“A long line of cases have held that a special 15 relationship with a person in peril is not established simply because police officers 16 responded to a call for assistance and took some action at the scene.”
How later courts described this case
- “A long line of cases have held that a special 15 relationship with a person in peril is not established simply because police officers 16 responded to a call for assistance and took some action at the scene.”
- “A long line of cases have held that 7 a special relationship with a person in peril is not established simply because police officers 8 responded to a call for assistance and took some action at the scene.”
- “[L]aw enforcement personnel render assistance to suicidal individuals at the scene, virtually always in response to emergency calls. They must take the individual and their environment as they find them.”
- “On balance, the relevant public policy considerations militate against imposing a legal duty on police officers to take reasonable steps to prevent a threatened suicide from being carried out.”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
*289 HAERLE, J., Concurring.
I agree completely with both the result and the path by which it is reached in Justice Ruvolo’s majority opinion. However, what is not addressed in Presiding Justice Kline’s dissent leads me to add this brief separate concurrence.
As both of my colleagues demonstrate repeatedly in their opinions, the special relationship doctrine is reserved for situations in which the authorities have created a relationship of “dependency” with a “vulnerable” individual, here of course the decedent. It is for this reason that, at various points in his dissent, Justice Kline references a “situation of dependency” or a “relationship of dependence” allegedly created here. (Dis. opn. of Kline P. J., post, at pp. 292, 295, 307.) He also suggests that the police action here amounted to an “ ‘undertaking to rescue’ ” by which they “ ‘voluntarily assume[d] a protective duty’ ” {id. at pp. 292, 310), and that the resulting special relationship triggers a duty to take “affirmative action to assist or protect another.” {Id. at p. 292.)
All of this and much more in the dissent might lead the unwary reader to suspect that we are dealing with a “vulnerable” and “dependent” victim, e.g., one who was standing on the proverbial ledge of a skyscraper and was allowed to step off the same. We are not. We are addressing the case of a man with a loaded gun who had already discharged that gun in his own household. This crucial, indeed overriding, fact is totally ignored by the dissent. More importantly, though, the explicit proposition in the dissent that, by entering into this situation and trying to disarm the decedent, the police thereby forged a “special relationship” with him constitutes a radical extension of that principle. It should be, I submit, self-evident that a man with a loaded gun is not exactly “vulnerable” and certainly not in a “dependent” relationship with the police who, for the safety of themselves and the community, are trying to disarm him.