Opinion ID: 3036458
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Promising Police Surveillance

Text: The majority correctly recognizes that officer Shields’s assurances of a police patrol on the evening of the shooting do not provide an independent basis for a due process violation. Maj. Op. at 2243 (“[W]e do not rest our judgment that Shields affirmatively created a danger on that assurance . . . .”). However, I cannot agree with the majority’s contention that, by assuring Kennedy “that the police would patrol the area,” Shields somehow aggravated the risks that Kennedy 8 Considering the alternative courses of conduct Shields could have taken to escape liability under the majority’s theory only highlights the artificiality of the majority’s analysis. Under the majority’s theory, Shields could simply have reversed the order in which he visited the residences of the plaintiff and her would-be assailant, or called Kim Kennedy on his cell phone from the Burnses’ doorstep. I cannot agree with the majority’s position that this flipflop of no more than fifteen minutes is of constitutional magnitude. 2270 KENNEDY v. RIDGEFIELD faced. Id. at 2233; id. at 2243 (“Instead, [it] was an additional and aggravating factor, making [Kennedy] more vulnerable to the danger he had already created [by notifying Burns of the allegations against him before telling Kennedy that he was about to do so].”). Kennedy does not claim that the RPD failed to patrol the area on the evening of the shooting, nor does she allege that Officer Shields made any false claims to her about the efficacy of police patrols in providing protection in similar cases. I do not see how Officer Shields’s statement that the police would patrol the area made the Kennedys “more vulnerable.” See DeShaney, 489 U.S. 189 (finding multiple attempted but failed interventions by social services insufficient to create a due process violation); Balistreri v. Pacifica Police Dep’t, 901 F.2d 696, 700 (9th Cir. 1990) (citing DeShaney and declining to find a due process violation where the plaintiff’s allegations amounted to the assertion that “state actors knew of her plight and affirmatively committed to protect her”). The majority attempts to justify its statement by analogizing the facts of this case to those of Grubbs I. This comparison does not help the majority’s case. In Grubbs I, we relied on the state’s misrepresentation merely as a means for bolstering our conclusion that the state’s affirmative act of directly placing the plaintiff in a dangerous situation—namely, assigning her to work alone with a known violent sex offender— created a risk that would not otherwise have existed. See Grubbs I, 974 F.2d at 121; see also Munger, 227 F.3d at 1086 (noting that the court in a state-created danger case “must determine whether [the state] did in fact affirmatively place [the plaintiff] in danger”). Here, Kennedy does not allege that the government lied about the risks she would face, but rather that she relied on government protective measures which failed her. While it is undeniably tragic that police patrols were unsuccessful in preventing Burns’s attack, this is categorically different from Grubbs I, where the government actively misrepresented the risks facing the plaintiff. I thereKENNEDY v. RIDGEFIELD 2271 fore believe the majority’s reasoning on this issue to be flawed. In sum, I would hold that Kennedy failed to establish a due process violation arising from Officer Shields’s actions either in notifying Michael Burns of her allegations prior to warning her, or in offering to increase surveillance on the evening of the shooting. Accordingly, I would hold that she failed to establish a cognizable due process violation premised on state-created danger.