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Cops don’t have a legal duty to respond when you call

This isn’t new. It was being taught in law schools half a century ago, when I was a law student.

Legal historian Mia Brett (profile here), writing for Raw Story (here), says, “The law doesn’t require cops to protect the public.”

It’s long been the rule that police don’t owe a legal duty to individuals. Brett mentions some of the more recent cases on the so-called “public duty doctrine.”

However, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule in all cases. Like most things in law, there are exceptions. For example. routinely ignoring protection orders in domestic cases could rise to actionable discrimination (she cites a case in her article).

I’m not saying it’s a good rule. It’s noteworthy that private mental health professionals are more at risk of being sued for not doing their jobs, or for doing an incompetent job, than police are. A lawsuit against the school cop who stayed outside while students were massacred at a Parkland, Florida, high school survived dismissal not because he was derelict in his police duties, but based on the argument that he was a derelict “caregiver.” (That case is still pending.)

Brett argues, “We should not accept earlier rulings that police have no duty to protect us,” adding, “especially as they continue to receive bloated budgets.” That’s a nice sentiment, but isn’t the law, or even a legal argument for changing the law. She offers several ways Uvalde families might be able to recover damages from the police who stood by while their children were murdered; I have no idea whether those arguments might work.

What the “public duty doctrine” really does is reinforce the argument for guns. If you can’t depend on the police, all you’ve got is self-defense. This isn’t a desirable state of affairs, and I’m not suggesting it is. In any case, there are problems with relying on guns, too; experts recommend a large, noisy dog for home defense.

But what we really need is police who’ll come when you call, and then do their jobs. That calls for better police than Uvalde has. Maybe the Supreme Court should revisit the “public duty doctrine” and change the law. The way you get people to drive carefully is by holding them liable for the injury they cause if they don’t. If the courts someday finally decide that police are liable for lousy policing, we’ll get better police. Until then, how good (or bad) your local police are is a crapshoot.

Note this has to do with police failure to protect you. Suing police for false arrest, excessive force, etc., is a different matter — and a different area of law.

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