- Dump job
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In American police slang (and influenced by it), a dump job is an act of avoiding unwanted responsibility.
Police usage
In police work (and presumably serving as the source of its wider use) a "dump job" is the abandonment of a dead human body, especially without significantly concealing it, after its removal from the place of death with specific intent: to obscure someone's association with the death, whether it is their responsibility for it, or their involvement in circumstances surrounding it, that is to be obscured.
Such cases often entail extra forensics difficulties. They also suggest to investigators theories that involve the death having occurred in the context of otherwise illegal or scandalous circumstances, panic, and/or awareness of either whoever left the body or whoever they seek to protect that the death is criminal; or some combination of these possibilities.
Wider usage
The term may also be applied (to some degree as a metaphor based on the police term) in any collaborative work situation, referring to a person's or group's declining to take on a task, despite their awareness of it raising the possibility of their being a straightforward candidate for it;[clarification needed] the term is especially applied when the failure to act is accompanied by specific steps that increase the likelihood of the task's allocation elsewhere.
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