So this whole Brooklyn Center shooting incident got me thinking.
I don't want to discuss this too much, as its just the jumpstart for my point. It's looking like this woman cop will probably be charged with negligent homicide or manslaughter.
There are many professions out there where negligence or honest mistakes can cause death or harm to an individual or people.
A doctor makes a mistake and someone dies. A firefighter makes a mistake and someone dies. Anyone in the armed forces makes a mistake and someone dies. An electrician wires something wrong and someone dies. A bridge designer makes a mistake and someone dies.
It also seems to me, that the higher exposure the case is, the more likely someone will get charged.
We/society are so hypocritical when it comes to who should get charged. This comes from many different ways. In the media. a soldier kills a friendly in war and they want to hank them up, yet it's perfectly ok for us to do drone strikes and kill innocent civilians. While there is vocal minority of those against these drone strikes, it rarely gets the national media attention. In some cases, especially medical malpractice, society is willing to look past human error in many cases. On top of all that, we won't pay for training. We spend millions of dollars on training a single soldier, but not on EMTs, police, or fire fighters. Yet it seems we hold certain professions to a higher standard, when many of these professions pay so little.
There is no logic or reason on how we as a society want to deal with these things. We either charge everyone or we don't charge them. "Let the process play out" they say. But they only say that when it's conveient.
One of the limiting factors to why I became a software engineer vs Electrical, Mechanical, or Civil is that the exposure of those professions to being criminally charged for simply making a mistake is significantly higher.
Why would anyone, especially in low to moderate paying jobs, want the risk of exposure to criminal prosecution when they simply make a mistake? And I've said the same thing when soldiers get in a bind for mistakes they make.
I don't want to discuss this too much, as its just the jumpstart for my point. It's looking like this woman cop will probably be charged with negligent homicide or manslaughter.
There are many professions out there where negligence or honest mistakes can cause death or harm to an individual or people.
A doctor makes a mistake and someone dies. A firefighter makes a mistake and someone dies. Anyone in the armed forces makes a mistake and someone dies. An electrician wires something wrong and someone dies. A bridge designer makes a mistake and someone dies.
It also seems to me, that the higher exposure the case is, the more likely someone will get charged.
We/society are so hypocritical when it comes to who should get charged. This comes from many different ways. In the media. a soldier kills a friendly in war and they want to hank them up, yet it's perfectly ok for us to do drone strikes and kill innocent civilians. While there is vocal minority of those against these drone strikes, it rarely gets the national media attention. In some cases, especially medical malpractice, society is willing to look past human error in many cases. On top of all that, we won't pay for training. We spend millions of dollars on training a single soldier, but not on EMTs, police, or fire fighters. Yet it seems we hold certain professions to a higher standard, when many of these professions pay so little.
There is no logic or reason on how we as a society want to deal with these things. We either charge everyone or we don't charge them. "Let the process play out" they say. But they only say that when it's conveient.
One of the limiting factors to why I became a software engineer vs Electrical, Mechanical, or Civil is that the exposure of those professions to being criminally charged for simply making a mistake is significantly higher.
Why would anyone, especially in low to moderate paying jobs, want the risk of exposure to criminal prosecution when they simply make a mistake? And I've said the same thing when soldiers get in a bind for mistakes they make.
