To Protect and to Serve

Probably because there are so many movies and TV shows produced in and around Los Angeles, the LAPD motto, “to protect and to serve,” has become a sort of national idea of what police do. In fact, it has been adopted by many other police departments around the country as their own motto.

In the recent increase in the national conversation about guns, the point that we have police to protect us often comes up when personal defense is brought up as a reason to own guns. I’d like to take a look at the idea that the police are here to protect us, and by extension perhaps, that the armed forces are here to protect us too.

Of course, this country rightfully has a long tradition of not using military for domestic police action, and hopefully that will never be breeched, so I’ll begin with local police.

What I thought

When I was growing up in the 60’s we had a cartoon character named Officer Friendly. And the local police department would have an officer come to school playing the role of Officer Friendly. Police were the guys who helped you when you were lost, they helped get your kitten out of the tree, and they caught bad guys when the bad guys took your stuff. That’s what was clear to us then. I had never seen a policeman wearing a flak jacket, military cargo pants or carrying an automatic weapon.

A lot has happened between then and now. Police have armored cars, automatic weapons, dark military style uniforms, and a load more firepower than they used to. And with the advent of civil asset forfeiture, they are sometimes the guy that takes your stuff. But in the end, they need all that power because they are here to protect us, right? I thought so too. I mean, it’s their motto; it must be true.

What the Supreme Court thinks

Then, in 2005 the Supreme Court decided the case of Castle Rock v Gonzales in which they said that police have no obligation to protect the public. Ms Gonzales, the mother of three, had a restraining order against her husband. He violated that and told the police. The police used what the Court called, “the well-established tradition of police discretion” and decided not to act on her complaint. Her husband came to her house and took her three children whom he later killed. The police finally interacted with him when he arrived at their station with his three children’s bodies in the car and started shooting at the police. He was killed.

When I read the case, I thought it was odd. It was started as an issue of property rights. I wondered why Ms Gonzales’ lawyers thought to adjudicate the case as a property case. It was, after all, her children’s lives that were lost, not her puppy. Then I read more.

It seems that in 1989 the Court had already heard another case about police obligation to protect. In DeShaney vs Winnebago County the case was also that of a child at risk from a father. Here’s the description from Wikipedia.com in case you didn’t click the link:

“In 1980, a divorce court in Wyoming gave custody of Joshua DeShaney, born in 1979, to his father Randy DeShaney, who moved to Winnebago County, Wisconsin. A police report of child abuse and a hospital visit in January, 1983, prompted the county Department of Social Services (DSS) to obtain a court order to keep the boy in the hospital’s custody. Three days later, “On the recommendation of a ‘child protection team,’ consisting of a pediatrician, a psychologist, a police detective, the county’s lawyer, several DSS caseworkers, and various hospital personnel, the juvenile court dismissed the case and returned the boy to the custody of his father.”[1] The DSS entered an agreement with the boy’s father, and five times throughout 1983, a DSS social worker visited the DeShaney home and recorded suspicion of child abuse and that the father was not complying with the agreement’s terms. No action was taken; the DSS also took no action to remove the boy from his father’s custody after a hospital reported child abuse suspicions to them in November, 1983.[2] Visits in January and March, 1984, in which the worker was told Joshua was too ill to see her, also resulted in no action. Following the March, 1984, visit, “Randy DeShaney beat 4-year-old Joshua so severely that he fell into a life-threatening coma. Emergency brain surgery revealed a series of hemorrhages caused by traumatic injuries to the head inflicted over a long period of time. Joshua suffered brain damage so severe that he was expected to spend the rest of his life confined to an institution for the profoundly retarded. He died Monday, November 9, 2015 at the age of 36. Randy DeShaney was subsequently tried and convicted of child abuse.”[3] DeShaney served less than two years in jail.[4]”

So, it was because Ms Gonzales’s lawyers were trying to get around the earlier precedent that they formed their case around due process and property rights. The police, and child protective services, and the county government don’t have an obligation to protect. Makes me wonder why they have a county government.

The oath

The hint might be in the oath taken by members of the military. Remember, I mentioned them earlier and said I’d get back to them? So here’s what member’s of the military, and members of the executive branch for that matter, pledge themselves to protect when they take office: “…to support and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They are here to protect the constitution. Notice the period at the end of the sentence?

Well, I figured, “That’s federal, right? No way the local police are taking that oath.” So I looked up the oath of office of my local PD. Nowhere does it say they’ll protect me or my stuff. It says, “…I will support the Constitution and laws of the United States; the Constitution and laws of this State and the Charter and Ordinances of this City…” I think we have all been reading that and figuring that in supporting and protecting those laws and ordinances, they’ll be protecting us. Well they do, but perhaps not directly.

When police enforce the law, they are hopefully making the area safer for law-abiding people, but law-abiding people need to understand that the police have limits. These are brave men and women who are put in dangerous circumstances on a daily basis. They are not highly paid Hollywood actors who shimmy up drainpipes and crawl through air-conditioning vents to shoot the bad guy at the last second. And as good as they are, what we see from these oaths and Court rulings is that government, whether federal, state, or city, doesn’t have the obligation to fund a police force with enough manpower to protect fully. Hence, Justice Scalia’s statement about “long-established tradition of police discretion.” They need the discretion because they can’t do it all.

So, for all the other reasons you may want to ban or limit guns from Americans, please remember, that if we’re going to count on police to use force to protect something, their obligation is to protect the law, not you. There is a reasonable expectation that a citizen may have to protect him or herself before the police can respond.