No Duty to Protect

I've come to thinking of police as part of the problem very late in the game: I held onto the idea of reform for a very long time. I remember the first time I heard about the idea of abolishing the police, and how shocked I was by it.

But when you understand that police have no duty to enforce the law, you have to begin to question the whole premise of their existence. The details of police failings in the Uvalde killings have raised this issue, but a Supreme Court case called Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) laid it bare 17 years ago.

Civil rights lawyer Sheryl Ring described the case on Twitter a few days ago.

In 1999, a Colorado woman named Jessica Gonzales had an order of protection for herself and her three kids against her ex, who had been violent and who had also threatened the kids. One evening, he kidnapped the kids from her yard. She called the police at 7:30 p.m. She showed two cops the the restraining order, but they told her to call back after 10:00 p.m. if the kids were not returned. Her ex called to taunt her. She called the police again after 10:00 when he did not return the kids.

A few hours later, she went to the police station to file a report and they refused to take a report. They went to dinner instead. While she was there, her ex arrived with a handgun to kill her, bringing the dead bodies of her three children. He was shot and killed by police, after opening fire.

Jessica Gonzalez sued the police. She argued Colorado law required an arrest for violating a domestic violence restraining order, which it clearly did. But in 2005, Antonin Scalia wrote a 7–2 opinion (only John Paul Stephens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting) saying the Colorado law was "irrelevant in light of 'long-standing police tradition.'"

Ring summarizes:

This is the origin of the "no duty to protect you" doctrine. Police, according to SCOTUS, have complete and unfettered discretion to decide whether or not to follow laws requiring them to act even when those laws are mandatory on their face. And for that you can thank Antonin Scalia's insistence that police duties are governed by tradition from when they were slave patrols, and not any actual statute or law.

This is the opinion.

Meanwhile, police departments are the largest budget item in every city in this country, from Uvalde to Saint Paul, shorting all of the other important work cities need to do to make children and adults happier, healthier, and therefore actually safe.

In Minneapolis, the city has been sued to add more cops than they can find to employ:

Even though many of their current cops are basically on a sick-out, drawing disability payments. 

And if they were showing up for work, under Castle Rock there's no way to make sure they do their jobs and enforce the law, at those times when they aren't being racist enforcers.