Warren v District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981). Typical of cases enunciating the non-responsibility of the police for protecting individual citizens is Warren v District of Columbia in which three rape victims sued the city and its police department under the following facts:
Two of the victims were upstairs when they heard the other being attacked by men who had broken in downstairs. Half an hour having passed and their roommate's screams having ceased, they assumed the police must have arrived in response to their repeated phone calls.
In fact their calls had somehow been lost in the shuffle while the roommate was being beaten into silent acquiesence.
So when the roommates went downstairs to see to her, as the court's opinion graphically describes it, "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands" of their attackers.
Having set out these facts, the court promptly exonerated the District of Columbia and its police, as was clearly required by [the] fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.