|
Monday, June 27, 2005The toughest case, today, I think, was Gonzalez. File sharing, reporters and our perennial favorite, separation of church and state, are nice, but the rubber meets the road in Gonzalez. Here we have a cut and dried case of how we rely on social institutions to protect us in an ostensive civilization but, oops, three kids turned up dead and the cops seem to have been less than on the ball about using the tools given them to prevent it.In essence, a screwed up dad grabbed his kids in a violation of a restraining order. He claimed to have them at an amusement park in Denver. Instead of checking out the story - or even calling the Denver cops to do so - local law enforcement sat on its hands. Their mother says it's not the first time the cops had acted like it was an awful lot of trouble to enforce the restraining order. The Supreme Court ruled, and rightly, that the mother couldn't sue the city. I've had 911 hang up on me when I was reporting an accident. I've heard of cops showing up an hour after a call that a homicide was in progress. And you really want to reach out and make them accountable, especially when it's plain that they're not doing their job up to par. But that doesn't mean that you can bankrupt every municipality where something goes wrong. And to let suits like this stand is to invite a world where torn between lawsuits for excessive force from criminals and inexcessive force from victims, the logical thing to do is to become a mall security guard and small towns can just do without having police forces because they can't maintain them. However... the Gonzalez case does invite political remedy. The mother in Gonzalez did not have property in the form of a restraining order taken from her because the cops were allegedly shiftless. Rather, the citizens of her town and of Colorado were defrauded of taxes paid to provide security to the community. Taxpayers, much as we'd like to, can't sue our officials for wasting our money. But we can vote them out. Gonzalez should find herself a picture of the police chief, print up some fliers with his picture next to her kids, and invite her fellow citizens to question what their taxes are going for. And the state of Colorado could make state funding of local police departments contingent upon taking seriously the domestic violence measures it passes. This political action would have the effect of encouraging the prevention of similar future tragedies with its strong incentives for politicians to give "not my problem" cops a boot in the rear. The judicial remedy, contrariwise, with its capacity to bankrupt any city over one mistake, would in the long run lead to the multiplication of such tragedies as localities and law enforcement joined the many sectors of society that invest more in avoiding lawsuits than doing their jobs. 
posted by gbarto at 3:35 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
