Do the police have a duty to protect the average citizen? ...

[spin]

Some here believe they do and may oppose gun ownership or concealed carry for that reason.

Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: June 28, 2005

WASHINGTON, June 27 - The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.

The decision, with an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia and dissents from Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, overturned a ruling by a federal appeals court in Colorado. The appeals court had permitted a lawsuit to proceed against a Colorado town, Castle Rock, for the failure of the police to respond to a woman's pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters, whom he eventually killed.

For hours on the night of June 22, 1999, Jessica Gonzales tried to get the Castle Rock police to find and arrest her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, who was under a court order to stay 100 yards away from the house. He had taken the children, ages 7, 9 and 10, as they played outside, and he later called his wife to tell her that he had the girls at an amusement park in Denver.

Ms. Gonzales conveyed the information to the police, but they failed to act before Mr. Gonzales arrived at the police station hours later, firing a gun, with the bodies of the girls in the back of his truck. The police killed him at the scene.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html

Do You Have A Right to Police Protection?

One of the basic themes of gun control is that only the police and military should have handguns or any type of firearm. I cannot explain their rationale, other than to say that gun control proponents must believe that the police exist to protect the citizenry from victimization. But in light of court decisions we find such is not the case. You have no right to expect the police to protect you from crime. Incredible as it may seem, the courts have ruled that the police are not obligated to even respond to your calls for help, even in life threatening situations!. To be fair to our men in blue, I think most officers really do want to save lives and stop dangerous situations before people get hurt. But the key point to remember is that they are under no legal obligation to do so.

Case Histories
Ruth Brunell called the police on 20 different occasions to plead for protection from her husband. He was arrested only one time. One evening Mr. Brunell telephoned his wife and told her he was coming over to kill her. When she called the police, they refused her request that they come to protect her. They told her to call back when he got there. Mr. Brunell stabbed his wife to death before she could call the police to tell them that he was there. The court held that the San Jose police were not liable for ignoring Mrs. Brunell's pleas for help. Hartzler v. City of San Jose, 46 Cal. App. 3d 6 (1st Dist. 1975).


Consider the case of Linda Riss, in which a young woman telephoned the police and begged for help because her ex-boyfriend had repeatedly threatened "If I can't have you no one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no-one else will want you." The day after she had pleaded for police protection, the ex-boyfriend threw lye in her face, blinding her in one eye, severely damaging the other, and permanently scarring her features. "What makes the City's position particularly difficult to understand," wrote a dissenting opinion in her tort suit against the City, "is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense. Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her." Riss v. New York, 240 N.E.2d 860 (N.Y. 1968).

Warren v. District of Columbia is one of the leading cases of this type. Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: ``For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers.'' The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a ``fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.'' Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981).
http://hematite.com/dragon/policeprot.html

No Right to Police Protection in the United States
by Advanced Investigative Technologies, LLC

The courts have decided that you have no right to expect the police to protect you from crime! Incredible as it may seem, the courts have ruled that the police are not obligated to even respond to your calls for help, even in life threatening situations! To be fair to the police, I think that many, and perhaps most, officers really do want to save lives and stop dangerous situations before people get hurt. While case law dates back to the early 1960's, a leading case on the topic is Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981) when the Court stated "fundamental principle of American law is that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen." In fact, the first precedent established by the United States Supreme Court regarding protecting citizens dates back to the late 1930's in the case of Erie Railroad Co. Vs. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 82 L.Ed. 1188) when the Court stated "there is no federal general common law. Congress has no power to declare substantive rules of common law applicable in a state whether they be local in their nature or 'general,' be they commercial law or a part of the law of torts. And no clause in the Constitution purports to confer such a power upon the federal courts." The seminal case establishing the general rule that police have no duty under federal law to protect citizens is DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (109 S.Ct. 998, 1989; 489 U.S. 189 (1989)). The court in DeShaney held that no duty arose as a result of a "special relationship," concluding that Constitutional duties of care and protection only exist as to certain individuals, such as incarcerated prisoners, involuntarily committed mental patients and others restrained against their will and therefore unable to protect themselves.

Yet, gun rights opponents rarely, if ever, speak of these precedents but citizens need to be aware that they have every right to self defense and to protect themselves. Some states have passed state statutes that reiterate that citizens have no right to police protection. Such is the case of California's Government Code, Sections 821, 845, and 846, which state in part: "Neither a public entity or a public employee may be sued for failure to provide adequate police protection or service, failure to prevent the commission of crimes and failure to apprehend criminals." Citizens injured because the police failed to protect them can only sue the State or local government in federal court if one of their officials violated a federal statutory or Constitutional right, and can only win such a suit if a "special relationship" can be shown to have existed, which DeShaney and its progeny make it very difficult to do. The most recent case, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005) was a 7-2 decision by the United States Supreme Court that provided that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. §1983 for failing to enforce a restraining order, which had led to the murder of a woman's three children by her estranged husband. Luckily, there is a little known law known as the "Castle Doctrine." The "Castle Doctrine" is an American legal doctrine that arises from English Common Law that designates one's place of residence (or, in some states, any place legally occupied, such as one's car or place of work) as a place in which one enjoys protection from illegal trespassing and violent attack. It then goes on to give a person the legal right to use deadly force to defend that place (his/her "castle"), and/or any other innocent persons legally inside it, from violent attack or an intrusion which may lead to violent attack. The "Castle Doctrine" also has a lengthy beginning dating back 1895 in the case of Beard v. U.S. (1895). This is sometimes called the "Stand Your Ground" doctrine and states that a man who was "where he had the right to be" when he came under attack and "...did not provoke the assault, and had at the time reasonable grounds to believe, and in good faith believed, that the deceased intended to take his life, or do him great bodily harm...was not obliged to retreat, nor to consider whether he could safely retreat, but was entitled to stand his ground." Many states have statutes of 'No Duty to Retreat" regardless of where the attack occurs.

As of the 28th of May, 2010, 31 States have some form of Castle Doctrine and/or Stand Your Ground law. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming have adopted Castle Doctrine statutes, and other states (Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington) are currently considering "Stand Your Ground" laws of their own. An aggressor whose victim fights back in self-defense may not invoke the doctrine of self-defense against the victim's legally justified acts.

http://m.hg.org/law-articles/20903/No_Right_to_Police_Protection_in_the_United