Whenever I write a column that mentions either cutting police budgets or supporting any sort of gun-safety regulation, someone (often several someones) always throws the same scenario at me: What if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night?

I find it almost nonsensical that the midnight-marauder thought experiment is thrown at me both to prove that I need the police and also that I need guns, because presumably the police won’t show up in time to save me. But let us briefly entertain it.

I’ve certainly worried about that particular sort of violence from time to time. What if someone gets violently angry with one of my columns, figures out where I live and breaks into my house in the middle of the night? What if someone is looking for money? (For the record, I don’t keep cash on me.) Even if I manage to grab my phone and call the cops before getting raped and/or murdered, it’s going to take them at least five minutes to get to my house. Which leaves plenty of time for a marauder to rape and/or murder me. What would the police do in that case, other than call the coroner?

I think this scenario gets thrown around because it’s supposed to trigger primal feelings of fear, which tend to override logical, rational thinking. Lucky for me, I’ve been dealing with an anxiety disorder for the last 25 years, which means I have a lot of practice in working through primal feelings of fear – and the illogical urges they produce.

People have a lot of feelings surrounding police and their place in our culture. A heavy law enforcement presence makes many people feel safe. I get that. I used to feel pretty positively about police. I grew up thinking that they were here to protect us and performed a dangerous job. But then I learned some facts.

Fact: Police work is not the most dangerous job in America. It’s not even in the top five, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Fact: Due to a legal principle called “public duty doctrine,” police officers are not legally or constitutionally required to help individual citizens in distress. This doctrine states that, absent a special relationship, government officials, including police officers, do not owe “a specific duty of care” to individual members of the public. Instead, their duty is to the public as a whole. This doctrine has been affirmed in several legal cases, including the utterly horrific 1981 Supreme Court case Warren v. District of Columbia. That lawsuit came about after – wouldn’t you know it! – armed intruders broke into a house and raped, beat and robbed the occupants over a period of several hours. The victims called the police, who arrived at the house, knocked on the door and left without any further investigation, leaving the victims at the mercy of their attackers.

Fact: Since 1990 – longer than I have been alive – the Office of the Maine Attorney General has never found a police shooting unjustified. Now, that’s a fact that can be interpreted in different ways. You can look at that fact and believe that every police shooting in Maine in the past three decades was completely justified. Or you can believe that the law gives its enforcement agents an awful lot of leeway.

Fact: Multiple law enforcement agencies failed to prevent the Lewiston mass shootings, even though Robert Card had pretty much every red flag you could think of waving above his head.

What makes me feel safe when I fall asleep at night? Mostly, it is the fellow occupants of my bedroom: two reactive dogs and my girlfriend, a weight-lifting social worker (she can squat 245 pounds, so if her deescalation skills don’t work, she can throw an intruder out the window).

I may not be the wisest owl in the tree, but I’ve made enough fear-based decisions in my life to know that it is not a good place from which to make choices. We should be looking at the root causes of crime. Investing in ways to make our communities safer. Funding an actual mental health system, not just the patchwork disconnected resources that currently exist. Putting money into drug treatment, which would cripple the market more than any dealers’ arrests.

We all deserve to be safe in our communities, and I believe that we should have a justice system, including law enforcement, that reflects this. One that is proactive, not reactive. One that focuses on prevention, not punishment. And above all, one led by facts.

Victoria Hugo-Vidal is a Maine millennial. She can be contacted at:
themainemillennial@gmail.com
Twitter: @mainemillennial

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