Poll of the Day > What kind of punishment do you believe former parkland h.s.

(+) Yeah! (+)

...resource officer, scot peterson should receive? His trial is going on now. it took them a long time to start it didn't they? or, maybe you believe he should receive no punishment

I think this is one of those situations where I can comprehend both sides. That being said, I end up leaning to the side that thinks someone wanting to be a 'public defender' should actually be required to do so. While I don't think the penultimate solution is for there to always be a 'good guy' to gun down the 'bad guy', cops that don't get into action are embarrassing.

The Uvalde shooting happened May 24, 2022. Where I live, where we don't see much gun violence, this happened a month later:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9424658/saanich-bank-shooting/

The cops formulated a quick plan, leapt into action, eliminated the threat, sustained major injuries, but nobody died except the two idiots that held up the bank with semi-automatics and body armour.

It's so sad that we've seen so many events like these that we can literally make a T-chart of whether or not the police response was effective or totally fucking useless.

So I don't really advocate harsh punishment, but maybe 6 months to a couple of years? It'd be good to have a positive restitution-type environment where that dude can consider if he should even be a resource officer.

I don't think he is going to get any punishment. The legal theory they are prosecuting him under is dubious. A police officer would've been protected under qualified immunity, so they are trying to make him out to be a caregiver to circumvent this protection, but I don't think anyone thinks of cops as caregivers to the general public, heck, I wouldn't even consider teachers this and they interact with the students far more.

Whether he deserves it is another matter. Everyone thinks the dude should be some John Mclane figure, but SROs are pretty much a low risk retirement potion they give to old geezers that couldn't cut it in any departments. I don't think HR realistically expects them to be going against armed bad guys. Regardless, even if you do think he should get some punishment for his cowardness a life sentence is ridiculous.

Sadly there's no real legal punishment for cowardice. Depending on what official capacity you work in, dereliction of duty can be applied, but I doubt that's something they could charge a school resource officer with.

Ozmose posted...

Sadly there's no real legal punishment for cowardice.

Mostly because putting people in jail just because lots of people are mad at them doesn't really work.

Ozmose posted...

Depending on what official capacity you work in, dereliction of duty can be applied, but I doubt that's something they could charge a school resource officer with.

Pretty much. Realistically, the extent of what can actually be done is to charge him with failing to uphold whatever responsibilities he officially had. If he had no official responsibility to put himself in harm's way to such an extent, there's no basis to charge him for not doing so. If he did, then here is a basis for shirking that responsibility.

The long-term effect of this trial may be to codify such a responsibility into the job descriptions for SRO's, after which point there'd be a case for dereliction or negligence or something, but I don't know that there is one now.