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The Police And Their Duty To Protect Individual Citizens

Despite all that information you might have taken away from crime shows on TV (yes, that’s exactly what law enforcement jobs are really like on a daily basis!), here’s something that you may not know…

Courts in the United States illustrate a longstanding rule of law that police owe no duty of protection to individual citizens.

Consider the following court cases (commentary from gun rights blog LearnAboutGuns.com):

Warren v. District of Columbia (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is the case in which three rape victims sued the District of Columbia police because of negligence. Two of three female roommates were upstairs when they heard men break in and begin attacking the third. After repeated calls to the police over half an hour, the roommate’s screams finally stopped, and they assumed the police had arrived. The two women went downstairs to find that the police never arrived, but that the rapists were still in the house. All 3 women were then held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, and forced to commit sexual acts upon one another and to submit to the attackers’ sexual demands for 14 hours.

The police had lost track of the repeated calls for assistance.

The District of Columbia’s highest court ruled that the police do not have a legal responsibility to provide personal protection to individuals, and absolved the police and the city of any liability.

And the second court case:

Riss v. New York (22 N.Y.2d 579, 240 N.E.2d 860, 293 N.Y.S.2d 897) Linda Riss was harassed by an ex boyfriend, who claimed he would kill or severely injure her if she dated someone else. Riss repeatedly asked for police protection, to no avail. After learning that she became engaged to another man, her ex threatened her and Riss again called the police for help. The next day, a criminal sent by the ex boyfriend partially blinded Linda Riss and permanently disfigured her face with a caustic chemical.

The court held that the police do not have a duty to provide police protection to an individual, and dismissed her lawsuit.

To quote internationally-recognized firearms instructor John Farnam once again:

It is said by enlightened social scientists, “If it rained twenty-dollar bills every Monday morning, there would still be people begging for their dinner every Monday evening!” The same is true for criminals. No matter how “civilized” or indulgent our society becomes, there will always be criminals. And, the more foolishly dependent we all become upon governmental institutions as the only means of preserving civil order, the more dubious our continued existence becomes, and the more quickly order will disintegrate when our societal underpinnings are crippled or even imperiled. When citizens become additively dependent on an eleemosynary and paternal government to do for them what they could be, and, of right, ought to be, doing for themselves, that civilization’s days are surely numbered. Never forget, regardless of how politically incorrect it may sound to the uninformed, your personal security is always your responsibility, and yours alone!