Self Help: Because No One Else Is Responsible

In my first column I wrote about the right to self help as an indispensible means for survival. Some may believe the police are responsible for our safety and it is better left to the professionals. I have no argument with that - just this question: What if no one comes?

Today I would like to point out the little known fact that the police have no duty whatsoever to protect any individual.

If one is brutalized, beaten, shot, stabbed, raped and this results in death or permanent disability then one’s self or one’s survivors or estate have no recourse to sue the city, county, state, police department, sheriff’s office or any other public entity. Even if one is on the line with 911 and they record your murder.

On the morning of Sunday, March 16, 1975 three women where in their shared rental home in NW DC when two men broke in. Two women where upstairs and could hear the other woman being raped and beaten. The two women placed several calls to the police that morning. They saw the police arrive and depart.  The two called out to the third roommate alerting the intruders to their presence. The Three women where then  kidnaped by the intruders and for the next fourteen hours the captive women were raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon one another, and made to submit to the sexual demands of Kent and Morse, their tormentors.

Understandably the three women believed that the police had failed to perform a legal obligation to protect them, especially in light of the repeated phone calls that where placed that morning.

They filled a claim of negligence that included:

• The dispatcher's failure to forward the 0623 call with the proper degree of urgency;
•  The responding officers' failure to follow standard police investigative procedures, specifically their failure to check the rear entrance and position themselves properly near the doors and windows to ascertain whether there was any activity inside;
• The dispatcher's failure to dispatch the call received at 0642 hours.

The case resulted in WARREN v DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. By a 4-3 decision the District of Columbia Court of Appeals decided that Warren was not entitled to remedy at the bar despite the demonstrable abuse and ineptitude on the part of the police. The court held that official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for a failure to provide adequate police protection.

In the five years my family and I have lived in Lorton I have called 911 twice. Once for a downed power line on the Cross County Trail. The second time was for a helicopter that seemed to be fouled on some high tension power lines. It was actually just servicing the orange reflective marker balls that help helicopters avoid hitting the power lines. In both cases that I called 911 I was placed on hold for greater that five minutes. Both times I hung up without being answered and was never called back.

If I had called because armed men had kicked my door in and where doing to my family what was done to the women in the warren case I too would  be “not entitled to remedy at the bar” if I get placed on hold one more time.

Neither would you.

We are all on our own. We all of us must learn to view the world in light of these legal facts and take precautions accordingly. Some of us holster a gun.