This was left in our comments and it is absolutely fantastic.
It references a Cracked video I have posted several times before about the case of Joe Lozito and his failed suit against the NYPD.
It also interviewed one of the lawyers in Castle Rock v. Gonzales.
It is 46 minutes long and absolutely worth your time.
It shouldn’t but it still amazes me how many people still are unaware that the police have no duty to respond.
The question the NPR person leading the story keeps asking is: if the police have no special duty to protect, and the rules that create a special duty to protect are so extreme and so narrow, why even have the police at all?
The best part of this comes at the very end. They interview “Napkin Man” the good samaritan who came to Joe Lozito’s aid after the attack with a handful of napkins to try and stop the bleeding and save his life.
Napkin man didn’t know about no duty to protect until the interview, and he says:
“If this is the case, they… you know, they should free up the gun laws in New York everybody could have their protection.”
It was amazing how quickly he came to that conclusion.
We in the gun enthusiast and concealed carry community know this, but we are the 3.5% of the country who do.
If there is to be any good that comes from all these riots and property destruction, hopefully, a flurry of lawsuits will be filed against police departments that failed to control them, and they will all be dismissed, and as a result, a substantial percentage of Americans will learn the reality of no duty to protect.
If there is anything that will ever make it possible for us to get the holy grail of gun rights, a 50 state national concealed carry reciprocity bill passed into law, it is millions upon millions of Americans coming face to face with the reality that the police have no duty what so every to interceded between you and mob, you are on your own as your last line of defense.
“Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.” –Sir Robert Peel (1829)
People in the post-modern, post-industrial, safe and peaceful West are too used to thinking of the police as separate from themselves (and, too often, so are the police themselves used to thinking this way.) It’s evident every time someone refers to “police and civilians” or something akin to that.
A police officer has no special duty to protect you, just as you have no special duty to protect him. A police officer has no duties whatsoever that a non-police offer has. He or she draws a salary in order to ensure that he or she can devote their full attention to the things that we all, as free people in a peaceful society, are expected to be able to do: keep the peace, observe the law, etc.
Call me cynical but … in some locales, a primary function of the police seems to be revenue generation for that locale. Of course traffic tickets, but also asset forfeiture. But those speak to the municipality’s greed more than the police officers who work there.
I agree with Ish’s sentiments but in today’s reality police do have special powers and privileges over and above that of the average citizen, including qualified immunity and the power to detain and arrest.
I am by no means a “defunder” but certainly, some thought needs to be given about what, exactly, police are expected to do and how. Even moreso, what the implications should be for not only things like concealed-carry laws, but laws regarding self-defense and prosecution of someone forced to do so.
That’s not cynical, that’s fact.
One police reform I’ve wanted to do is figure out how to end this perverse incentive. Perhaps it’s blocking cavities from using fines as revenue. They can collect tht money but I has to go into some special fund that can’t be used for general government work. Say a victims fund or something.
If the city can’t use fines to boost their budgets they won’t put so much effort into trying to collect it. Or maybe all fines go to the state and and are dispersed as a tax refund to the people.
Two things:
1. I didn’t hear the statement you bolded. Did the article get edited to cut that?
2. I didn’t hear either of the presenters come to the (obvious) conclusion to their question, “whose job is it to protect me?”
Go to 43:05 where they are talking to the Jamaican gentleman that assisted Lozito.
You’re right re the 2nd point … That’s probably a step too far for public radio in its current form.
I was just stunned they even broached the question, tbh. Not the sort of thing you want the average citizen asking themselves about if you’re a Leftistz I’d have thought.
The police are there to protect the community in general, to investigate crimes and arrest criminals after-the-fact, but can’t possibly prevent all criminal activity. If they had a legal duty to protect they every victim of crime could sue the government for damages, which means that no government entity could afford to have a police force.
Maybe sharing a personal experience is germane here.
I live in as rural and remote Appalachian mountain community as exists east of the great Mississippi.
Meth, pills and, bad behavior, the thievery comes with this plague, is a constant in our little community. Was. Key concept here.
On a Christmas eve few years back, two local meth heads where caught in a B&E of a neighbor away at our community Christmas eve gathering of family and tribe. Gives you an idea of what kind of scum these criminals are.
Long story short half a dozen of us, armed, went to take care of these thieves personally. By pure luck and circumstances they got away thru the deep woods in the middle of night. Not before we chased them a good ways and almost got our hands on the SOB’s, all the while shouting out to them they where going to be receiving proper dirt naps.
Meanwhile a Deputy Sheriff arrived, we who where chasing the meth heads arrived back at the scene of the crime, the Deputy not once even looked at our weapons in our hands, or inquiring why armed and what we where doing. After taking various statements, he very deliberately, most politely and respectfully looking us all in the eye, with a sublime display of virtue, said to us: “we all know you folks up here, we never have any problems because of you all, we know you are good folks, ( he paused for a few moments looking each of us in the eye again to see if we where listening), “it’s time you all begin to take care of this business yourselves. Our hands are tied, we bust these bums and an hour later they are walking down the street giving us the finger, and immediately committing more crimes. There’s people who are deliberately making this happen. We can only do so much to help you all.”
Then he drove off.
I believe as Men of The West when we gave up our duty as self responsible Men to be directly involved and responsible within our families tribes villages and communities for the actions of our fellow folks in our AO’s, we gave up our essential ability to effect ongoing and future positive change and at the least maintaining and protecting Time Honored Traditions. Time. Honored. Traditions.
