EDITORIAL: Reminder: The Police Don’t Have an Obligation to Protect Lives
This is not news. But it probably will be to many.
It’s been reported time after time but the American population, in general, is ignorant to one of the very fundamentals of policing and how the law enforcement industry has, successfully, managed to brainwash the majority of society.
This usually comes as a shock to those when they first read or hear it but the police have zero obligation to stop and deter a crime as it’s happening — even if that means saving countless lives during an elementary school massacre such as was seen in Uvalde, Texas on May 24.
On that day, 19 children between the ages of eight and ten were murdered along with two of their teachers. Eighteen-year-old Salvador Ramos had reportedly shot his grandmother before driving to the school to carry out the massacre.
What has been reported in the 48 hours following is, not only angering, but indicative of what many of us have known to be true.
We now know that Ramos was inside the school, maiming innocent children and teachers, for nearly an entire hour before anything was done. Meanwhile, law enforcement—local, state, and federal—amassed outside the school, bullying the only people they could: the children’s parents.
One mother was handcuffed, another parent was tackled to the ground, and another was even pepper-sprayed. All for trying to protect their children because, well, nobody else did besides the two teachers who lost their lives in the process.
Oh, and let’s not forget that the cops went into the school and rescued their own kids first.
Here’s that dose of reality, though.
Despite how, I am sure, much of the population feels and thinks regarding this news about saving lives not being an obligation, it isn’t new and shouldn’t come as a shock. But it does. This is because we’ve been led, since the beginning of the original slave patrols, to idolize and elevate law enforcement officers to some sort of “protector,” or “savior,” status.
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the police, in fact, do not have to protect anyone. This was the result of a lawsuit stemming from the police in Castle Rock, Colorado failing to heed to a woman’s “pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters, whom he eventually killed.” An appeals court had allowed a lawsuit against the city to proceed but this was then overturned by the Supreme Court with Antonin Scalia delivering its opinion.
This was reaffirmed, in 2018, by a federal judge following the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida where students believed that local governmental officials were responsible for their safety. In contrast, U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom ruled that only those “in custody” are afforded that right to safety. Amazing.
So, that’s the reality here in the United States of America, the “greatest country in the world.”
People need to start opening their eyes, question what’s going on around them, and inform others that the majority of what we’ve all been taught is a lie, a smokescreen.
