Requiring a duty to protect is extremely dangerous to society. It elevates police above regular citizens. Contrary to popular perception police have almost no

Requiring a duty to protect is extremely dangerous to society. It elevates police above regular citizens. Contrary to popular perception police have almost no powers beyond that of regular citizens. Citizens can make arrests, police differ in that they can do so even if they are not direct witnesses of a crime. Citizens can enter private property to save lives, and can break laws and regulations to do so as well. Police can only enter private property absent a threat to life or property if given permission either by the owner or courts. They have qualified immunity, as do several other professions and citizens acting in extraordinary capacities such as good samaritans. The law and public expectations should be that police are regular citizens with a regular job, bound by the same laws as everyone else. Not that they are specially-designated protectors. They only become specially-designated protectors when they take someone into custody—- and depriving someone of their freedom of movement is one of the few things regular citizens cannot realistically do. Elevating them to have some special extraordinary status is, again, very dangerous. Many powers would be enabled by such a status which do not exist today that could be justified by granting them a “duty” to protect. Additionally, just from a philosophical perspective doing so would be immoral. Regular citizens, with very few exceptions such as vessel captains, parents, spouses, and employers (in the context of being required to be provide a safe working environment and facilitate rescue of endangered employees) having a “duty” to protect anyone. It is unreasonable, to myself and many others, to levy such a duty on anyone except in extraordinary circumstances. Airline captains have a duty to protect their passengers. This RIGHTLY grants them near-total, absolute, and unquestionable authority over the conduct of their crew and all souls on board. Giving or forcing a duty to protect to or on police would do the same. That’s bad. And because police are NOT extraordinary they don’t have a parental-like duty to protect their children (the public). Nor are we their spouses or employees. As far as cynicism goes, they don’t protect the interests of large corporations that’s more the purview of politicians. Police are generally just enforcing the laws as written. The court decision and the cases it references you yourself linked to goes over some of my points. Many people respond with “but what about when the police…” but the egregious cases of misconduct from which they draw outrage are what are wrong and should be stopped— not an absence of some duty to protect.