Balancing act

The City of Alameda recently filed a demurrer in the lawsuit filed by the relatives of Raymond Zack seeking compensation in a wrongful death.  Essentially the City’s lawyers are asking for the judge to dismiss the entire complaint.

The filing itself is a pretty interesting read.   If you have time you can check it out on the Domain Web site using the case code of RG12632015.   The demurrer essentially says that the plaintiffs have no cause of action and therefore the whole case should be booted.   One of the cases cited in the demurrer is one from the City of Fremont where the City was sued from wrongful death and actually received an award from a jury.   Later upon appeal, the ruling from the jury was overturned.

In this case the decedent was threatening suicide and brandishing a weapon which he refused to surrender to police.   Apparently he shot himself and police believed he was shooting at them so they shot at him and he later died from gunshot wounds, including a self-inflicted one. Anyway, lawsuit ended in successful jury award which later was overturned and here are some of the parts which are relevant to the Raymond Zack situation:

We agree with the Allen court’s conclusion that police officers providing assistance at the scene of a threatened suicide must concern themselves with more than simply the safety of the suicidal person. Protection of the physical safety of the police officers and other third parties is paramount.

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In keeping with the analysis employed by the Allen court, we conclude that imposing liability for the negligent handling of a threatened suicide improperly elevates the interests in preserving the life of the person threatening suicide over the interests of public safety and the physical safety of police officers.

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Furthermore, exposing police officers to tort liability for inadequate or unreasonable assistance to suicidal individuals could inhibit them from providing intervention at all. fn. 25 The resulting loss of an important resource in dealing with threatened suicides would be devastating to such affected communities.

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Our Supreme Court has acted to dispel “widely held misconceptions” that law enforcement’s public safety function imposes a duty on police officers to protect individual constituents as opposed to the general public. (Williams, supra, 34 Cal. 3d at pp. 23-24.) Although police officers regularly respond to [68 Cal. App. 4th 275] third parties’ requests for assistance, they are not professional Good Samaritans subject to a ” ‘novel’ ” claim of malpractice whenever their response falls short of ” ‘what reasonably prudent police employees would have done in similar circumstances.’ ” (Id. at p. 24, fn. 3, quoting with approval Warren, supra, 444 A.2d at p. 8.) ” ‘A person does not, by becoming a police officer, insulate himself from any of the basic duties which everyone owes to other people, but neither does he assume any greater obligation to others individually. The only additional duty undertaken by accepting employment as a police officer is the duty owed to the public at large.’ ” (34 Cal. 3d at pp. 23-24, original italics.)

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Admittedly, law enforcement largely acts to preserve the peace by its interactions with individual members of the public. Nevertheless, the role of law enforcement in society is to act in the general public interest. Permitting potential suicide victims and their families to hold police officers personally liable for the negligent handling of a suicide crisis conflicts with the public nature of protection services police officers provide to the community at large.

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Moreover, imposing a duty on law enforcement to take reasonable steps to prevent a threatened suicide would have significant budgetary implications and improperly insinuate the civil justice system into the allocation of law enforcement resources. The degree of training devoted to suicide intervention and prevention would be dictated by events in the civil courtroom, and not necessarily by the needs of the community. Compelling the reallocation of finite public resources may serve to benefit individuals in a suicidal crisis, but that benefit may be at the expense of other, more pressing law enforcement needs and programs.

Much more interesting stuff from that opinion, while the facts aren’t exactly on point, the general issues of law that arise will definitely come up in the Raymond Zack lawsuit.