No Safe Haven
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AMERICA IS FACING A TEST of its determination to confront domestic violence. Two tests, really: one, a court case; the other, a piece of federal legislation, each signaling in its own way whether the struggle to ensure women’s safety is advancing or in retreat. That struggle—which is as old as Carrie Nation—has made great strides over the last three decades. Domestic violence has been acknowledged and defined, recognized in law, and countered with programs ranging from counseling to shelters to hot lines to enforcement training and judicial reform. As a result, the overall incidence of women being battered or killed by intimate partners has declined or leveled off.
Still, as many as 4 million women are assaulted by spouses or partners each year, and 1,200 are killed. Clearly, the fight is not over.
It certainly isn’t over for Jessica Gonzales, who in June lost her case, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, before the U.S. Supreme Court. One day in 1999, Gonzales’s estranged husband abducted their three daughters from her front yard and murdered them, a carnage that might have been prevented had the Castle Rock, Colorado, police department not repeatedly refused to act on the protective order she’d sworn out. Gonzales sued the town for its negligence; when her case reached the Supreme Court, the Bush administration weighed in on Castle Rock’s side. The arguments were technical legal dissections; left hanging was any consideration of the mayhem an adverse court decision could introduce into many women’s lives. After the court’s ruling favoring Castle Rock, advocates fear a future where restraining orders, standard protection sought by thousands of women each year, will ring hollow, leaving abused women with even less legal support.
That was one test. The second will come when Congress deliberates the renewal of the 10-year-old Violence Against Women Act, which will expire on September 30. Advocates of the successful and popular legislation hope it will be buttressed with enhanced funding but fear its support will be cut.
The stories that follow display the enormous ramifications of such decisions. We may no longer live in the era when so many women, deprived of legal, peaceful remedies to the horror of their lives, resorted to the violent remedy forced on Shelley Hendrickson. But, as Patricia Prickett, a former adviser to the L.A.P.D., attests, the most effective way to solve the larger problem is still being sought by advocates battling for women’s safety. Judging from the casualties, the battle remains to be won.
This is an amended version of a piece appearing in the July/August 2005 print issue of Mother Jones.
It is unfortunate our media has not informed the public that police officers have no duty to provide protection for individuals regardless of the danger they might be in. Consider Warren vs. District of Columbia, Atlantic Reporter, Second Series, Volume 444, pages 1 – 12 quoted below.
In the early morning hours of March 16, 1975, appellants Carolyn Warren, Joan Taliaferro, and Miriam Douglas were asleep in their rooming house at 1112 Lamont Street, N.W. Warren and Taliaferro shared a room on the second floor. The women were awakened by the sound of the back door being broken down by two men later identified as Marvin Kent and James Morse. The men entered Douglas' second floor room where Kent forced Douglas to sodomize him and Morse raped her.
Warren and Taliaferro heard Douglas' screams from the floor below. Warren telephoned the police, told the officer on duty that the house was being burglarized, and requested immediate assistance. The department employee told her to remain quiet and assured her that police assistance would be dispatched properly. Warren's call was received at Metropolitan Police Department Headquarters at 6:23 a.m., and was recorded as a burglary in progress. At 6:26 a.m., a call was dispatched to officers on the street as a "Code 2" assignment, although calls of a crime in progress should be given priority and designated as "Code 1." Four police cruisers responded to the broadcast; three to the Lamont Street address and one to another address to investigate a possible suspect.
Meanwhile, Warren and Taliaferro crawled from their window onto an adjoining roof and waited for the police to arrive. While there, they saw one policeman drive through the alley behind their house and proceeded to the front of the residence without stopping, leaning out the window, or getting out of the car to check the back entrance of the house. A second officer apparently knocked on the door in front of the residence, but left when he received no answer. The three officers departed the scene at 6:33 a.m., five minutes after they arrived.
Warren and Taliaferro crawled back inside their room. They again heard Douglas' continuing screams; again called the police; told the officer that the intruders had entered the house, and requested immediate assistance. Once again, a police officer assured them that help was on the way. This second call was received at 6:41 a.m. and recorded merely as "investigate the trouble" it was never dispatched to any police officer.
Believing the police might be in the house, Warren and Taliaferro called down to Douglas, thereby alerting Kent to their presence. Kent and Morse then forced all three women, at knifepoint, to accompany them to Douglas' apartment. For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of Kent and Morse.
Appellant's claims of negligence included: The dispatcher's failure to forward the 6:23 a.m. call with the proper degree of urgency; the responding officers' failure to follow standard police investigative procedures, specifically their failure to check the rear entrance and position themselves properly near the doors and windows to ascertain whether there was any activity inside; and the dispatcher's failure to dispatch the 6:41 a.m. call.
Quotes from the Decision Finding No Negligence On the Part of Police
Government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen, but, rather, duty to provide public services is owed to public at large, and, absent special relationship between police and individual, no special legal duty exists.
That police answered call and arrived outside premises which were scene of burglary and assaults did not give rise to special duty on part of police toward victims therein, and police officers were not answerable in damages for failing to ascertain that assaults were continuing upon victims therein, or for leaving premises without so ascertaining.
The Court ... does not agree that defendants owed a specific legal duty to plaintiffs with respect to the allegations made in the amended complaint for the reason that the District of Columbia appears to follow the well established rule that 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 constitutes a basic governmental service provided to benefit the community at large by promoting public peace, safety and good order. The extent and quality of police protection afforded to the community necessarily depends upon the availability of public resources and upon legislative or administrative determinations concerning allocation of resources. ... Accordingly, courts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.
For the purpose of federal grant money allocation, each "perpetrator" provides money for VAWA administrators. Amongst other abuses, VAWA provides federal grant money for the surveillance of men who refuse "anger management".
The consequence of dividing family with gender bias translates politically into divisive gender politics (as evidenced by this column and its comments). Totalitarians better manage a nation divided into male and female parts.
The tyrants sword is forged with legal privilege based on unconstitutional "victim class" ideology. This legal privilege is illegal under the original 13th amendment (passed in 1819). The good news is that VAWA and the legal profession as we know (and hate it) are illegal. The bad news is that lawyers and VAWA administrators ignore this fact.