Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 17:25:34 -0400 From: sw357mag@MINDSPRING.COM (Nancy) Subject: MA: Can't Sue police for not reponding to crime To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
here's one more to add to the police have no duty to protect you list......
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/lo...rob04052001.htm
quote:
----Ignored robbery victims can't sue cops for bias by J.M. Lawrence Thursday, April 5, 2001
A Tedeschi's clerk and customer who feared they were about to be robbed can't sue Brockton police for not responding to their call for help even though three thugs later robbed them at knifepoint, a federal judge has ruled.
``It was a terrible incident,'' one of the women's attorneys, Roland Garrison, said. ``The shame of it all was there was a cruiser available.''
The women claimed a Brockton police dispatcher discriminated against them Jan. 27, 1997, when she refused to send help because they described the suspects as black men in hoods outside the food shop.
``(Expletive) them . . . People who see black people with hoods on them think they're no good,'' officer Nancy Leedberg said, according to another police officer.
Leedberg, who is white, denies making the remark. Her superiors suspended her for five days after the incident.
U.S. District Court Judge Patti B. Saris ruled that shopper Elizabeth Pariseau and clerk Mary Diaz failed to prove that police discriminated against them based on their race. The plaintiff are white.
``While there is evidence of inept law enforcement, Plaintiffs have not demonstrated that the conduct of Leedberg violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,'' Saris ruled.
Attorneys for the women said they will refile the case in state court on the basis of police negligence alone.
The three black males emptied the register and robbed Pariseau and Diaz of their money and jewelry. They were never caught.
----
~USP"[Even if there would be] few tears shed if and when the Second Amendment is held to guarantee nothing more than the state National Guard, this would simply show that the Founders were right when they feared that some future generation might wish to abandon liberties that they considered essential, and so sought to protect those liberties in a Bill of Rights. We may tolerate the abridgement of property rights and the elimination of a right to bear arms; but we should ot pretend that these are not reductions of rights." -- Justice Scalia 1998