Safety Checklist
Cellphone: Add your city's and adjoining cities police department phone numbers to bypass 911 delays.
Add these numbers to every family member's cellphone.
Join your neighborhood's email list.
Refresh and upgrade your home first aid supplies. Be sure your vehicles are equipped with first aid kits.
Take a first aid class. Learn hands-only CPR.
Take a trauma first aid class. Learn how to use a tourniquet and apply trauma dressing.
Practice home evacuation drills with your family – especially if you have young ones. Use a word or phrase (such as 'Rome is Burning') that will tell every family member to immediately stop what they are doing and move to a safe point. Be sure to also practice using an alternate safe point.
Extend the home evacuation procedure for use outdoors, in shopping malls, movie theaters, restaurants, and other places you frequent.
Sign up for alerts from your police department.
Refer to commonly available checklists for the basics. This list is for a prepared family's first responder.
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Police Have a Duty to Protect?
… Think Again
Why do you call the police?
We are told that if we call they will come and protect us. We learn this from the news, movies, and TV shows. TV shows and movies are short on facts but long on ratings.
The Los Angeles Police Department's Motto
When do you call the police?
When you have been attacked, robbed, or raped. Or when someone has been murdered. The police mean well, but the odds of them being there right when you are being harmed are very slim.95% of the time police arrive too late to prevent a crime or arrest the suspect. ("This is 911 … please hold", Witkin, Gordon, Guttman, Monika and Lenzy, Tracy. U.S. News & World Report, June 17, 1998)
In 2011, 639,000 911 calls made on cell phones went unanswered in California. (Emergency Management Magazine, 2011)
The police cannot be everywhere at all times. The police are basically historians. They take a report after the fact. Hopefully, they will find whoever did you harm and the district attorney will pursue a court trial.
Duty to protect?
In the 1981 Supreme Court case, Warren v District of Columbia, the court reiterated case law: “the government has no duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.” In this case a woman heard her roommate being raped and called 911. The police arrived, but when the officer knocked on the door and there was no answer so they left. Again one of the women was able to call the police and while dispatch told her help was on the way. No one ever came.
In another case, Town of Castle Rock v Jessica Gonzales (SCOTUS 2005), the court once more stated that the police had no duty to protect even though in this case the Ms. Gonzales had a restraining order against her ex-husband. He abducted their 3 daughters, murdered them, and was subsequently killed in a stand off with the police.
If police have no duty to protect, then why do they carry guns?
They carry to protect themselves first and if they want to, to protect others. While the average beat cop is under no obligation to protect an individual, many will try to do what is right – after all, that is why most got into law enforcement -- to serve and to protect.
The simple fact is the gun is an equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you are 5ft 4 and 115 lbs. or 6ft 2 and 260 lbs. or if you are 90 years or 20 years old; no other tool will put a 70 year old 5ft 4in woman on equal terms with a 20 year old, 6ft 2 man – other than a personal, armed bodyguard.
The Secret Service Protects the First Family
When guns are used in self-defense, 91.1% of the time, not a single shot is fired. (National Crime Victimization Survey, 2000)
When a woman was armed with a gun or knife, only 3% of rape attacks were completed, compared to 32% when the woman was unarmed. (National Crime Victimization Survey, Department of Justice, 1979)
The probability of serious injury from an attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with guns. Men also benefit from using guns, but the benefits are smaller: Men are 1.4 times more likely to receive a serious injury. (National Crime Victimization Survey, Department of Justice, 2000)
So who is really responsible for your protection?
YOU are are own first responder – not the police. No one else is everywhere you are, every second. No one, but no one, cares about your safety more than you.
Everytown for Gun Safety's TV Ad Unintentionally Triggered the Public's Awareness to Protect Themselves and Their Family