Civil Rights — equal protection

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United States Court of Appeals

Civil

Civil Rights — equal protection

It does not violate the Equal Protection Clause for a city to not give special treatment to victims of domestic violence.

“Because the Equal Protection Clause is ‘concerned . . . with equal treatment rather than with establishing entitlements to some minimum of government services, [it] does not entitle a person to adequate, or indeed to any, police protection.’ Hilton v. City of Wheeling, 209 F.3d 1005, 1007 (7th Cir. 2000); see also DeShaney v. Winnebago Cnty. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 196 (1989) (The government’s failure to protect an individual from private violence is not actionable under the Due Process Clause.). ‘On the other hand, selective withdrawal of police protection, as when the Southern states during the Reconstruction era refused to give police protection to their black citizens, is the prototypical denial of equal protection.’ Hilton, 209 F.3d at 1007. The allegations in the paragraph quoted above do not plausibly suggest that the City maintained a policy or practice of selective withdrawal of police protection. To the contrary, the complaint alleges that the City failed to have particularized practices in place for the special protection of domestic-violence victims. In essence, the complaint alleges that the City failed to promulgate specific policies for this particular class of crime victims, not that the City denied this class of victims equal protection. At most, the factual allegations in the complaint plausibly suggest the uneven allocation of limited police-protection services; they do not plausibly suggest that the City maintained an intentional policy or practice of omitting police protection from female domestic-violence victims as a class.”

Affirmed.

09-3561 McCauley v. City of Chicago

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, St. Eve, J., Sykes, J.