I don’t recall a time when I’ve seen a police car without the phrase “protect and serve”, or something similar displayed on the side. I always thought, even through all of the protests, struggles for equity, and the other necessary noise, that the police, at the end of the day, would commit to protecting the general public. Once again I was wrong. In actuality, the police don’t have to protect you at all. Seriously. It’s been codified into law for years.
The reality is that police don’t have to protect you in the majority of jurisdictions in the United States. Those jurisdictions that do offer protection, are definitely the exception and not the rule. In a book devoted exclusively to the subject, Dial 911 and Die, attorney Richard W. Stevens notes, “It was the most shocking thing I learned in law school. I was studying Torts in my first year at the University of San Diego School of Law, when I came upon the case of Hartzler v. City of San Jose. In that case I discovered the secret truth: the government owes no duty to protect individual citizens from criminal attack. Not only did the California courts hold to that rule, the California legislature had enacted a statute to make sure the courts couldn’t change the rule.” The actual California Tort Claims Act, section 845 states : "Neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable for failure to establish a police department or otherwise provide police protection service or, if police protection service is provided, for failure to provide sufficient police protection service.”
In the aforementioned case, Hartzler v. City of San Jose, a woman by the name of Ruth Brunell had called the police on 20 different occasions to plead for protection from her husband. One evening, her husband called her and said that he was coming over to kill her. When she called the police, they refused her request to come and protect her - they told her to call back when he got there. Her husband arrived and stabbed her to death before she could call them back. The court held the aforementioned ruling stating that protection services were not a right.
Then there’s the case of Warren v. District of Columbia. Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by an intruder. They called the police and were assured that they were on their way. About 30 minutes later, when the roommate’s screams had stopped, they assumed that the police had arrived. When the two women made their way downstairs, they saw that the police had not arrived and the intruders were still there. For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten and forced to commit sexual acts on each other, as well as on their attackers. These women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.’s highest court exonerated the police saying “fundamental principles 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”.
The latter case is really hard to stomach because the police actually claimed that they were on their way. So, just to be clear, even if you call the police in an emergency, and they say they’re coming, even if they don’t, there’s no recourse. The courts have made this clear. This is not to say that most police officers don’t try every day to make the world a better place. I want to believe that. It is to say, however, that those that aren’t trying to do the same thing, have nothing to fear. That’s the scary part.
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