ShadowDragon8685 wrote:JCady wrote:Rescue personnel have a duty of care to discharge their trained abilities in the service of the public when they are on duty and operating within their area of jurisdiction. I happen to be a trained and licensed EMT-B in the State of California; that does not mean that I'm required to pull over and render aid if I come across a car accident when I'm driving home (although in most cases I will voluntarily do so), and it does not mean I'm required to respond to emergencies even when I'm on duty if I happen to be outside my jurisdiction. For example, the AMR Hollywood unit I was assigned to occasionally got long-distance patient transports as far away as Las Vegas. . . when we're on the return leg from those runs, we do NOT get dispatched to 911 calls in the areas we're passing through even though we are a "live" ambulance on duty and not currently carrying a patient.
We would only respond to an out-of-zone call like that based on pre-existing aid agreements; i.e., the agency that actually HAS jurisdiction has a standing contract with our company that they can call our units for help if they're overwhelmed by a multiple-casualty incident, at which point central dispatch will transfer us to their chain of command. If no such agreement exists, we have no legal ability to intervene even if a traffic accident happens right in front of us.
Funnily enough, every medically-trained person I've known, ranging from my family's GP, my aunt (who is an RN and steaming headfirst towards an MD,) and my friend who was a volunteer, then paid, fireman with EMT training, as well as the first aid teacher back at college, all told me that trained lifesaving personnel
do have a duty to render care, on-the-clock or off it, in-jurisdiction or out of it. In fact, they brought up this point very specifically when we were taking Red Cross first-aid to explain the difference between first aid training (
not obliged to render care) and anything higher, like EMT training (obliged to render care,) as a specific part of assuring us that by taking the elective class we weren't legally obliging ourselves to render care to someone.
So I'm going to ask you to back up your claim that you're not legally obliged to render aid, because I strongly suspect that you are either making shit the fuck up about being an EMT, or your knowledge of the laws surrounding your training is
woefully incorrect.
First of all, you're not using the correct term. What you're looking for is
duty to rescue, further developed in
Castle Rock v. Gonzales (text of the decision
here.
Second, any duty to rescue for emergency personell applies solely
within the scope of their employment. In your cop example, the officer has a duty to rescue someone when he is on duty regardless of whether they spit in his face because he is on duty. If however, a cop lives next door to you, you do not have a right to call him off duty when a burglar breaks in expecting him to come over and arrest the burglar, although he could certainly do so if he chose (barring any jurisdictional/venue issues). You would be obligated to call the actual police department and have them send an officer actually on duty. Similarly, you cannot call up your firefighter or EMT neighbor at 1:00 in the morning and demand that, now being aware of some emergency, they come deal with it for you.
There may be local/state laws creating some sort of obligation for medical personnel off duty, but duty to rescue in general is purely civil, not criminal, and because the U.S. has no overriding tort law, with each state developing its own, that doctrine would not be universal as either a civil principle or a criminal one if it is a crime in that state not to respond when off duty. Since we're offering up anecdotal evidence, however, I have found that emergency medical personnel like to exaggerate the scope of their responsibilities and authority, so I'm really not buying your secondhand assertions about what these medical personnel told you.
This is far more true for firefighters than for EMTs or police; EMTs and police can reasonably keep available the equipment they need to perform at least some functions off duty, but their capabilities will be degraded. For firefighters, being off duty is
crippling; they do not have any essential equipment such as their protective suits, trucks, and most importantly, other firefighters. Firefighters work as a team and an off-duty firefighter is of little use to do anything other than advise you to call the fire department and get the hell out. Even an on duty firefighter by himself will be hard-pressed to do much of any use. Therefore, your examples of police and EMTs are irrelevant because they relate to off-duty situations and to emergency services that work in a completely different manner.
But wait, you say. These guys were on duty, and really, "within the scope of their employment" should include when they were workign as volunteers! Yes, they were, and yes, it should. However, again, the applicable legal duty they have is
duty to rescue. Duty to rescue applies only to people. There is no duty to rescue property. In fact, such a duty would be silly because the act of rescuing the property from fire is highly likely to cause huge amount of damage in and of itself. Fire departments and other emergency services exist to preserve and protect the lives and safety of people first. Protection of property comes by far second, and legally, does not fall under any duty of care or duty to rescue. In fact, even the duty of a police officer to apprehend criminals is second to protecting life. If you work at a gas station and a robber shoots you and runs with the money just as I arrive, do you really imagine I would chase the robber rather than administer first aid to you?
So, there is no legal duty to protect property. There is, however, a legal duty, often backed up by criminal sanctions (such as Ohio's Dereliction of Duty law) requiring one to perform duties within the scope of one's employment. Volunteer firefighters are presumeably "employed" for such purposes if an equivalent statute exists in Tennessee. So, since no human life was in danger, didn't they have a duty to put the fire out? Well no, because the scope of their employment is A) within town, where taxes are paid and B) anyone outside town who has paid the fee. The town itself is under no obligation whatsoever to provide fire services to county residents; that is the purview of county government, excpet that in this case the reidents seem unwilling to elect a government that will properly tax them to either pay the city to do it or establish their own.
The only person the fire department had any legal duty to was the neighbor, and they evidently did put the fire out when it reached his property, or did something to prevent that. It's a bit unclear exactly which from the different accounts.
As to your example about not helping a person who didn't pay their taxes, EMTs and other emergency personnel cannot tell if you've paid your taxes. If you're not paying your taxes, sanction is taken against you in other ways; you will still get emergency help but you may have a lien on your property, tax penalties, or even jail. In this case, however, the fee is not a tax and there is no legal sanction the city can take against you, so comparing it to someone not paying taxes is, again, inaccurate.
Shit like this is why I'm kind of glad it isn't legal to go around punching people in the crotch. You'd be able to track my movement from orbit from the sheer mass of idiots I'd leave lying on the ground clutching their privates in my wake. -- Mr. Coffee
