Lack of law enforcement's duty to protect people

This article covers the injustice of the lack of a duty of law enforcement to protect people from crime in certain countries. In addition, this article covers the double standard of civilians being required to assist law enforcement.

## Background

In some countries including the United States, police and law enforcement agencies have no legal duty to protect individual citizens and people from crime. The job and function of law enforcement is to stop and prosecute criminal activity, but in these countries, no individual person has an actual right for the authorities to protect them from crime. In the United States, this was established by court cases such as Warren v. District of Columbia. In the United States, law enforcement is considered to have a general obligation "to the public" but not to any individual person. This **public duty doctrine** is known oxymoronically as "**duty to all, duty to none**."

Police often fail to protect people for any number of reasons, including negligence/incompetence (as was the case in Warren v. D.C.), indifference to the victim, or simply exercising governmental discretion. **Discretion** means the right of law enforcement to decide how to handle a case and whether to prosecute offenders in any given situation.

Often in the United States, victims of domestic violence have obtained restraining orders against abusive spouses, ex-spouses, or significant others, but police would not enforce these orders, leading to devastating consequences such as the death of children and victims. In these cases, there is no liability on the part of law enforcement officials and departments who failed to act.

In some countries including the United States, law enforcement's lack of a duty to act is intertwined with the concepts of qualified immunity and sovereign immunity. In addition, police protection such as by enforcement of restraining orders is often termed to be a "valuable government benefit" that members of the public are not entitled to.

## Arguments in favor of regarding as an injustice

Law enforcement's function is to serve the public by enforcing the law and stopping crime. It does not make any sense for society to refuse to allow plaintiffs to hold them liable for failing to do their jobs. Law enforcement is paid by public taxes, is specially authorized to use force, has public trust invested in it, and is given significant resources to carry out its functions. Giving total discretion to officers about what crimes to curtail puts victims of crime, and especially the vulnerable in our society, at the complete whim of law enforcement to either help them or "throw them to the wolves".

This discretion is also very easy to abuse for corrupt purposes, and in fact is often abused this way:

* For example, important people such as mayors and town councilmen that run the police departments, and university officials in charge of campus police departments, may not be prosecuted by their police departments for committing certain offenses in certain circumstances, often as a professional courtesy or an institutionalized conflict-of-interest.
	+ Specific example: This was seen in the case of ***Shelvia Underwood v. Tallman Trask and Duke University***, in which a private campus police department failed to properly investigate -- and rather attempted to "sweep under the rug" -- a car accident caused by a high-ranking university official to whom the department indirectly reported, and was believed to have in fact colluded with the official in doing so; the plaintiff later attempted to sue the university for failing to take police action against the offender but lost that part of the suit at the outset due to the public duty doctrine -- i.e., the police department owed no duty to enforce the law for the victim, so they lawfully allowed the official to "skate" free of criminal liability.
* In addition, this can be true when powerful or well-connected people get away with certain crimes by having cronyist relationships with police departments who decide not to charge or to under-charge them.
* The professional courtesy of not charging/undercharging a crime can be extended to fellow officers and their families for officer-involved matters.

When a crime victim attempts to report a crime under these kinds of circumstances, they are often shunned and not helped, because the offender is getting some kind of "special treatment".

Law enforcement should not be punished for doing their jobs correctly, and should have some amount of discretion in resolving difficult cases. However, it is not legitimate to allow innocent people to become hurt by crime simply because the police didn't want to do their jobs or didn't want to protect a certain individual. Everyone should have access to police protection, so there needs to be an affirmative legal duty and liability for police officers to protect individual people.

## Arguments against regarding as an injustice

It is difficult enough for law enforcement to do the job they have in protecting the public overall without attaching more liability to it. The discretion to prosecute or not to prosecute is one that they need to exercise. Cases are not always clear-cut in officers having the appropriate standard of proof to arrest a suspected/potential criminal offender, and the civil rights of the suspect also cannot be violated which would lead to the opposite liability.

Suppose the scenario of a man who walks a fine line in "stalking" (seeing and finding information about) his ex-wife but doesn't ever threaten any physical violence. The police investigate in good faith at first but find that no crime is being committed. Later on, the man suddenly decides to become violent and finds and kills the ex-wife. The police could not have known that the man would turn from peaceful to violent. The police shouldn't be held accountable for not being able to predict the future, lest they would have preemptively violated the man's civil rights. Imposing a duty and liability on law enforcement to protect members of the public in a situation like this might lead down a slippery slope of suspects' civil rights being violated or curtailed as an unwanted side effect.

## Civilians' duty to protect law enforcement officers

In many jurisdictions, including England, Wales, and most states in the United States, there exists a double standard that civilians are obligated to aid and assist law enforcement officers in making arrests and subduing offenders. Failure to assist an officer is often a "violation" or a "misdemeanor". This obligation exists even in spite of the fact that law enforcement has no reciprocal duty to protect members of the public from crime. This creates a situation of **non-reciprocity**.

Members of the public may be forced to place themselves in harm's way and the potential to be injured in assisting law enforcement officers. In addition, members of the public do not have the same immunities (such as "qualified immunity") that law enforcement officers have, in case the arrest is unlawful or the suspect is injured.

### Arguments in favor of regarding as an injustice

The fact that civilians are obligated to protect law enforcement officers, but not vice-versa, is completely Kafkaesque and makes no sense. Law enforcement officers are the ones with the job to "protect and serve"; therefore it should be they who are obligated to protect individual civilians and not the opposite.