When Radley Balko posted at The Agitator about the death of Laquisha Turner, a 17-year-old quadriplegic woman from Richmond, California, it crystallized a very real question about the tipping point between the dual functions of police, public safety and law enforcement.  In particular, when cops are engaged primarily in one function, law enforcement, how concerned should they be about their other?

From ABC7 in San Francisco,

[W]hen FBI agents raided her house as part of a major gang sweep last month, West said Turner never recovered.

“When I opened the door I said, ‘I have a disabled daughter…you guys are going to scare her, you can come in and search, do whatever you have to do,’ but by this time they were coming in the side door shooting things,” West said. 

Laquisha Turner was the victim of a drive-by shooting, ironically as a result of gang violence, and was left a quad as a result, spending her days at home playing cards and watching television.  The police entered shooting flash-bang grenades, designed to stun and confuse occupants, and avoid harm to police and occupants.

“They kept telling her to get down on the ground and she kept telling them, ‘I can’t get down,'” West said.

Should the police have been aware, in advance, that there was a quadriplegic in the house they were about to raid?  Should they be expected to ascertain whether there will be special circumstances involved, or is this too much a burden on the police? 

It’s easy to default to the answer that cops should always be required to know what they are doing beforehand, though  there is something inherently contradictory about that reaction.  The fact is that we expect the police to do their job when it comes to law enforcement in order to fulfill their responsibility to protect us from people inclined to commit crimes.  In this case, Laquisha Turner, herself the victim of violent crime, is the example of why we can’t saddle the police with a constant stream of greater and more burdensome duties.  If you don’t want to get shot on the street, then don’t make it impossible for the cops to do their job.

On the other hand, there are certain aspects of an execution of a warrant that call into question how great a burden it would be to have some clue what you might be facing inside.  Initially, the police were not engaged in a street encounter with unknown people of dubious threat.  They made the decision to enter into someone’s home, a place that the law (and most rational people) endow with a special degree of protection from forced entry.  The police made the call to break into Laquisha Turner’s home, and she did nothing to cause it. 

Further, the warrant to enter the Turner home required police to express some degree of knowledge about why they should be entitled to do so.  The expectation that they show good cause to execute the warrant includes the belief that they have good basis to knock down a door and find the target inside.  They are thus expected to have a far greater degree of knowledge about what they are doing than they would have in a typical street encounter.  In other words, the increased burden of ascertaining whether there are likely to be children, innocent people, quadriplegics inside a home, shouldn’t be particularly great.

And finally, there is the larger question about the primacy of the police functions.  Which is more important, public safety or law enforcement?  The justification for law enforcement is public safety; Police don’t enforce laws because it’s fun to do or wins them medals to wear in court to prove their credibility.  Their authority to enforce laws stems from the public welfare, and the public welfare demands that they do not harm people in the process of enforcing laws.  They do not harm innocent people.  They do not harm less than innocent people, either, to the extent they can avoid doing so consistent with self-protection, a point missed by many.

While it’s true that the expectation that cops find out if there will be a Laquisha Turner, or a Tarika Wilson, killed while holding her baby almost a year ago in Lima, Ohio, inside the house they’re about to raid, it is more important that they not harm the innocent in the course of performing their law enforcement function.

To put it another way, just as it is a axiomatic that it is better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man be convicted, it is a fundamental precept that the police not harm the innocent in their zeal fo get their target.  The bad guys will still be there tomorrow, but there will be no tomorrow for Laquisha Turner or Tarika Wilson or the others who are the unfortunate collateral damage of law enforcement. 

The duty of the police must be to protect the public first, even if it means that they have to find another way to capture their target.  If this is not their first priority, then they have neither legal nor moral authority to perform the law enforcement function.