Miguel has more details about the court case.
Yup, the Coward of Broward is going to win and Mr Pollack is going to be on the hook for all the costs.
BUT.
What this is doing is finally informing people that the government is under zero obligation to do the things We The People constituted government to do for us.
Most everyone I've talked to about this is surprised that the police didn't have to respond to the shooting and cannot be held accountable for anything they do, or don't do in response to it.
Not for Pulse, not for Parkland, not for YOU!
People are sitting at home right now thinking, "When I hired you to do this, I bloody well expect you to DO it!"
Wanna bet there's going to be some changes to 768.28 soon?
By the way, Officer, you don't get to put on the mantle of how dangerous your job is when you can simply refuse to do it, then retire with a pension comparable to the income of a CEO of a successful medium sized company.
I'm thinking that, very soon, people are going to remember that the government is supposed to work for US rather than itself.
To toss an interesting monkey-wrench into the 'no obligation to enforce' defense, one can counter-argue with Accreditation Standards.
ReplyDeleteFor those not in the know, a while ago the accreditation movement swept law enforcement, supposedly to make departments have easily followed policies and procedures and done in a manner that is consistent with other departments (participating in the accreditation process) and with national standards. (Really, this is a real thing. Personally, I think it was an excuse for a bunch of retired cops to shake down departments over the accreditation policy, as I saw my department's easy to read manual morph into a super-thick tome full of bureaucratic mealy-mouthed language.)
So. The BCSO standard and policy for a mass shooting states, much like every other department after Columbine, that armed members run into and engage the shooter. Thus, Peterson did not follow his own department's policy, nor did the on-scene commander, or any other of the deputies.
Failure to follow department policy.
These policies are the ones they use to fire people over, such as uniform policy, take-home car policy, back-up gun policy, ACTIVE SHOOTER POLICY...
Failure to follow policy. He should have been fired, along with all others who didn't engage the shooter. And the people in BCSO whose job it is to fire or punish those who failed to follow policy? Well, since there's a policy over termination or suspension over non-compliance with department policy, you can see a train of firings, suspensions, demotions, transfers that should have taken place already.
We're starting to see some of this, with the on-scene commander being reassigned, but the 'punishments' most likely don't meet the policy for punishments.
Bet Mr. Pollack's lawyers either have the department manual or are itching to get their hands on one.
Oh, and part of the accreditation policy is signing that you have read, understand, and will abide by the policy you are signing for. So if Peterson signed that he read, understood and acknowledged he would abide by all the policies he signed for, well, that right there could and can be construed as signing a contract to 'protect' and to 'go towards fire.'
Accreditation standards are a two-edged bitch. Non-conformance to accredited standards will affect BCSO's insurance, their credibility in court case across the board, their ability to get fed grants AND to have their LEOs accepted in reciprocity agreements with other agencies. (FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement - Florida's version of the FBI) should be looking into this whole mess especially hard just for this reason alone.)
I sit with great anticipation over whether the lawyers toss the department manual into the pot.