Reason #2974 for getting out of police work

Confederate Yankee wonders if more people died because of the police response in Binghamton, NY.

This is a dangerous speculative road to go down. The post itself didn't bug me, but some of the replies did. There seems to be a notion that there is a duty to protect in police work. Let provide a clue to those of you who do not already know this: THERE IS NO DUTY TO PROTECT on the part of police officers. Before you conjure up mental images of coward cops who would rather stay at the doughnut shop rather than charge into a shooting scene with guns blazing, consider what things would look like if police officers were bound by law to insert themselves into life threatening situations. The implications on the force continuum alone would be enough to make most people think twice about making this a requirement.

The bottom line here is that if you are looking for the police to save you from every situation, then you are in big trouble. The fact that there is no duty to protect is what gives the police the discretion to act on information available to them at the time of an incident. If you take discretion away, you create many more problems than you solve. Mandatory arrest laws (which I still believe to be unconstitutional) have proven this time and time again. Police making arrests for VERY trivial matters invariably make the news and create indignation, but those situations are almost always the result of discretion being removed from a officer's toolbox.

My old department has conducted a lot of training in active shooter situations. If we arrived at a shooting where the shooter is still doing his thing, then we would put together a small tactical group from the officers on scene and we would go in looking for the bad guy. However, even this response is not immediate, and the chance of successfully eliminating the threat is only slightly elevated in exchange for the greatly heightened risk to both innocent civilians and officers alike. I know what I would personally do, given an active shooter situation. I also know that most of the officers I worked with would go in with me. However, I know enough to know that there is no substitute for being there on scene, seeing and hearing what is happening, and that there ARE situations where I would not go in immediately. I would like to say that my department would hae moved in on the Binghamton shooter immediately, but then again, I wasn't there, and neither were the commenters on Confederate Yankee's blog entry.

Ironically, active shooter response requires that there actually be an active shooter present. If officers present do not hear gunfire (either the shooter has left, capped himself, etc) then protocol is to set up a perimeter and wait for a dedicated entry team. I think that Confederate Yankee's post insinuated that some injured people may have bled out and died while waiting for the police to get inside to them. Again, I don't know because I wasn't there. Neither were you.

If you expect perfect performance from the police during critical incidents and shootings, then try applying that standard to your own profession and see how it goes. Critical incidents are dynamic and very difficult to control. The police cannot read minds and they cannot see through walls. If our public is moving towards the point where the police are required to take foolish risks as a condition of their employment, then I say be prepared to take the law into your own hands, because only fools will be police officers.