Picture this: You and your family are in the living room, watching a movie after a long day. The blue glow of the t.v. washing over you, as the sun begins to set, and the street lights flicker on. Your son has his head in your lap, half asleep but forcing his eyes open, not wanting to miss the action. Your wife is next to you with her arm around your neck. There’s a knock at the door. Not uncommon in a quiet suburban area, it’s probably the mailman with a package. You get up quickly and start to walk to the door. Out of the corner of your eye you see someone at your back door. A man wearing a bandanna around his face and carrying something black in his hand. He tries the sliding glass door. The doorbell rings and the man outside starts to look through the front windows, trying to open them. Surrounding your house are two men intent on ungodly acts of violence on your family.
What would you do?
If you thought “I would call 9-1-1”, you’d be wrong. That choice would prove fatal to you and your family in this case. Because the average response time in the US for police officers is 10 minutes. That’s a long time when there is a man with a gun on your back patio.
This situation is not uncommon. In fact, 60% of burglaries are “forced entry”, like the example above. But no matter the crime, the police will show up after the fact. That’s what happened to a mother and son in Virginia, who were subjected to a brutal home invasion.
“Norma Jean Freeman, 81, died at the hospital from injuries” sustained from the home invasion, while her son “Allen Freeman Jr., 63, remains in critical condition…”
For decades these poor people paid for police protection through taxation. But they didn’t get any protection on the one night they really needed it. What they got was a body-bag and hospital bills. That begs the question, why do we have law enforcement in the first place? Considering there have been cases where the legal duty to protect us has been questioned by the highest courts.
The lack of a duty of police to protect us has plenty of legal precedents. In Warren v. District Of Columbia, the DC Court of Appeals decided 4-3 that police did not owe a specific duty to give police services. In a 2005 case, the Supreme Court ruled that police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm. The police department’s failure to act in this case led to the death of three girls kidnapped by their father. He had the time to take them to an amusement park before he drove himself, and their bodies., to the police station and opened fire.
The police don’t even reduce crime that much to begin with. In “Policing For Crime Prevention”, Lawrence W. Sherman writes:
The more police we have, the less crime there will be. While citizens and public officials often espouse that view, social scientists often claim the opposite extreme: that police make only minimal contributions to crime prevention…Hiring more police to provide rapid 911 responses, unfocused random patrol, and reactive arrests does not prevent serious crime.
One of the most striking recent findings is the extent to which the police themselves create a risk factor for crime simply by using bad manners. Modest but consistent scientific evidence supports the hypothesis that the less respectful police are towards suspects and citizens generally, the less people will comply with the law.
Just like legal precedents protect you, it protects them. But they also have some impunity from murdering us. According to statistics on justified homicides, there were 2,718 in a seven-year period. But during that same time period, only 41 officers were convicted. Because convictions are easier to track than police shootings however, the real number is higher than the official one. What these numbers do not take into account however, is how many of these people were unarmed. Because killing an unarmed man means the officer lost control of the situation, was improperly trained, or both.
If your doctor had no duty to fix your broken leg, would you continue to see him? Of course not, and law enforcement isn’t different. And it shouldn’t be, considering we’re talking about men with the license to kill, not men with a doctorate. Which is exactly why police officers should be held to higher standards. Or at the very least, held accountable when they fail at their duty to protect us from harm.
Aaron Allbrite – DontComply.com
