Obama propagates myth that police ‘duty’ is to ‘keep Americans safe’

By Martin Hill L.A. County Libertarian Examiner

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-27692-LA-County-Libertarian-Examiner~y2010m5d20-Obama-propogates-myth-that-police-duty-is-to-keep-Americans-safe#

President Obama, who gave a speech May 15th in tribute to slain police officers at the National Peace Officers Memorial, made a claim in his speech that is commmonly parroted by etsablishment supporting statists of both parties, but is demonstrably false. Obama stated “You don’t know what dangers you’ll confront each time you put on that uniform or step outside in plain clothes …All you know is your duty — to keep us safe, to keep our communities safe, to keep America safe. It is a duty you fulfill every day.”

The notion that it’s a police duty to keep the citizenry safe may be a commonly held belief, but it is in reality a bold-faced lie, and a mandate that the police themselves have fought steadfastly against in court- and won. The truth is that the police are not legally obligated to protect anyone. As the United States Supreme Court ruled in 2005, Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone. That particular case involved a Colorado woman named Jessica Gonzales, who had a restraining order against her estranged husband, who then violated the order by kidnapping and murdering their three daughters. Before the man had killed his daughters, their mother had pleaded with police to enforce the restraining order, which had been granted by a court, and to arrest the man for violating it. They did not arrest him, and as Justice Scalia wrote in the ruling defending the lack of police action, “a well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes.” [Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278.].

A New York Times article on the case also mentions a previous precedent from 1989 “DeShaney v. Winnebago County”, in which the Supreme Court ruled that social service agencies did not breach their Constitutional duty by failing to protect a boy from a beating from his father.

So the public is always fed the lie that police and social workers will “keep us safe” and that it is their ‘sworn obligation and duty’ to do so; yet when it comes down to it, these busibody agencies themselves, who so often meddle, arrest, and break apart families, will fight to the end insisting that they have no such obligation. Here is a google search on the topic that reveals many interesting results. The excellent website Outlawslegal.com, now apparently defunct, ran an indepth analysis outlining even more such cases, in their article CALIFORNIA DREAMING: Police have no obligation to protect any individual from harm. Ruth Bunnell, had called police and pleaded with them for forty five minutes to come to her aide after her estranged husband, who had a documented record of domestic violence, had called Ruth and told her that he was coming over to kill her. The police told Ruth to call them back when he arrived. Ruth’s husband killed her, and her estate filed a wrongful death suit. The police fought it, and won, wiht the court ruling “that the police department and its employees enjoyed absolute immunity for failure to provide sufficient police protection.” [Hartzler v. City of San Jose].