This May will mark six years since George Floyd was murdered by now-former police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, MN. The brutal murder sparked protests against police brutality across the nation in a decentralized movement that carried on steadily for months. It forced the beginnings of a conversation that we still need to have in full in this country, specifically regarding law enforcement and their relationship with public safety.

Now that things have evolved to a place where federal law enforcement agents from both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) are kidnapping people in broad daylight, it feels like that discussion will likely be forced forward once again in the coming months. Especially now that ICE has started being sent to our airports.

After all, police and other law enforcement agencies purport themselves “To Protect and Serve” the public, as so eloquently stated by the LAPD’s motto going as far back as 1963. So why is it that the general public is so often in the crosshairs of our various law enforcement agencies when they are categorized as part of the public safety apparatus?

There’s a problem with the LAPD’s motto: the police aren’t actually obligated to protect us unless a special relationship has been established between law enforcement and the individual (e.g., under certain circumstances when a person is in police custody, incarcerated, etc.), something that the Supreme Court has upheld multiple times in multiple ways. It’s quite literally not their job, despite what you might hear at a press conference following a mass shooting, or when they are trying to get an increase to their already inflated budget.

One of the arguments cited as to why police do not have an obligation to us as individuals is the general idea that police in particular swear an oath to serve their community, but that this does not equate to an oath to protect a given individual. This was upheld in 1981, when the Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in Warren vs District of Columbia that police do not have a duty to protect and serve us as individuals, as their responsibility is owed more broadly to the public at large. This ruling is especially heinous when considering that this case was about a home invasion wherein the victims were held hostage, robbed, beaten, and raped. The police in question failed on multiple fronts and yet they were not deemed liable by the courts. The dispatcher did not communicate the urgency of the situation when the first call was made, the responding officers failed to follow established protocol, and when a second call was made to police, the dispatcher did not even forward the call at all. But nothing to see here, no harm, no foul according to the Supreme Court.

Even when the victim is in a public space, law enforcement are not obligated to put themselves in danger in order to render aid and/or assistance. This is true even if and when they encounter someone who is still actively being attacked. In the 2013 case Lozito vs New York City, a judge dismissed the lawsuit brought against the NYPD by Joseph Lozito after police failed to render assistance when he was viscously and repeatedly stabbed by Maksim Gelman in the spring of 2012.

Lozito vs New York City of course helped to lay out the groundwork for the legal precedent that ensures that police present at the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas will not be held legally liable for their actions that led to physical altercations while preventing parents from entering the building in an attempt to save their children, and their inaction in apprehending the shooter. The police never breached the classroom the shooter was in, and it was ultimately a tactical unit of the US Border Patrol that ended up fatally shooting the perpetrator 77 minutes after the mass shooting began. (NOTE: This does not magically absolve the US Border Patrol from the many, many harms they have and continue to bring about.)

Even in cases where there is an established threat of physical violence, such as when a person has taken out a restraining order against someone else, the Supreme Court has upheld that the police are not obligated to protect you. In the 2005 Supreme Court case Castle Rock vs Gonzales, the court found that the police cannot be held liable for enforcing a restraining order, despite the fact that in this case the refusal by the police led to the murder of Jessica Lenahan-Gonzales’ three daughters by her estranged husband, against whom she’d obtained a permanent restraining order during their divorce proceedings.

Much of the time when police or other law enforcement officials are not held responsible for the harms against members of the public that they’ve enabled, or in some instances directly caused, it’s because they benefit from something called qualified immunity. At its core, qualified immunity is intended to protect law enforcement and other government officials from prosecution and/or from being sued for actions taken when performing their job, unless it can be proven that there was a violation of civil or constitutional rights, or that the official acted outside of the scope of their responsibilities. In short, it often amounts to legal protection in the name of “hey man, I was just doing my job,” even when ‘just doing [their] job’ results in the harm (or worse) of someone else. You know, while they’re doing all that serving and protecting.

It seems likely that a lot of these precedents are going to come back into question as things continue to erode in the United States. They may not be discussed on the stage of the Supreme Court again for a relatively long time; the courts deliberately tend to move slowly, and that’s not actually a bad thing in the abstract. Regardless, the discussions about law enforcement and their tenuous-at-best relationship with public safety must be had. As the warm weather approaches, I’m worried that it’s not just the temperature of the air that we’ll see rise. Between the increased activity and presence of ICE and CBP, the economy that’s on fire, the illegal war in Iran, and well, [gestures broadly at basically everything], it does not seem far-fetched to assume that as the public’s tensions rise, encounters with law enforcement in general will creep up, and with them, the question of what exactly they’re there to do. Because it certainly isn’t to protect us.