to a woman sitting some distance away from him, and proceeds to stab her viciously, multiple times, with the ferocity of an animal. The police officers in the driver's room stay in, despite seeing clearly what is happening outside the room.
The stabber may or may not then hurt other people inside the carriage (from which no one can leave, since the train is moving), and then comes up to the man telling the story – and stabs him viciously multiple times.
The man wakes up at the hospital, with his family around him. The damage from the stabbings is massive, but he survives. His sister, a police officer, balks at hearing police slang (the exact phrase I forget) which means (as she tells her brother) "the victim is unlikely to survive". The man'd heard the slang term from the police officers on the train as he was blacking out from the blood loss.
As the man later finds out, what happened on the train was: the police knew about a mass murderer on the loose in the vicinity of that particular train station, and have speculated that the murderer might board a train there. So, two officers were dispatched on that train in order to make sure the murderer gets caught. It was not among their goals to protect any possible victims; in fact, it has been speculated that they were using the people on the train to bait the murderer, in other to catch him quicker. The police officers on that train stayed inside the driver's room because they felt they could get hurt.
It may or may not be the same episode, but 99% Invisible also touches on the two cases Legal Eagle brings up in his video.
The conclusion of the episode was: while the interviewed police officers say specifically that "[their] duty" is "to protect and serve", the law does not see it that way. The conclusion was that no police officer has any obligation to protect any individual from harm.
Which was a deeply disheartening thing to hear. From a purely rational standpoint, I understand it: okay, their duty is to enforce the law, and the law does not prevent a person from being harmed: it simply punishes those who harm someone, as a measure of deterrent. But it does feel beyond fucked up that one cannot rely on anyone but themselves in order to protect their life because ultimately, the police is not there to help with that.
It's also beyond fucked up that they're prevent people from taking matters into their own hands. Imagine firefighters handcuffing volunteers who run into the burning building to safe someone. How cruel would that be? (Granted, firefighters don't fuck around with fire, and if they don't want to go into that building, no unprotected and untrained civilian should. But then, I'd trust the firefighters' judgement and I wouldn't trust the police's. There's a reason there's no rap song called "Fuck the Fire Department", and all that.)
Then again, the more I hear about the police in the US, the more depressing the thought of living there becomes. It's a nightmare what they can do and what they can get away with scot-free.
You know, I find very weird that in a country so fascinated with the idea of individual heroism law enforcement is drilled so hard on putting self-preservation above all else.
Don't get me wrong, it is extremely important for law enforcers to guarantee the safety required to perform their functions, but when you choose certain professions you must understand that you're implicitly accepting its inherent risks. Officers are trained to shoot first because "what if the wallet is a gun", IDK, I don't wanna be crude, but there seems to be a lot of cowardice behind all the macho posturing. This is something I've noticed way before this current event.
Everything I learn about police training in the US tells me that there's an excessive focus on self preservation to the detriment of society.
I can begrudgingly accept the judgment that the law as written doesn’t require them to protect the public. In some ways I might even sympathise with a judge making that call; I can imagine a truly principled person feeling their hands were tied by the law despite their own feelings, although given the unprincipled behaviour we’re seeing exposed in some US courts that may also not have been the case here at all.
Of course, this doesn’t absolve the cops hiding behind the excuse in any way - “didn’t legally have to” doesn’t mean they were in any way prevented from doing the right thing.
Either way, though, the answer seems very clear cut: “Oh shit, the law doesn’t actually say what everyone thinks it should and thought it already did. Let’s draft and pass a fix for that immediately, with total bipartisan support”. The fact that didn’t happen within a few months of the original verdict seems absurd to me.
I feel like if your action is "let's make the police enforce the law and that's it", it doesn't matter what your word is. You're already telling your citizens "We're not here to take care of you, but also, don't you dare take matters into your own hands". Intentional or not, the results matter more than the intent when it comes to anything at the scale of an entire nation.
So the lack of a vote is not all that absurd. If you want a scared and compliant populace, you give the police all the power and none of the responsibility.
This may be on the cynical side, but then, nothing I've seen inspires optimism about this.
What I really want to see is any effort that's been done to curb the overwhelming power of the police. Legislation, campaigning, that sorta stuff. I feel like just seeing effort being made to make a society better would inspire others to join the cause, or at least find their own way to help. Talking about the terrible truths helps, but having it go without also shedding light on the good nature of the people fighting oppression and injustice just makes people fuckin' depressed.
