Originally published at: Cop who failed to enter building during Parkland mass shooting found not guilty of neglect, negligence and perjury | Boing Boing
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As opposed to a cop who actually did his. job.
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I’ve got my life back
I’m sure he’ll also get his pension back. Police departments and unions are always willing to reward cops who’ve been exposed as complete moral, ethical, or human failures.
Does anyone know about the status of the civil lawsuits parents filed against pants-pissing coward Scot Peterson?
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Go tell the parents, they’ll be delighted.
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He did, at no personal risk to himself, maintain and secure police personnel and equipment from incurring any risk of damage, saving the department an undisclosed dollar value.
So sure, reward him.
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some people are lucky enough to do that, but I think he is not one of them.
I get into too many arguments with people on Reddit about this. No matter how many times courts rule that police have no general legal duty to protect people, a lot of people (understandably) refuse to believe that. The police are not there to help you. Sometimes they do, but “protect and serve” is just a marketing slogan. Their job (legally…I’m not expressing that this is how it should be) is to enforce laws, primarily by arresting people and charging them with crimes. We can and should change this.
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Capitalism, generally.
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Well, yeah. I was going to add that and a whole bunch of other stuff about how unlikely this all is to change anytime soon, but I’m trying to be less negative about everything. This world makes that hard, though.
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“In general” is good enough for today, no need to make your day worse. 
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Yeah, well…SCOTUS already did that for me today. Two days in a row!
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Admittedly, being crap at your job is rarely illegal, even when lives are at stake. Was he at least fired with extreme prejudice?
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To turn minor school infractions into full blown legal problems.
To escalate disruptions to a point where they can use force.
To create fear.
To beat up the occasional kid.
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“school resource officer,” also tends to be one of the places they send cops that are that are so crap at their jobs that nobody wants to work with them. So there is a reasonable chance that he was there because he had demonstrated cowardice before.
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Yep. Another reminder that they have no duty to protect, and any department with “protect and serve” on their cars should scrape them off.
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This guy deserves at least a good share of the disgust aimed his way but the biggest takeaway from this tragedy should be “We cannot rely on ‘good guys with guns’ to prevent mass shootings, the only way to do that is to restrict bad guys’ access to weapons of war.”
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This seemed like an utterly hopeless case to me. As everyone said, there’s no duty to protect any specific individual(s). It seemed like a waste of effort to even try to prosecute him.
I can’t imagine he has any personal liability in this. He has insurance, plus again, he has no legal duty to protect anyone… The victims’ families won $127ml in lawsuits from the school, but again, none of that is going to impact this particular cop.
I believe he’s still getting his pension. They tried to pass a bill to cancel his pension but it died, because if it had passed it would have been tossed out in court.
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Cops have a really hard job that they are under no obligation to perform well at, so it’s pointless trying to hold them to account, we should continue to let them act as they wish.
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If there’s no duty to protect, then what the fuck was he there for? Why should he get a pension if he didn’t do his job? Because regardless of legal duty to protect, it was most certainly what he was hired for and why he was on school grounds to begin with.
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The law prosecutors were trying to apply in this case is an example of failure to perform your job as a criminal act. Healthcare workers face criminal charges, prosecution, and prison time if they fail to help patients. It’s obscene that standard is not also applied to cops.
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