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This took me exactly 10 seconds to find on Google and I'm not an attorney. Anyone with a basic law background should be able to cite this case.
Warren v. District of Columbia
(444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is a U.S. Court of Appeals case in which three rape victims sued the District of Columbia because of negligence on the part of the police.
Two of three female roommates were upstairs when they heard men break in and attack the third. They phoned the police, reporting that their house was being burglarized, and waited on the roof. Their call was incorrectly dispatched as less important than it was three minutes after they made the call, and three police cars came to the scene, three minutes after the call was dispatched. One policeman drove by without stopping, and another officer walked up to the door and knocked. Upon receiving no answer, the officers left five minutes after they had arrived. Nine minutes later, the two women called the police again and were assured they would receive assistance. This call was never dispatched and the police never came.
Believing that the police had arrived and were in the house, the two women called down to the third who was being attacked. This alerted the intruders to their presence, and they then took them captive at knife-point. They were then raped, robbed, beaten, and forced to submit to the attackers' sexual demands for the next fourteen hours.
DC's highest court noted that because the police are only under a general duty to provide services to the public at large, a special relationship must exist between the police and the individual in question for the "duty" element of negligence to be satisfied. It held that no such special relationship existed so the case was properly dismissed by the lower court for failure to state a claim and the case never went to trial.
Just one case of many along these lines...
We are just cattle to law enforcement leadership when things go sideways. The law states that they can't be responsible for the individuals when the herd at large is in danger. Even then, you're lucky to get whatever help you can.
Another interesting case regarding the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone
WASHINGTON, June 27 - The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.
The decision, with an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia and dissents from Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, overturned a ruling by a federal appeals court in Colorado. The appeals court had permitted a lawsuit to proceed against a Colorado town, Castle Rock, for the failure of the police to respond 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.
For hours on the night of June 22, 1999, Jessica Gonzales tried to get the Castle Rock police to find and arrest her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, who was under a court order to stay 100 yards away from the house. He had taken the children, ages 7, 9 and 10, as they played outside, and he later called his wife to tell her that he had the girls at an amusement park in Denver.
Ms. Gonzales conveyed the information to the police, but they failed to act before Mr. Gonzales arrived at the police station hours later, firing a gun, with the bodies of the girls in the back of his truck. The police killed him at the scene.
The theory of the lawsuit Ms. Gonzales filed in federal district court in Denver was that Colorado law had given her an enforceable right to protection by instructing the police, on the court order, that "you shall arrest" or issue a warrant for the arrest of a violator. She argued that the order gave her a "property interest" within the meaning of the 14th Amendment's due process guarantee, which prohibits the deprivation of property without due process.
The district court and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit dismissed the suit, but the full appeals court reinstated it and the town appealed. The Supreme Court's precedents made the appellate ruling a challenging one for Ms. Gonzales and her lawyers to sustain.
A 1989 decision, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, held that the failure by county social service workers to protect a young boy from a beating by his father did not breach any substantive constitutional duty. By framing her case as one of process rather than substance, Ms. Gonzales and her lawyers hoped to find a way around that precedent.
But the majority on Monday saw little difference between the earlier case and this one, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278. Ms. Gonzales did not have a "property interest" in enforcing the restraining order, Justice Scalia said, adding that "such a right would not, of course, resemble any traditional conception of property."
Although the protective order did mandate an arrest, or an arrest warrant, in so many words, Justice Scalia said, "a well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes."
But Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, in their dissenting opinion, said "it is clear that the elimination of police discretion was integral to Colorado and its fellow states' solution to the problem of underenforcement in domestic violence cases." Colorado was one of two dozen states that, in response to increased attention to the problem of domestic violence during the 1990's, made arrest mandatory for violating protective orders.
"The court fails to come to terms with the wave of domestic violence statutes that provides the crucial context for understanding Colorado's law," the dissenting justices said.
Organizations concerned with domestic violence had watched the case closely and expressed disappointment at the outcome. Fernando LaGuarda, counsel for the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said in a statement that Congress and the states should now act to give greater protection.
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