I think it is fair to say that if a fight is occurring we want our police to stop it and not really worry about blame.
I don’t think that’s fair to say at all. If one person clearly is in the wrong (committed assault, hate speech or so on,) we have laws that say that they’re responsible and are to be punished, and we do this to discourage people from engaging in these kinds of acts in the first place.
We might want the police to stop fights first and only worry about who to blame afterwards if they think something serious was going on, but I don’t think we’d want to live in a society where police either broke up conflicts without issuing punishment or charged everyone involved in conflicts. Policemen aren’t judges, but we do entrust them with the responsibility of working out who to charge with crimes. This is analogous to a teacher, say, coming upon an altercation between students, rendering a judgment of who’s responsible, and sending only the person or people who they think are responsible to the principal to work out what if anything is an appropriate punishment.
I don’t think that’s fair to say at all. If one person clearly is in the wrong (committed assault, hate speech or so on,) we have laws that say that they’re responsible and are to be punished, and we do this to discourage people from engaging in these kinds of acts in the first place.
We might want the police to stop fights first and only worry about who to blame afterwards if they think something serious was going on, but I don’t think we’d want to live in a society where police either broke up conflicts without issuing punishment or charged everyone involved in conflicts. Policemen aren’t judges, but we do entrust them with the responsibility of working out who to charge with crimes. This is analogous to a teacher, say, coming upon an altercation between students, rendering a judgment of who’s responsible, and sending only the person or people who they think are responsible to the principal to work out what if anything is an appropriate punishment.