Your Safety- A Poll

My house. My responsibility,

 

Police have no legal duty to respond and prevent crime or protect the victim.
'Nuff said.

 

I'm afraid that even the good police officers out there are being hamstrung by bad policy. Regardless of whether or not they want to "Serve and Protect", they aren't being allowed to.

That having been said, the old saw of "When seconds count, the Police are just minutes away" is truer now than it has ever been. We have a security system on the house but both times we've had false alarms, the call from the police saying they were there and checking on things was almost 20 minutes after the notification from the alarm company. Yes, sure, there are mitigating factors and the likelihood of a false alarm...but what if it hadn't been.

Something made a noise downstairs a little over a year ago and it woke my wife up. She'd been sleeping as she wasn't feeling well and I was at work and the kids at school. She called me on the phone (cell to cell) because we didn't have a land line anymore and I called 911 from my work phone. It took the officers almost 10 minutes to get to the house. My wife was in a tizzy, totally panicked and sure someone was in the house and it took them 10 minutes to get to her. Yes, she was armed.

My point is that even if they want to help, the ratio of Officers:Citizens is just too low...they can't even if they want to.

I am responsible for my own safety. I am responsible for the safety of my family while they are in my home. Carry permit? Yeah. And helping to push for constitutional carry in the state (will still have the permit for reciprocity and "ease" of purchasing). Home alarm, yeah. Dog...pffft, he's a greyhound and loves everyone but yeah. He can be intimidating if you don't know any better and he's a good judge of character.

Eventually I will be out of the city (suburbs count) though. I don't like hearing firecrackers in the middle of the night and wondering if it was a gunshot and too far away to sound like one (happened last night). I don't like feeling like I need to look out the front door before I exit. I don't like having TWO apartment complexes spring up behind my house over the last 3 years. The older I get (and I'm only early forties), the less I like being around people. The "sphincter per furlong" density is just getting too high and with all of the cranial rectal insertion syndrome going around...I just have no patience for it anymore.

It's my job, my life, my responsibility. I guess I'll just have to make sure there's only one side of the story to tell...

 

My worry is an over-zealous officer would show up and they would shot my family or my dog. I find it sad that I feel scared of the police rather then protected. And there are decent officers out there but you just don't know what your going to get.

 

My house has a lock on the door...but nobody has seen the key for 10+ years.
It's a very old and intimidating looking farm house...kids don't come here to trick or treat unless they live on the street and know us. There are generally 2 or more lifted 4x4s in the driveway and several less-than-friendly signs. It's pretty clear from the road that hillbillies live here and my brothers and I have cultivated a reputation in town as "folks not to mess with." We are "known to police" and fire dept for some of the more rowdy parties and bon fires when my brothers were younger but even the cops don't pull in the driveway when they come to tell us to quiet down. They park on the road and honk a couple times until we come out of the woods. We have always been courteous and compliant when asked to turn the music down or stop 4x4 mud running with loud trucks after midnight....unfortunately "progress cannot be halted" and it's just a matter of time before the city punches a road through the dead end on my street and more houses start popping up all around us. Life on "acreage" is quickly becoming a thing of the past in my province as many if not most of the population here think it's "normal" to live in a box with a 10x10 yard at most. I do worry aboot strangers a bit but not enough to replace the lock on the front door or change my way of life out of "fear".

Tha's it.

 

My brother used to live in a cul-de-sac in southern california. 8/10 of the families were active duty Navy/former Military. Some druggies moved into the neighborhood and started using the cul-de-sac as a meeting place to sell. Long story short, his wife called the police to get something done and they said it would be an hour or more. She said "Never mind, send the coroner, it'll be over by then and you can clean up the mess."

The cops were there in less than a minute, I kid you not.

That didn't fix the problem though. Eventually the neighbors all got together and when the next deal went down they backed two suburbans out of the driveways, blocking the way out. Then my brother's neighbor came out and told them they needed to get off his property. When he got drawn on the ENTIRE cul-de-sac showed up with, in many cases, fully automatic weapons, locked and loaded.

THAT fixed the problem.

---EDIT---
Without a shot fired btw.

 

I do love the life of solitude.. Like others, I look out the window before I venture out of my home.. I look to see if there are any wild life that I may need to worry about.. City dwellers have the two legged critters to worry over.. If I should have reason to call for the police, I know they WILL be a long time in finding me.. Dog's are only for warning of a threat.. A steak or a bullet will take them out of contention in most cases.. SO, ultimately it up to each man to provide the most effective and expedient means for their own defense..

 

I don't worry so much about defending the house, or defending my life, but the legal ramifications of doing so. I have no problem pulling a trigger on an intruder, or defending a neighbor, but I don't want to destroy my life while defending it.
Make sure the bullet holes match the story.

 

Case in point: the cop who just shot a guy for grabbing his tazer dropping it, and running away. 8shots later, the perp is shot in the back.
At the moment of attack, the cop WAS right to respond with deadly force, but not 5 seconds later when the tazer fell, and the guy ran.
The bullet holes did not fit the story.

 

Cop had a gun and a tazer. If the perp had fired the tazer, he would have had both, and the cop would be dead. He had, at that moment, the right to defend himself. Same as you or I.

 

And it was the police that said it, lol. No problem. They are good at paperwork.

 

The key word in @Yard Dart's reply to this was TRAINING. Perhaps if the cop in question had trained more/differently he may have reacted differently, we will never know for sure. But as a rule a person will fight like they train, that much has pretty well been proven. The decision to draw a weapon is the first and most important one they are likely to make with only seconds to do so. To me, training the mind to know when to make that choice is at least equally important as training the body to handle a weapon effectively.

Can or will mistakes be made? Certainly. That's the human factor and while it can never be eliminated, IMHO it can be reduced with proper training and mindset.

My

 

I've had this discussion with cops, a few times. While you are in danger, deadly force is allowed, but from the moment that threat is gone, it is not. (At least locally).
So I could be beaten bloody, and shoot them, but not if they were leaving at the time. (Unless, they were (IMHO) just pausing to pick up weapons.)
Deadly force is only to stop an attack, not revenge it.