In some jurisdictions police go around looking for unlocked doors and garage doors that are open late at night. While they generally just leave a friendly reminder that you were an idiot who was just begging to have your property stolen out from underneath of you, in this case they went further by actually walking inside some houses and talking to the home owners.

Obviously, this is dangerous for both the cops and the people inside the home. When the police woke that guy up at 3AM, they stood a chance of being mistaken for robbers and shot at. Ironically, Quebec has shown more intelligence than our system usually shows when it comes to handling law-abiding citizens who shoot police mistaking them for criminals entering their home.

The police are in a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation here. While their tactics were wrong here, there are a lot of loud-mouthed fools in our society who just look to complain about the police; the police just can't do right in their opinion. When they're not being proactive, they're not doing enough. When they're being proactive, they're a danger. There is a lot of overlap between these people and the sort who either leave their doors unlocked at night or sympathize with those who do.

Maybe the approach the police need is a "stupidity penalty" for gauging which cases to give priority to outside of homicide and certain extremely dangerous sex offenses. If you leave your door unlocked in a city and get robbed, or even raped, I think the police should be able to relegate that to the bottom of the list of cases to tackle first because that's the best that can be done to demand that people take some responsibility for their own safety these days.

Question for those who know anything about Washington D.C. Would you really think it's the police department's responsibility to make it a priority to go after the robbers who mug a drunk white guy who was walking through Anacostia at night wearing fancy clothes and $10,000 worth of expensive stuff like a Rolex watch?