Thursday, May 19, 2005

Polistasi Accountability

In Sweden a pair of cops were jailed and a third fined after failing to respond when a woman was being raped. This stands in sharp contrast to the polistasi here in Amerika. Here, they have no resposibility to the citizenry.

In Warren v. District of Columbia, two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third women, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed that the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs, they saw that, in fact, the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive ... (omitted, you can fill in the blanks here)" The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen" (Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981)

Further the court in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, (109 S.Ct. 998 (1989) at 1006)held that no duty arose as a result of a "special relationship," (a SR is when the police know of a threat/danger to you) concluding that Constitutional duties of care and protection only exist as to certain individuals, such as incarcerated prisoners, involuntarily committed mental patients and others restrained against their will and therefore unable to protect themselves. "The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State's knowledge of the individual's predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf"

Interestingly enough if they dont let you own/carry a firearm or any other weapon for that matter, they somehow dont see that as having imposed a limitation on you.

Now if we could just hold our boys in blue accountable for their actions...