During the early morning hours of March 16, 1975 two men (Marvin Kent and James Morse) broke into a house occupied by three women in Washington DC. They found Mrs. Miriam Douglas and her four year old daughter asleep, at which point "...The men entered Douglas' second floor room, where Kent forcer Douglas to sodomize him and Morse raped her." (Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1, 4 (D.C. 1981)) This happened in front of her daughter.
The two other women in the house, Carrolyn Warren and Joan Taliaferro, heard Douglas' screams and called the police. Within 3 minutes four squad cars were dispatched to the house, but the call was radioed out as a "Code 2," a lower priority call than the "Code 1" usually used for crimes in progress.
Warren and Taliaferro crawled out a window onto an adjoining roof and waited for the police to show up. When the police arrived, they knocked on the front door, received no response, and just left.
The two women crawled back in through the window and called the police AGAIN. The call was logged as "investigate the trouble," but no officers were dispatched.
The men then kidnapped all three women. They forced the women at knifepoint to go to Kent's apartment where "...For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of Kent and Morse." (Id.)
The three victims sued DC and the officers involved for negligently failing to provide adequate police protection, but their case was dismissed. No jury ever heard any of the evidence.
The court stated that "official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for failure to provide adequate police protection." According to the court, this rule "rests upon the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen." (Id. emphasis added)
The Supreme Court itself ruled that one has no constitutional right to state protection in DeShaney v. Winnebego County Dep't. of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 109 S. Ct. 998, 103 L. Ed. 2d 249 (1989). Every jurisdiction in the country has upheld similar rulings. It's part of the "qualified immunity" that government claims for itself. It's one of the most well-settled issues in American Jurisprudence.
Government, AT ANY LEVEL, has no positive duty to protect your life, liberty, or property. They tell you flat out, if you bother to look, that this is the case.
