A prisoner cannot simply leave when the person guarding them becomes a danger. That inability to walk away changes the whole meaning of responsibility. Someone else controls the door, and with it much of what can happen next.
Anadolu Ajansı reports that Israeli rights groups have recorded 22 accounts of prisoners being shot by guards. The supplied reporting does not establish the circumstances of each account or independently confirm what happened. Those limits matter. So does the seriousness of what is being reported: people allegedly being shot by those exercising custody over them.
It is tempting to make concern depend on knowing who the prisoners are. What were they accused of? What might they have done? These can be legitimate questions in deciding guilt and punishment. They cannot settle whether someone responsible for a prisoner acted lawfully. An accusation against the person in custody is no answer to an allegation against the person holding the weapon.
There is a difficult objection here. Guards may face danger, and custody does not make every use of force unjustified. A serious examination must allow for that. But acknowledging possible danger cannot become a substitute for examining a particular shooting. Otherwise, the very authority that requires scrutiny supplies its own exemption from it.
For those reading at a distance, the responsibility is smaller, though still real. We can resist the urge to turn an attributed account into a proven fact. We can also resist the much more comfortable habit of treating uncertainty as permission to forget it.
Ordinary life gives us reasons to understand dependence, even where the circumstances are utterly different. Families entrust relatives to care. Parents leave children with other adults. Illness can place any of us in someone else’s hands. We expect the power involved to carry obligations, especially when the dependent person cannot easily complain or be believed.
That expectation deserves to survive our dislike of someone, including someone accused or convicted of a serious crime. If it disappears at that point, protection becomes something the powerful grant to people they approve of. The person behind the locked door then has very little left to rely on.