“To Protect and Serve”

Warning, this article contains graphic descriptions and is not suitable for young readers.
Think about how good your home security is. You may have an alarm, possibly a baseball bat under the bed, a phone in every room so you can call 911 if necessary, and maybe you have a gun of some variety in the house. But what if you are one of the ones who don’t have any of that? What is your plan for protecting your home, and family? Have you even given it anymore thought than “Oh, I’m not worried, the police will protect me”?Did you know that the police have absolutely no legal obligation to protect you? The little catchy slogan “to protect and serve” you see on the side of police cars is just there as a means of self preservation (as long as you think you’re being protected you won’t want to get rid of the people who are doing the protecting). As a matter of fact, before the mid-1800’s in the U.S. and England, there was no such thing as a police force. It was considered a standing army, and people didn’t want to have anything to do with that. People were expected to protect themselves and their neighbors from criminals. In fact, they were even legally required to pursue and make an attempt to apprehend criminals. Even today, there are many small towns around the country that don’t provide their residents with a police force.

Now you’re probably saying, “well my town has a police force, why can’t I rely on them to protect me?” Well you can, if you want to put your life in someone else’s hands. But just remember that the people who make up the police force in your town have families that they would like to go home to, and I hate to break the news to you, but you’re not that important.

Now consider the case Warren v. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department. In that case, three women were sleeping in their home when they were awakened by two men breaking in their back door. The two men entered one of the bedrooms and forced the woman inside to sodomize one man while the other raped her. The other two women heard the commotion, and called the police, telling the dispatcher that their house was being burglarized, and that they needed immediate assistance. This was at 6:23 a.m.. Four police cruisers responded to the dispatcher’s call of a “Code 2” (even though calls of this nature should have been given a higher priority “Code 1” designation). In the meantime, the two women climbed over to an adjoining roof to wait for the police. They observed the officers going to the front door and knocking (probably thinking that the burglars would open the door for them) and doing a brief drive around the house. They were gone by 6:33 a.m. only five minutes after their arrival.

The two women then crawled back inside the house to call the police again. This time, their call was simply recorded as “investigate the trouble”, and never dispatched to the officers. This was at 6:42 a.m. Shortly after, the two women thought that the police were inside the house, and made the mistake of calling down to their friend. Unfortunately, the police weren’t in the house, but the burglars still were. The burglars then forced all three women, at knifepoint, to leave the house and go to the apartment of one of the burglars. Over the next 14 hours, the women were raped, robbed, beaten and forced to perform sexual acts upon each other and the burglars.

The women brought suit against the negligent members of the D.C. police department, claiming that (1) the dispatcher failed to give their original call the proper priority code, (2) that the responding officers failed to conduct a proper investigation of the house to determine if the burglars were still inside and (3) the dispatcher’s failure to send out the 6:42 a.m. call.

Now if you’re as outraged as I am about this case as I am you’ll be shocked to learn that the first court’s trial judges held that the police were under no specific legal duty to provide protection to the women. They then appealed the decision, but found that the appellate court wasn’t any more help. The following is a direct quote from the appeal’s opinion, “The Court, however, does not agree that defendants [the police] owed a specific legal duty to plaintiffs [the women] with respect to the allegations made in the amended complaint for the reason that the District of Columbia appears to follow the well-established rule that official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for failure to provide adequate police protection…This uniformly accepted rule rests upon the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.”

Look up this case for yourself. All these facts and more are in there. It also cites other similar cases, for those who think that this is just the one case that “fell through the cracks”.

Now I don’t care if you go out and do anything different to protect yourself. Just that you realize the next time you hear about a law restricting an individual’s right to carry a gun, mace, knife, etc. it forces potential victims to rely on the police for protection, since they will no longer be able to protect themselves as well. Like the old saying goes, if you want a job done right, do it yourself.