So what innocent reason could the police have to remove his security detail?
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Especially at a time when they were well aware that there were credibly threats on his life?
It’s far to easy to read the above quote posted by @noahdjango as pure paranoia with regards to other people besides NOI gunning for Malcolm… but he’s dead, and now we know that the direct actions of the NYPD contributed at least in part to his death. And let me remind everyone, he was gunned down in front of his wife and children. They were right there in front of him when he got shot. His wife and children.
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The quotes indicate sarcasm, apparently. 
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to “protect” and to “serve”
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I always thought the unspoken part was “…the interests of rich White males.”
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Indeed. Our goal should be to make that motto mean something for the rest of society, too.
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But, again, the police and FBI conspired together to murder Fred Hampton a few years later. So we know that exact thing happened. You wanna argue that, sure, they did it, but it’s not believable that they did it another time?
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Big misunderstanding about that slogan, as it turns out…
The actual usage is more in line with
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OK, but in your example, there’s no controversy that FBI coordinates with local authorities when they are making an [unjust but] “legal” raid (Hampton). With Malcolm X, what’s apparently proposed is: the NYPD and FBI together conspired to aid multiple Nation of Islam cut-outs to commit an assassination. Again, it would be more convincing if the allegation were that it was a single entity committing such an outrageous scheme.
And what we just discovered indicates there might have been some coordination going on.
The FBI colluded with the Chicago PD on Hampton’s assassination.
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The FBI drugged Hampton so that when the police came in on their “raid,” they could murder him and set up the scene without risk to themselves. It was an actual conspiracy to murder there.
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Most people don’t know that important detail of what happened… it was an assassination, pure and simple. If they did it to Hampton, how many other Black leaders did they collude to take out, one has to wonder.
This has been one thing I’ve been pleased to see in our popular culture lately - just how brutal the implementation of white supremacy has been over the years. Shows like Watchmen, films about slavery that aren’t white washed, films about leaders like Hampton are critical to getting this message out, since those of us who teach this history can only reach a small number of people each semester.
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I suspect we’ll never find out. The people involved are dying off, and they avoided leaving behind incriminating documents. Also I keep thinking of various members of left-wing groups who died (or narrowly avoided dying) in… suspicious circumstances. Although there’s also business entities at play with some of those, though that doesn’t rule out LEO/corporate cooperation, for which there’s also quite a history.
And on the other side, LEOs aiding anti-choice terror groups (that had murdered people). Some of that information has come out, but I suspect there’s a lot more that hasn’t.
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Yeah, historians can do a good deal of reconstructing such things, but sometimes, there are enough gaps to make it problematic to get a clear picture. I suspect that there was a lot more of that kind of thing that went on than we do know about, and that continues to be true to this day. One wonders how many BLM chapters have been infiltrated, for example, and how many of those are the cause of any violence attributed to the protests this past summer.
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That’s a rather odd hair to split.
The specific lower court language quoted with approval on the appeal is:
@Chipsa’s rather briefer version sets out the same point perfectly well.
The police have no duty to protect any particular person. And therefore they have no duty to protect anybody.
There are probably good reasons for that as you say but it remains the case that if the police stand right in front of an obvious crime being committed and decide to do nothing, there is nothing a citizen can do directly to hold them to account.
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ultimately, the point of the doctrine in warren was to bolster and extend the concept of “qualified immunity”, my use of air quotes is because the concept has been bolstered and extended so much one would be left without an answer to the question of what would disqualify the immunity.
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