"You don't need a gun. If someone tries to break in, just call the police."
How many times have you heard or read some variation of that claim? How many times has someone tried to frame your desire to protect yourself as somehow bizarre because that duty falls on the police? If you're like many of us, you've lost count of the times this so-called argument has come up.
The truth is that the police do not have a duty to protect you. That's true even if they forcibly disarm people in a given place, like a school.
Basically, the argument is that the police have a duty to protect society by arresting criminals but not to protect you as an individual. Yes, even if you call them and they don't bother to show up for hours.
A woman who was raped at gunpoint by a home invader in Gresham waited for hours for Chicago police to respond to her emergency call because the district had no officers available to handle it, according to police dispatch recordings.
The Chicago Police Department’s 911 center received nine calls for service about the November 6 home invasion and sexual assault without dispatching an officer. The victim was eventually taken to Holy Cross Hospital for treatment, but police did not send an officer to meet her there until 2:13 p.m.
...Recordings of police radio traffic from the Gresham (6th) District show that the emergency call was apparently classified as a criminal sexual assault report requiring an officer’s response, with the first mention of the attack being made at 12:21 p.m. But the district was in “Radio Assignments Pending,” or RAP, status, meaning no patrol cars were available to handle incoming calls.
As a result, emergency assignments accumulated without officers being dispatched, including the report from the woman who had just been raped during a home invasion. By 1:13 p.m., the victim had been transported to Holy Cross Hospital for treatment, but CPD still had not sent an officer to meet with her.
Now, in fairness, it does seem to be a case of taking the report and everything versus a failure to respond to the break-in, but this is still gross incompetence, at least on the part of the dispatcher. This isn't the worst example, either. I've seen worse.
The problem, though, is that you're dealing with people. People make mistakes. People get lazy. People do all sorts of things they shouldn't do, often because they'd gotten away with it in the past and no one caught them.
Then some poor woman gets raped and burglarized, who could have been killed, and the dispatchers rated that as a ridiculously low priority. It wasn't until a sergeant saw the call and started poking at it that anyone was sent. In other words, there should have been an officer dispatched sooner, but the dispatcher claimed there was no one available.
Would there have been someone available if she'd called as the bad guy was breaking in?
I wouldn't bank on it.
Look, the police aren't the problem. Dispatchers aren't the problem, really, because most of them do their damnedest to do the job well. They recognize the responsibility they have, and they don't pull these games.
The problem is that people are people, and that means any number of things can go wrong.
It's up to you to protect yourself. You can't bank on the police swooping in to save the day. It's not because they don't want to. There's just no way you can bank on it because there are too many people involved who may or may not do a damn thing to help you.
Get a gun. Get training. Learn how to protect yourself. Don't just learn the basics and think you're good to go. You need to learn a lot more than that.
Don't trust the dispatcher to tell the officer and for them to get there in the nick of time like Batman. Trust that your rights can protect you and others. Then the police can show up to take your statement on why the would-be rapist has a dozen holes in him. That's a much better trade.