Abstract

Persons who dial 911 are often able to foresee that the subsequent levels of force police employ will be excessive, disproportionate, and therefore wrongful. This might seem to justify the provocative thesis that persons who call the police against suspected unlawful aggressors act impermissibly and deserve some quantum of blame for what they have done. In this paper, I critically examine and ultimately reject this thesis and discuss several possible grounds on which it might be false.