Police NOT Obligated to Protect Citizens

How many of you believe that the main purpose of your local police department is to protect and serve the people? I don’t recall what TV program it was, but some years back there was a program about policeman and in the introduction it always had the words, ‘to protect and serve.’

We were taught from the time were small children that if we are threatened by anyone we were to call 911 and asked them to dispatch the police. But is that the real function of the police department?

According to the US Supreme Court decision in Warren v. District of Columbia in 1981, the police do not have the duty to provide protection and services to individuals except under specific assignments.

In 1975 two men kicked in the back door of a rooming house in Washington DC. The men entered the second floor room the woman and her four-year-old daughter were. The men raped and sodomized the mother. Two women living on the third floor above heard the screams and call the police station. The dispatcher promised them that help would be on the way, and sent out a Code 2 call to officers in the area.

The two women crawled out of the window onto the roof and watched as several police cars arrived. One car patrolled the alley and another car parked out front and the officer approached the front of the house and knocked on the door. When no one answered the second officer left the scene. All four police officers left the area five minutes after arriving.

The two women crawled back into their room they could still hear the screams coming from the floor below and again call the police department. The dispatcher logged the call as ‘investigate the trouble’ which was never dispatched to any officers in the field.

Hoping in believing that police officers had entered the home the two women called down to the woman on the third floor. The two rapists heard the calls and confronted the women at knife point and took all three women back to their apartment and continued to sexually abuse, rape, rob and beat them for the next fourteen hours.

One of the women that lived upstairs, Carolyn Warren, filed a lawsuit against the local police department for how they handled the situation. In her lawsuit, Warren contended that the police dispatcher failed to forward the first call with the proper degree of urgency — Code 1 — which would have alerted officers of the danger occurring within the home. The second contention in the lawsuit was that when the officers did respond, they fail to follow proper police procedures by not checking the rear entrance or windows of the home. The third contention filed in the lawsuit stated that the dispatcher failed to notify officers in the field of the second call.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where in 1981 a 4 – 3 decision was rendered stating that since Warren did not have a special relationship with the police department that the police were not obligated to go beyond the measures they took to protect her and the other women. Basically the Supreme Court ruled that police are not obligated to or have any duty to the victims of criminal acts. The main function of the police department is to arrest criminals and investigate crimes.

That only leaves one legal source of defense for every individual and homeowner. That defense is guaranteed by the Second Amendment in the right to bear and keep arms. That’s why the town of Kennesaw, Georgia passed an ordinance in 1982 requiring all homeowners to own a firearm to be used for protection. The only exceptions were for religious beliefs, convicted felons or those who had a strong conscientious opposition to guns. Consequently Kennesaw, a suburb of Atlanta, has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation.

So if you want to protect yourself and your family, I wouldn’t count on the police but rather I would urge you to go out and purchase a firearm and learn how to use it. Then if anyone breaks into your house, you’ll have your protection right there in your hands and you won’t have to wait for police who may or may not show up to help.