When are folks going to realize this??!?!?!?
Sorry but I have NO sympathy for folks who only depend on others for their safety….
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###############FAIR USE########
January 20, 2000
No Duty to Protect
Kenneth D. Smith

She was on her way to work and parked in the garage of a Los Angeles
office building, as she usually did. Her accounting business was in that
building so it
was convenient to park there; she paid a monthly fee to do so. But what
happened next was anything but routine. As she was preparing to leave her
car, a masked
assailant came up from behind her. He put a gun to her head, forced her into
the back of her car and sexually assaulted her.

Who was responsible for protecting her from this nightmare? The police? The
garage operator or owner? The courts? The suspects in such cases are many,
ranging from complete strangers to former boyfriends. But the parties
responsible
for ensuring anyone’s safety are few, if any, as case after case shows.

In the case of the Los Angeles accountant, described in court papers only
as Sharon P., the victim blamed the garage operator and owner. Underground
parking
garages are inherently dangerous, she argued in a lawsuit, and therefore the
two should have foreseen assaults on their customers. Worse, there had been
seven
robberies at the bank on the ground floor of the building and numerous crimes
in the 50-block area surrounding the business.

The garage had darkened areas in which an attacker could hide, and there
was a smell of urine that suggested more than business people had daily
access to the garage.

The defendants should have done better, Sharon P. said. “Simple things
like a clean, brightly lit garage, with working security cameras, and
periodic walk-throughs [by existing personnel], all give the appearance that
someone cares about this garage and sends a message to any potential criminal
to go elsewhere.”

Last month the California Supreme Court disagreed.

For one thing, it turned out there hadn’t been a crime committed in the
garage in the preceding 10 years. For another, the state high court said,
bank robberies and the smell of urine are not necessarily precursors to rape.
Hence, the attack was not clearly foreseeable. “To hold otherwise,” the
court quoted from a prior decision, “would be to impose an unfair burden upon
landlords and, in effect, would force landlords to become the insurers of
public safety, contrary to well-established
policy in this state.”

Consider another horrible case making headlines this month involving a
Charles County woman named Janice Lancaster. Her husband had beaten her to the
point that she felt obliged to draw up a will. But the courts were of little
help to her. After one particularly vicious incident, her husband pleaded
guilty to assault and was given 18 months . . . probation.

She subsequently filed for divorce, but after a violent argument in which
her husband yelled at her to get out or she wouldn’t make it out, she sought
help from
the local state’s attorney’s office. He asked a judge to sign an arrest
warrant for Mrs. Lancaster’s husband, and the judge did so.

But the court clerk’s office didn’t get around to working on the warrant.
It went 13 days ? over a long holiday break ? without being processed, at
which point the violent husband ? who should already
have been served the warrant and been in jail ? shot and killed her.

Martha M. Rasin, chief judge of Maryland’s District Court, called it a
“horrible situation” added that the time lapse was “normal.” Think of the
court as the U.S. Postal Service without even the late delivery.

Law enforcement seems the obvious choice to protect women from assaults,
but case law suggests otherwise. In an infamous local case, Warren vs.
District of
Columbia, two women who heard their roommate being assaulted downstairs
called the police for help. The police came but left without entering the
building. Again the
women called, and this time the police didn’t bother to dispatch anyone to
the scene at all. The attackers, however, heard the women upstairs and
assaulted them too . . . for 14 hours. No police came.

The women sued the city, but the courts dismissed their claims saying it
was a
“fundamental principle” that the government has “no general duty to provide
public services, such as police protection, to any
individual citizen.”

The same was true in a New York case, Riss vs. City of New York. A woman
who telephoned police to beg for protection from her boyfriend sued the city
for its failure to protect her from an assault in
which he threw lye in her face, blinding her in one eye, damaging the other
and scarring her face. The city denied responsibility, and the courts agreed.
Complained a dissenting judge, “What makes the City’s position particularly
difficult to understand is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law,
[the plaintiff] did not carry any weapon for self-defense.

Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on
the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her.” News
stories say that today crime rates are declining across the board, but to the
victim of such assaults, that’s
hardly consolation. For her and other women, it only takes one attack to make
a crime wave.

Sharon P. and others may find that the first step toward protecting
themselves is understanding that no one else has a duty to do
so.

Email: [email protected]

Kenneth Smith is deputy editor of The Washington
Times editorial page.His column appears on
Thursdays. >>