(June 8, 2019 at 9:14 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: When people who consent to receive pay and exercise authority in return for readiness to discharge a clear set of responsibilities specifically pertaining to life and safety signalingly fail to discharge this responsibility, everyone who is effected by his failure to discharge his responsibilities has a right to shame him. Furthermore everyone who care those social contracts that are already paid for and are aimed at ensuring such critical responsibilities are discharged can normally be expected to be fulfilled has an vested interest to shame, and support the appropriate punishment of, those who enter into and then breach the contract.
The appropriate punishment must exhibit deterrence effect sufficient to contribute towards reducing the likelihood of further breaches of such contracts in the future by others.
Sure, if that's the way you look at it, but there is no way to anticipate how an individual will react to a situation until he or she is in said situation. This man wasn't battle tested, and, if we are going to expect him to go into battle, it is incumbent upon us to actually make sure he can discharge his duties effectively. That we have to expect this of people based solely on a mental health examination, firearms test, written exam and PT is a flaw in the "system" we have to accept. Otherwise, we'd have to put every cop out into a full-blown battle before we trust them to do their jobs. We can't do that, and the cop himself can never know how he will react, either. That's like hiring a chef and telling them, "You will never, ever cook a souffle until one day you do. On that day, your ability to cook a souffle will be life or death. All you will have is the recipe, and someone will be shooting at you."
This guy is a terrible cop and a coward, but he's not a criminal. He's also not even necessarily a bad person. Moreover, we don't even know he could have helped. So, there's no point in punishing him.
