If you don’t read anything else…… read this!
Your personal safety is YOUR responsibility. The police are usually called DURING or AFTER a criminal attack. A little known fact is this…….the police have NO duty to protect individual citizens!
In Warren v. District of Columbia (444 A.2d 1, 1981) the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled, “official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for failure to provide adequate police protection…. this uniformly accepted rule rests upon the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular citizen…. a publicly maintained police force constitute a basic governmental service provided to benefit the community at large by promoting public peace, safety and good order.” In Bowers v. Devito (686 F. 2d 616, 1982), the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, “There is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen.”
The law in New York remains as decided by the Court of Appeals case Riss v. New York: the government is not liable even for a grossly negligent failure to protect a crime victim. In the Riss case, a young woman telephoned the police and begged for help because her ex-boyfriend had repeatedly threatened “If I can’t have you, not one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no one else will want you.” The day after she had pleaded for police protection, the ex-boyfriend threw lye in her face, blinding her in one eye, severely damaging the other, and permanently scarring her features. “What makes the City’s position particularly difficult to understand”, wrote a dissenting opinion, “is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense. Thus by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her.” Riss v. New York, 22 N.Y.2d 579,293 N.Y.S.2d 897, 240 N.E.2d 806 (1958).