The Police Are Not Paid to Protect or Serve

Did you ever notice that the line "to protect and serve" on the side of Los Angeles police cruisers is in quotes, as if they’re being ironic? 

Guess what?  

They are.  The phrase is meaningless. 

In fact the courts have ruled that police have NO duty to protect the populace from assault, murder or rape, even if they are witnessing it in action.

The police have NO duty to stop crime in progress, arrest thieves, stop vandalism or pretty much anything else.

The only job requirement of a cop is to get hired and collect his or her salary.

And for what?  Policing is one of the safer jobs in the U.S.  

Yes, that's right -- being a cop is safer than being a garbage man, a logger, a roofer, an ironworker, a delivery driver, a farmer, a power lineman, a crossing guard, a farm worker, a construction helper, a mason, or a highway maintenance worker.

As the good folks at NPR's Radiolab found out (much to their amazement), the police have NO special duty to stop you from being assaulted (or even killed) right in front of them.

Police have NO special duty to stop a burglary even if they are witnessing it.

Police have NO special duty to enforce a protective order against an abusive spouse… or to do pretty much anything else.

As Professor Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University School of Law told Radiolab:   

[T]he Constitution is kind of a weird way to run anything in government. I mean, it's a framework for government, but all it is, is a framework. And then the framework gets filled in with statutes. We have environmental protection statutes and we have workplace safety statutes, but we don't have policing statutes. And so basically the courts are left to try to hold people accountable or not under the vaguest of terms.

That's why it's hard to hold people accountable and why people get frustrated. And the odd thing is they keep doubling down on that by creating more mechanisms on the back end to try to hold people responsible and don't notice that the whole problem is the vacuum, as you described it, on the front end.

Police, literally, have NO LEGAL OBLIGATIONS to "protect and serve" in almost any capacity or under nearly any set of circumstances.

And yet police are given ALL KINDS of special rights to detain, assault, and intimidate law-abiding citizens without any legal consequence whatsoever.

Any question why America's system of policing is broken? 

Any question why so many Americans are ready to defund the police?