Disarming women: an iconoclastic, new brand of "individualist feminism"—ifeminism—suggests that abused women might do well to put their trust in Smith and Wesson

Women's Quarterly, Summer, 2002 by Richard W. Stevens, Hugo Teufel, III, Matthew Y. Biscan

SINCE 1968 Americans who face criminal attack have been advised to "dial 911" and rely upon the emergency police response for protection. Indeed, according to a study of 911 calls, "the public has built up extraordinary levels of expectation and reliance on the [911] system's effectiveness." Meanwhile, a story in U S. News & World Report magazine in 1996, headlined, "This is 911, please hold," reported that in recent years, many law enforcement executives have questioned the entire foundation on which 911 is built-the idea that police can stop crimes by responding rapidly to citizens' 'emergency' calls."

In practice, does dialing 911 actually protect crime victims? Fewer than 5 percent of all calls dispatched to police are made soon enough for officers to stop a crime or arrest a suspect. Even when it functions at its best, the 911 system cannot adequately protect crime victims. When citizens rely solely on 911 and police protection from imminent criminal attacks, their risks of harm increase because of slow police response times, clogged emergency telephone lines, and occasional partial or total 911 system outages. More striking is the position of the law in nearly every state: The police have no legal obligation to protect citizens from crime.

In one landmark California case, a woman separated from her husband, and he retaliated with threats and violence. Over a period of a year, Ruth Bunnell had called the San Jose police at least twenty times to report that her estranged husband, Mack, had violently assaulted her and her two daughters. Mack had even been arrested for one assault.

One day Mack called Ruth to say that he was coming to her house to kill her. Ruth called the police for immediate help. The police department, according to court documents, "refused to come to her aid at that time and asked that she call the department again when Mack Bunnell had arrived." Forty-five minutes later Mack arrived and stabbed Ruth to death. Responding to a neighbor's call, the police eventually came to Ruth's house--after she was dead.

Ruth's estate sued the police for negligently failing to protect her. The California appeals court held that the city of San Jose was shielded from the suit because of a state statute and because there was no "special relationship" between the police and Ruth--the police had not started to help her, and she had not relied on any promise that the police would help. Case dismissed.

IN A PARTICULARLY BRUTAL Washington, D.C., case, three women discovered that the law promises them no protection against brutal attack by strangers. All three women were sleeping in their rooms during the early morning hours when two men broke down the back door of their three-floor house in northwest Washington. The men first entered the second-floor room and violently assaulted one woman there.

From tile third-floor room they shared, the other two women heard the screams and commotion and called the police. The call was dispatched as "Code 2" priority, which has a lower priority than "Code 1" given to crimes in progress. Four police cruisers responded to the call within a few minutes. One of the police cars drove through the alley without stopping to check the back door and then went around to the front of the house. A second police officer knocked on the front door but left when he got no answer. All officers left the scene just five minutes after they had arrived.

The two women, who had escaped to an adjoining roof, then climbed back into their room and called the police a second time because they still heard screams. The duty officer assured them that help was on the way. That second call was logged as "investigate the trouble," but no officers were dispatched.

Minutes later, the women thought the police were in the house and called down for them. There were no policemen there, but the attackers heard the screams and came upstairs. All three women were kidnapped, taken to one of the attacker's houses, and raped, robbed, beaten, and sexually abused.

The three women sued the District of Columbia and the officers for negligently failing to provide police protection, but their complaint was dismissed. Under D.C. law, "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 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 individual citizen." Many state courts follow and apply this same rule.

The city of Sonoma, California, recently settled a federal civil rights lawsuit by paying one million dollars to the children of a battered and murdered woman whom the police failed to protect against her violent ex-husband. This lawsuit alleged that the police denied the woman her civil rights by failing to protect her. Although this settlement does not create a legal precedent, it does signal that city governments may see holes forming in their legal immunity.