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Comment count is 16
Udderdude - 2013-06-05

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

Oh boy here we go.


dairyqueenlatifah - 2013-06-05

Welp, if the video isn't evil enough for you, reading that should give you your fill.


13.5 - 2013-06-05

A straightforward application of Deshaney v. Winnebago County

In our republic, the way to deal with such shortcomings is to vote the responsible parties out of offPPPPTHSHHPPBBHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


StanleyPain - 2013-06-05

If they're paid with taxes, though, how can that determination possibly be made? Doesn't that constitute fraud if the government funds a service with your money that does not actually deliver said service?


13.5 - 2013-06-05

Theres two legal relationships: between citizen and government, and government and employee

If an employee defrauds employer or otherwise does a tort or breaches contract, the employer can sue. Assuming this behavior reaches that level, the government could sue the individual cops. But has nothing legally to do with the injuries to the citizen

Citizen has no direct relation to cop, and the government has no legally enforceable duty to keep you safe, per Deshaney. (Just a politically enforceable one, har dee har.) Can post more later, phone typing sucks


Oscar Wildcat - 2013-06-05

Please do, 13.5.


13.5 - 2013-06-05

Ok, there's a lot of shit loaded up in this

To be liable to somebody in a civil action in court, you have to (1) owe them a legally enforceable duty to do or not to do something, and (2) violate that duty. All the fight here is going to be about (1).

A key aspect of the problem here is that the cops are _not doing anything_. While ethicists and philosophers are always pointing out how the distinction falls apart under pressure, American civil law is still rooted in a very old moral distinction between action and inaction: in general, unless you positively _do something to someone_, you're not liable. This is the old saw right-wing libertarians love about negative versus positive rights: American law is full of negative rights (thou shalt not steal your neighbor's food), comparatively empty of positive rights (thou shalt feed thine neighbor). If a cop shoots you for no reason, that's all kinds of torts; if he just sits there and watches you get shot, the situation is more complicated.

You generally only have a positive legal duty to do something to someone if you're in some sort of special relationship with them. Parents owe certain duties to their children (care & support and so on), people who enter into a contract with each other have a positive duty to do what they promised in the contract, etc. In these situations, you can sue someone for doing nothing.

So what's at issue in these situations is, does _someone_ owe the crime victim a legally enforceable obligation to _do something_? Given the general presumption in American law that no one owes anybody positive duties, there has to be something special about the nature of the relationship (like parent-child) or something the either by nature of their relationship or something they have done?

There's three issues: (1) do the individual cops owe individual crime victims a duty? (2) do the individual cops owe the government a duty, and if so, can private individuals enforce that duty? (3) does the government owe the crime victims a duty?

(1) Do the police (the individual cops, the human beings) owe crime victims a duty to take steps to protect them, try to catch killers, etc., just because of the nature of the relationship between cop and civilian? This basically came up "no" in Deshaney (which actually involved a state DCFS service that had severely fucked up its investigation of a, needless to say, now horribly mutilated child, but same diff). There was no precedent for these kinds of suits, and the SCOTUS was worried about the allocation of limited resources under pressure. This is almost always talked about in opinions in a kind of dry way--once we start, where does it stop? What if the police only have enough resources to stop one of two crimes, and they have to decide which?--but almost always also involves shying away from systemic racism in the political system. For instance, if the police have a duty to respond to an emergency call rather than just sitting around, does CPD have a duty to cut police protection in north side (white, wealthy) neighborhoods that are generally safe in order to reduce violent crime that is endemic to the (black, poor) south side? If the court holds the cops have a positive duty to that mutilated kid in Minnesota, the suit for an injunction in Chicago is right around the corner, legally speaking.

Cops are still potentially liable when something horrible happens to you, so long as you can find a way to tie it to something they positively did. The Deshaney court noted that if instead of leaving the kid with his parents, where he had the shit beat out of him, the state had given the kid to foster parents who beat the shit out of him, then there would be liability. When in doubt, let the free market handle it. Actual example: CPD just settled a suit where instead of putting a psych hold on a young schizophrenic woman they picked up for causing a ruckus and decided not to charge, they just dumped her somewhere on the west side, resulting in all kinds of horrors visited upon her. The cops _did_ something--put her in a place they didn't pick her up to begin with, changing her circumstances for the worse.

(2) Do the cops owe the government a duty to do their jobs? Yes, they've contracted to perform the duties of their employment, which is a classic case of positive duty to act. If they don't perform them they can be liable for damages or other relief.

However, that duty is owed to the employer--the government--not crime victims. In general, under American law, private citizens don't have a right to enforce obligations that are owed to the government. For instance, if someone is committing a crime that doesn't hurt you in some way, you can't sue him for breaking the law, even if the dude's committed a crime. The theoretical basis for this is that the law can be harsh, the government sometimes has to judge which cases to prosecute and which to let slide, etc. You can easily come up with a crime that you'd want to let slide--say, a person who assists the suicide of a close relative in immense pain. In practice, it's a lot easier to find crimes and legal violations that are being let slid for other reasons, such as the police union is a key help in municipal elections.

