Posted by Kromey at 1:45pm May 5 '10Certainly wasn't me. I'm simply pointing out one simple fact -- even if you can call 911, and even if there is ample time for the police to respond ("When seconds count, the police are only minutes away"), they have no duty or obligation to come to your aid.
I hadn't intended for the anecdotes to become the centerpiece of my posts, but I'll concede that I failed on that point. Rather, what I wanted to highlight is the court decisions, which establish legal precedent and therefore are, for all intents and purposes, law (see: "case law"). These case laws paint an explicitly clear picture: The police have no duty to respond to clear and present danger and come to your aid.
As for the 25 years bit, I intentionally limited my research to recent decades to avoid the potential counter-argument that a "musty old" decision is not relevant today. By comparison, Miranda v. Arizona, from which we get the ever-so-famous Miranda warning, is 44 years old; Gideon v. Wainwright, the precedent for your right to a court-appointed attorney should you be unable to provide one yourself, is 47 years old (by the way, the book Gideon's Trumpet is a great read!), and in fact your right to counsel at all was established in Powell v. Alabama 78 years ago! Point being that even though I was trying to avoid the "but that's too old" criticism, it is nonetheless an invalid one.
I hadn't intended for the anecdotes to become the centerpiece of my posts, but I'll concede that I failed on that point. Rather, what I wanted to highlight is the court decisions, which establish legal precedent and therefore are, for all intents and purposes, law (see: "case law"). These case laws paint an explicitly clear picture: The police have no duty to respond to clear and present danger and come to your aid.
As for the 25 years bit, I intentionally limited my research to recent decades to avoid the potential counter-argument that a "musty old" decision is not relevant today. By comparison, Miranda v. Arizona, from which we get the ever-so-famous Miranda warning, is 44 years old; Gideon v. Wainwright, the precedent for your right to a court-appointed attorney should you be unable to provide one yourself, is 47 years old (by the way, the book Gideon's Trumpet is a great read!), and in fact your right to counsel at all was established in Powell v. Alabama 78 years ago! Point being that even though I was trying to avoid the "but that's too old" criticism, it is nonetheless an invalid one.
Who said anything about a crisis? - Kromey