| Venue: | NY Ct. App. |
| Facts: | Riss dated a guy for a while, and he became a psycho stalker. She asked for police protection when she was threatened, but no dice. This pattern repeated itself, with escalating threats: again, no protection. Eventually, the stalker hires a thug to throw lye in her face: scarring and near loss of vision. |
| Posture: | Appellate Division dismissed before the trial court submitted the case to the jury. |
| Issue: | Is a municipality liable for failure to provide special protection to a threatened person when the threat is made good? |
| Holding: | No. The Appellate Division's dismissal is affirmed. |
| Rule: | Municipalities are liable for negligence in the provision of services or facilities for direct us by members of the public, but not for negligence in providing a service that protects the public against others. |
| Reasoning: | We don't have total sovereign immunity, but we need to understand the
difference betwen the affirmative provision of direct services
and the provision of harm-prevention, whose effectiveness is
necessarily limited by both resources and executive/legislative
consideration.
It is not for the court to decide how crime-fighting resources should be allocated. There's no basis for doing otherwise: it wasn't the court that got rid of sovereign immunity, and it was the legislature that suspended the statute limiting municipal liability as a result of riots. |
| Dicta: | Dissent: it's not fair to say that because the police owe a duty to everybody, they're not liable to anybody. Also, courts review decisions about the allocation of resources and executive negligence all the time: what do you think those other tort actions are? The government can be vicariously liable, and all we're saying here is that administrators must take responsibility for the services they provide, and the costs of failure. |