SP, you brought up the fact that there's taxpayer money involved. People came up with this idea real quick--I'm a taxpayer, you're wasting my money, I have my rights!--and courts have shot it down in almost every situation, using the logic that the right you're asking for is your money back, and that money's not coming back--even if the courts nullify a government contract or call back someone's contract, the government's probably just going to wind up spending that dough on something else anyway, not giving it back to your sorry ass. "Taxpayer standing" at wikipedia will have more.

(3) Does the government itself (not the individual cops) owe crime victims a legally enforceable duty to take steps to keep them safe? No, and here the situation gets a lot loopier real quick. Back in the Enlightenment, when the middle class was getting powerful enough to kill of the prior aristocratic class that was losing its hold on the most powerful forces of production and power, everyone involved in the fight was trying to come up with some kind of ideology that would justify the government's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (and that monopoly being largely under their control). For some reason, trying to interpret government as a contract between the governing powers and the governed powers became really popular. All of these were basically an update on the old commoner-noble relationship: commoners agree to obey, and in exchange the nobles agree to protect them. Just replace commoners with "citizen" and noble with "government."

But, at least until the Randian anarchocapitalists get their hands on it, government's _not_ a contract, and it never was--you never signed anything, you can't opt out (except in Hobbes's TERRIFYING model, which is so materialist that it's less a mystification than just factually wrong), and most importantly, the contract's not enforceable in court, only through whatever half-baked legislative and executive procedures your country has cooked up. Government's _way_ more complicated than the neat and tidy contracts you see in court, which are dependent on the prior existence of a government and the system of legal rights and obligations it creates in order to take the clean and simple shape they do. The social contract is only a metaphor, and a pretty weak and misleading one. (Neitzsche tried to define a contract outside of government and legal system, which would be something like a "social contract," and came up with "two forces of roughly equal power coming to an agreement, and forcing every weaker party to conform to it.")

The way the governed "enforce" the "duty" of the government to them is through electoral pressures: throwing the bums out and finding someone who's not a bum to replace them.

I was particularly amused when you brought up the notion that the taxpayers had been defrauded, SP. Not sure if you've heard of it, but the best anecdote in this vein is when a group of people from rural Louisiana visited Gov. Earl Long about that paved road he'd promised them in exchange for their votes. He instructed his aide to get rid of them. "But Governor, what can I tell them?" pleads the aide. "Tell 'em I lied!" says the Governor. Better luck next time!

When fraud gets naked enough into just siphoning money away from the public fisc, the executive can sometimes deploy the federal wire and mail fraud statutes against the target and throw 'em in jail. But legal scholars have always been confused by question of where legitimate horsetrading stops and mail fraud begins. In practice, this is solved by mail fraud indictments being brought against public targets only when they're sufficiently politically vulnerable. Hit some random congressman or mayor with a wire fraud charge and you're probably fine, hit Huey Long at the height of his power and you're facing a constitutional crisis.


memedumpster - 2013-06-05

So, we are absolutely bound to obey law enforcement under penalty of immediate, on the scene, death, wherein our murderer is completely beyond all accountability, but they have no requirement to do anything with us at all for any reason whatsoever.

I am now convinced that nature alone holds society together, and that "reason" is an illusion of animal existence. There is no way this country is still standing in a system that broken. There must be some mechanism in our DNA which is keeping the majority of us out of a perpetual state of warfare, because it cannot possibly be this shit system.


memedumpster - 2013-06-05

Oh, thank you for taking the time to post all of that, spirit stars!


Gmork - 2013-06-05

Fuck pigs.


memedumpster - 2013-06-05

"The court stated that official police personnel and the government employing them owe no duty to victims of criminal acts and thus are not liable for a failure to provide adequate police protection unless a special relationship exists. The case was dismissed by the trial court for failure to state a claim and the case never went to trial."

JUSTICE! *eagle screams in triumph while being raped*


Jet Bin Fever - 2013-06-05

To protect and to get served complimentary food.


Nikon - 2013-06-05

Jack Bauer can get by with CalorieMate. No need to stop working just to eat.


chumbucket - 2013-06-05

Bauer gets his nourishment from the sun. He just needs to drive around in it long enough while yelling on his cellphone.


That guy - 2013-06-05

If this wasn't worth 5 for shitheel cops, it'd be worth 6 for the LA RAZA reporter who can't keep it in her pants every time she says a Spanish name. Jesus Cristo, we get it, you know Spanish. Now what the fuck did you say?


Senator_Unger - 2013-06-05

I like how she rolled her r's on the cop's names but her colleague at the end was just "Ju-an"


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