Police in the US have no obligation to serve the public or prevent crime due to Warren vs DC.
Specifically, "the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."[0]
People like to extrapolate from that, saying that if no specific legal duty exists toward individual 1, and no specific legal duty exists toward individual 2, and so on, then ultimately, no specific legal duty exists toward any individuals at all, but again, the first part of that sentence restates that there is a duty to provide services to the public.
I mean, look, the story of the crime itself is horrifying, but if the ruling had gone the other way, the concern was that cops would essentially be held to a standard of perfection, and any cop who ever didn't investigate any crime aggressively enough would be liable in court for their lack of aggressiveness.
I think it's a bad ruling, but it doesn't say what people claim it does, and it also doesn't seem to apply particularly strongly outside of the District of Columbia.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
But "duty to the public at large" doesn't mean anything, right? Duty to an individual can be litigated when the police fail to perform it. There's no way to hold the police accountable to "the public at large."
I agree that, taken to its extreme, it would be problematic to hold the police responsible to serving every single call perfectly. But we seem to be nowhere near that standard.
It actually can't. Castle Rock v. Gonzales is the relevant ruling here, not Warren v. DC.
In the majority opinion for Castle Rock, Scalia wrote that not only do police not have any special duty, but states cannot establish such a duty even through legislative means. (It also says that even though any such duty would be unconstitutional, if it somehow were established, the aggrieved parties would still have zero recourse under the constitution for other reasons).
It's a fantastically broad ruling, preempting pretty much every conceivable attempt for states to work around it even if they want to.
Exactly, mincing words around this ruling can accomplish nothing.
Unfortunately Castle Rock v. Gonzalez was a SCOTUS ruling, which is binding nationwide, and it did in fact rule that the police have no duty to protect the public. Worse, the ruling decided that because police have "always" enjoyed broad freedoma (in Scalia's mind), any law which attempts to curtail police freedoms is impermissible. (If that sounds tautological to you, that's because it is.)
That ruling has been used as precedent by lower courts across the country to determine that police do not, in fact, have any duty to protect or serve the public, to prevent crime, or even to halt a crime in progress.
Castle Rock explicitly prohibits states and municipalities from placing these sorts of restrictions on the police. It's a very broad ruling.
Whereas the duty I was talking about was just the basic standard of performing every job - when you don't do your job to the satisfaction of whomever is paying you, then you get fired or otherwise let go. (Of course this is modulo needing to get rid of police unions, or at least needing to seriously reform them so that bad employees will indeed be fired).
Furthermore Gonzales's argument would seem to rely on the idea that police are a special type of citizen that carries specific responsibilities/capabilities, which runs contrary to removing the privileges they abuse.
> but the case seems to revolve around Gonzales wanting to legally compel the town / its police to perform their advertised jobs
That is incorrect. It's about a specific law which required the police to perform a specific task, which they repeatedly refused to do.
> Furthermore Gonzales's argument would seem to rely on the idea that police are a special type of citizen that carries certain intrinsic responsibilities
It doesn't. That wasn't the argument at all.
> I haven't read the decision
In that case, I'd suggest you do that.
1. The case revolves around Gonzales arguing that police were legally compelled to attempt enforcement of the restraining order.
2. The opinion says nothing about the ability of Castle Rock to fire the involved officers for being derelict in their employment duties (like any other employee).
I mean, it literally does. The ruling overturns the law which gives them the basis to do so, and additionally establishes that states cannot pass laws imposing such requirements (as well as prohibiting a number of other things as well).
I'd suggest actually reading the opinion and dissents before discussing this further.
However, I still cannot figure out what you are referencing when you say "Castle Rock explicitly prohibits states and municipalities from placing these sorts of restrictions [contractual employment requirements] on the police". Is this something from one of the earlier decisions, or what am I missing? I'd appreciate a quote or other reference.
To the extent that municipalities may need some explicit legal justification to fire individual police officers (as you seem to be implying), then that is its own problem. But I'd say it's unrelated to this case which is ultimately about whether the town itself is legally liable to Gonzales.
Please stop there. If you haven't even read the decision how can your opinion possibly be well informed?
Having now read the opinion, I don't think my initial estimate of the case from Wikipedia was far off. Modulo the specific details of Colorado law (and similar must-arrest laws across many states), for which down thread I do say the dissent makes a convincing case on those merits. But that doesn't have much bearing on my original main point, but rather just how I might have made that point.
BTW what prompted you to chime in this way instead of continuing to read the thread and seeing I did go on to read the primary source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Gelman_stabbing_spree#L...
When it comes to restricting police powers, they actually cannot. That was a key determination in Scalia's majority opinion in Castle Rock v. Gonzalez.
People are always shocked by this, because it goes against how they understand the legal system to work. And they're right to be surprised, because it is a truly incomprehensible ruling when you pick it apart. But it's right there in the text of the ruling. And it has been treated as binding precedent and applied as such by lower courts in the years since.
That said, I still think it was a shitty way to slice due process law.
That's actually not true! Read the ruling itself and you'll see. Or if you can't read the ruling, read the legal analysis of it.
The ruling is incredibly broad and exhaustive. It basically said "Colorado didn't, but even if they had, they couldn't because that would be unconstitutional, and even if it weren't, the Due Process clause wouldn't apply, and even if it did, the value would be $0".
It basically preempted five levels of rebuttals to the law, making it difficult or impossible to overturn it without directly abandoning stare decisis.
Scalia'a argument for why the law was unconstitutional basically boils down to "police have always enjoyed near-unlimited freedom, and this law is too recent in the scale of US history, so it contradicts historical precedent". Which is another way of saying that states can't pass laws to restrict police discretion, because any law that is passed is by definition... "recent".
The ruling did that because the Colorado law was quite explicit in how it mandated a right to enforcement, so there was no other way to overturn the law.
And as if that's not enough, the precedent applied is quite clear: courts including in New York City have specifically used Castle Rock to rule that police do not have a duty to protect, serve, prevent crime, or intervene in a crime that is taking place, even if they were specifically dispatched to arrest that particular criminal for that particular crime. (Yes, that last part was an NYC court ruling that cited Castle Rock as precedent).
The Supreme Court really doesn’t care about state decisis except when it suits them. That was made plainly evident last year in Dobbs v. JWHO.
Actually it's due to Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, but you have the right idea.
To quote from wikipedia: "Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is a District of Columbia Court of Appeals case that held that the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine."
It kinda means (very loosely): If you call the police to help you, but they don't show up, tough luck. You can't sue them over that.