Not to say this is deliberate in the sense we willingly relinquished, consciously and deliberately, our responsibilities as Men of The West, our Western Christian Greco/Roman codes and culture of 2000 years, but slowly, over a long time span, events conspired to remove from our activities and traditions our involvement in choosing and deciding how we behave and interact on our lives on the moral ground.
The precepts and actual working system of the Precinct System that is part of the Compact of Confederation the 13 individual Sovereign Nation States was getting along quite well with the people themselves in most of those States. So why all of a sudden, if the convention in Philly was an event for the purpose of ironing out a number if issues in the Compact which arose, nothing that simple co-operation and debate was to handle, all of a sudden this parchment shows up much to the surprise and alarm of the delegates, the last thing they expected. Why after winning the only successful slave revolt in history, would they create the very thing they just seceded from? Why go from organic grassroots local self governance to power given to a select privileged few, a group of elites who ruled from a concentrated removed few over the many?
If Liberty was the object why did those few give us centralism?
This is very pertinent to the discussion inn the podcast. Police no matter their courage and intent, have no vested interest in each of ours personal affairs, beyond enforcing a politicians will and interests. There’s so many layers of separation from our organic grass roots immediate lives, it has created a system of special interests over individual self determinism and self reliance, and wrecked local area of operations involvement in our personal affairs. You might even be led to think this current state talked about in this podcast was by design.
It seems the aptly named “Conspiracy in Philadelphia”, aka the foisting of the holy parchment called the US Constitution, to bring the Freemen of the Colonial Nations under an umbrella of centralism, the administrative state of federalism, and diminish, eliminate local sovereignty of the people replacing it with a central power of rule of men, not leave things alone and follow the rule of law, that most precious of Christian Greco/Roman ideas. Time. Honored. Traditions.
Maybe coincidently, or not, a couple weeks later a State Police officer told one of us in another meth addict related event, almost word for word what our Deputy Sheriff said.
That Deputy was right in ways we did not fully appreciate till later. A few of us began to do what the Deputy suggested, and it’s been an amazing journey. It seems, local direct peer pressure action with threat of bodily harm, tribal efforts to handle the drug and pedophilia, and roll on order negative effects of such, is effective beyond anyones conception of the idea of local grassroots policing of our local ranks. Amazing differences of before and after have developed.
While none of us have any issue with what others boot up their arm or snort up their nose, thats freedom, everyone has the natural primal freedom to indulge in drugs drink what have you. Not my monkeys not my circus. But, Big But, how your behavior and especially actions effects others, our community, well thats a whole other kettle of fish.
Being shamed by your family tribe and local community for bad shit you have done must be a primal instinctive order of just punishment. Something like that, because the positive effects and serenity in our little community has been profound.
And nobody yet has been shot or hung, all we did was let it be known, in no uncertain armed terms, something is unacceptable, it will not go on, and this is your one and only piece of friendly peaceful advice your getting.
And whether its totally unrelated or not, the worst of these community drug dealers, addicts and other criminals from thieves to murderers to pedos have mostly all ended up with proper fitting long term crowbar hotel visits. Or dead by other circumstances, by others outside the purview of our AO.
What I’m beginning to wonder about and believe I’m seeing the beginnings of, is this local self governance we have established on a civilizational scale, that maybe its dawning on us who care and believe in ordered liberty form of self governance, it’s time to take back our power as sovereign individuals and handle our way of life by our own druthers and duty.
Its prudence, virtue, responsibility, action, grass roots style. Home rule. We do not need inalienable law enforcers, we do need, we must have if our great Western Christian Greco/Roman Athenian culture is to not just to survive but thrive, Unalienable local local local support of Rule of Natural Law.
I’m writing this to tell any who read this missive we found it works, it is natural, we come by it like water is to the fish once entered into. The vigilance required is minimal, and that too has become naturally to us.
Now, we never see the law up here, even the fish & game wardens leave us be up here. Its peaceful, serene. The only thing that mars this new/old zeitgeist is the Karens, you get them everywhere, they too are recipients of hard neiborhood ridicule and love and after a brief run have mostly shut the heck up and mind their own business.
The American Revolution was not a “slave revolt”, and your basic misunderstanding of the Founding makes the rest of your comment suspect.
The Founders were not slaves seeking freedom, but free men demanding their rights be respected.
For an excellent, well-documented paper by a pro-gun lawyer, please go to
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3703927
and download the paper. It explains why the Second Amendment is particularly needed with the cops refusing or unable to do their jobs.
Another issue that I’ve raised: if the government proves to be unable or unwilling to use its mechanisms to keep the peace, people will look for alternatives.
Vigilantism, sure. But how do people think organized crime forms? Thuggish some may be, but ‘protection’ can be a very tangible thing. When the cops refuse to lift a finger to stop the creep harassing someone’s sister on her way home from school, do you think that someone will blink at quietly passing a fistful of cash to that fellow with the Italian name, or those two gents in the blue do-rags?
However, I am really curious if Riss vs NY, Castle Rock vs Gonzales, and Warren vs DC apply to larger-scale unrest. I can appreciate the impossibility of ‘protecting individuals’, but allowing BLM/Antifa to run amok shouldn’t be shielded by those cases.
Large scale “unrest” is best met with the military.
Failing that, the militia has to do the job.