A cop’s decision to sport a body camera and search a Massachusetts middle school for a book has raised serious concerns among civil liberties experts, a new report shows.
The Berkshire Eagle reported Wednesday on mounting fears after the Great Barrington plainclothes police officer who entered an eighth grade classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.
“Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia," Ruth A. Bourquin, senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told the local news outlet. "What are we doing?”
For their part, police say they were obligated to investigate a complaint about the book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, a memoir about gender identity that contains sexually explicit illustrations and language, the report notes.
When people say police have no duty to protect the public, they are talking about a legal affirmative duty to act.
Usually the law does not impose a duty to act. If you see someone drowning, it’s not negligent to NOT jump into the water and save the person. You can stand there and watch your neighbor’s kid drown and you’re neither breaking the law nor being negligent. Even if your neighbor’s kid screams for help and looks right at you and says please help me, it’s legal to do nothing: there is no affirmative duty to rescue.
It’s the same for police. The exception are when there is a fiduciary relationship, if you created the peril, or if you start rescuing someone you can’t leave them worse off. Usually these exceptions don’t apply to police, even if you call and ask for help, they have no duty to act. That doesn’t mean they won’t show up and do their best. Just means you can’t sue them for negligence if they fail to save you.
Therapists, doctors, lawyers, architects, have legal duties to act.
I’m not sure why this had to be typed out.
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