A common response in the US to public servants abusing their authority is to pass laws removing discretion. The problem is that human judgement is still necessary. Rules can’t substitute for thinking about what’s right in specific circumstances. There are also limits on the volume of rules that people can learn.
In practice, changing laws may mean in practice that judges have more discretion to decide what the police should have done, and inflict penalties. That might not be a bad idea, but this deterrence is only going to have an indirect effect on what people do.
Deciding what sort of risks to take to protect the public in a dangerous situation seems like the sort of thing where human judgement is going to be important. In a crunch, people are still people. They’re going to rely on their training.
When there are failures, it seems important to figure out what to learn from them, and then to change how the police are trained and led. These changes need to be made by people too. Getting the right leadership and the right teachers to make deep cultural changes is a lot harder than changing a rule.
Also, these are jobs, so this is also a recruiting problem. You need to figure out why someone would join the police, what sort of sacrifices they’d be willing to make, why they would make them, and why they wouldn’t pick a less demanding job.
But I’m no expert on the police and these are generic arguments. You can make similar arguments about other important, demanding jobs including teaching and healthcare.
I think we're coming from a similar place here; I can definitely think of situations where legislation is misused or overused as a reaction to a specific situation or crisis, and of course at the extreme end of that are zero tolerance policies that remove all human discretion, but we have enough examples of reasonably functioning laws around negligence and malpractice that I'd say there's a good template to work from. From doctors, to the military, to engineers, to social workers, to teachers there are binding requirements in place that they act in the interests of those in their care - and most seem to have broadly workable definitions around reasonable expectation rather than specific actions for specific situations.
All that said, you're quite right that it's one small part of a large puzzle. I think enormous overhaul of the US policing system is needed and I think most here would agree with that; changing a rule won't do much in and of itself.
What I do believe is that changing the rule is an important tool in making those reforms, for two reasons: first, as a statement of intent and unifying ethos - an unambiguous reminder of where their responsibilities lie. Second, as an effective and functional way to weed out those people who shouldn't have been doing the job in the first place and ensure that space is made for those who will.
Yes, there are laws about malpractice and negligence. But do you know of a law requiring someone to risk their life? In the military it’s possible, but I’m guessing the actual law someone might be court-marshaled for is disobeying orders. It’s also a special case compared to civilian jobs. Is there anything similar for fire fighters?
Article 99 - Misbehavior Before the Enemy
Any member of the military would have absolutely broken the law if they did what the police did in Uvalde.
Beyond the military, medical staff are the first example that springs to mind, and the one I'm most personally familiar with - there's a fine balance between their right to personal safety and their obligation to their patients, and while that article is specific to a pandemic situation it's something that also comes up regularly when dealing with violent patients, particularly in the mental health field.
The only times these kind of things will actually be litigated are going to be the complex situations, and the laws I'm aware of almost always make allowance for the balance between the safety of the professional in question and the safety of the public, so depending on the hypothetical law's wording it may even be the case that in this specific scenario (directly engaging an active shooter at risk of life to the officers) they wouldn't have been found liable. If that turned out to be the case, so be it, I still want us to have the framework in place to probe those questions with the force of law and to act as one pillar among many in police reform. A verdict accounting for the realities of police work and concluding that they weren't negligent because the situation was too dangerous would be one thing, a shrug and "they had no obligation to help if they didn't feel like it" is quite another.
I believe you are thinking of the Radio Lab episode No Special Duty which references the video from Cracked "Why The Cops Won't Help You When You're Getting Stabbed".
Both are worth the listen.
That's the episode. I think, then, that the reason I remember it being from 99% Invisible is because they retranslated the Radio Lab episode, as they tend to do every once in a while with similar educational shows.
Thank you for linking it.
May I respectfu suggestl that this should be in ~news? It seems for fit the description of that group.
~news tends to be reserved for pure news stories, with commentary pieces and articles spread across their relevant groups in Tildes.
I understand. I was reading the description and it says otherwise. Maybe it needs an update.
No worries. You're probably right about that description needing a refresh though. It's been an age since I glanced across to that blurb; I'd forgotten the exact wording of it.
We'll see if Deimos gets round to re-working it, as I seem to recall he has an apathy towards this particular ~group. 😉