Vicarious Liability: Criminal Or Civil Liability

4-5 FULL pages

3 Peer-reviewed resources

APA Style with headings and sub-headings

If a fact or information is used from a source, a citation MUST be used

Following a series of high-profile charges of police misconduct including assault, extortion, sexual assault, and money laundering by officers, a local news station conducted an investigation into the agency and uncovered 14 individuals who had been hired on at the local police agency despite all having previous felony records. The crimes ranged from drug convictions to aggravated assault, auto theft to robbery. Upon discovery of this information, the news station submitted a request for information and obtained the names of every officer employed at the agency. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that over 50 of the officers had previous criminal records including blackmail, extortion, solicitation of prostitution, domestic violence, and two were convicted of hate crimes.

Following the news report, the attorney general of the state received a call from several community organizations requesting that the chief of police and human resources director be brought up on criminal charges relating to the hiring of these individuals. The argument was that the chief and director were directly responsible for approving all of the hiring and that the background checks on every officer with the exception of one returned the criminal records.

Because of the seriousness of the issue and the need of urgency, you need to make the appropriate decision on whether to press charges against the human resources director and the chief of police.

In your response, be very detailed in the application of vicarious liability and whether you believe the individuals, named above, should be held criminally liable or if only the agency should be held civilly liable?