“Failure-to-protect” cases, situations in which crime victims do not receive reasonably relied-upon police protection, receive troubling treatment under the law. This problem originated with the Supreme Court case DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, which held that litigants cannot bring a substantive due process claim for failure-to-protect cases. In doing so, the Court espoused a distinction between state action and inaction that relied upon unsound assumptions about state obligations and paltry factual analysis. DeShaney is troublesome because it provides only two situations in which failure-to- protect cases can be successful: physical, involuntary police custody and the state-created-danger doctrine. These exceptions are too narrow; they exclude the frequent situations in which police officers fail to carry out their duties when they are a severely injured victim’s only possible source of protection. This Comment proposes two methods for providing more protection to victims who are faced with imminent violence and thus rely on police presence. One approach is to expand the custody exception past considerations of whether a victim is in physical custody and to account for the facts of the victim’s situation and reasonable police knowledge of those facts. A more drastic approach would be overturning DeShaney and replacing it with a dereliction-of-duty standard that considers steps the police took in handling a victim’s case and the effects of their inaction. The legal realm will benefit from standards that eschew the DeShaney Court’s misguided attempts at categorizing police conduct as action or inaction and clarify police obligations through fact-specific analysis.

“未能保护”案件，即犯罪受害者没有得到合理可靠的警方保护的情况，根据法律受到令人不安的待遇。这个问题起源于最高法院德沙尼诉温尼贝戈县社会服务部一案，该案认为，诉讼当事人不能对未能保护的案件提出实质性的正当程序索赔。在此过程中，法院支持区分国家作为和不作为，这种区分依赖于对国家义务的不合理假设和微不足道的事实分析。德沙尼案很麻烦，因为它只提供了两种未能保护案件能够成功的情况：警察非自愿拘留和国家制造危险原则。这些例外的范围太窄；它们排除了警察在作为重伤受害者唯一可能的保护来源时未能履行职责的常见情况。本评论提出了两种方法，为面临迫在眉睫的暴力并因此依赖警察在场的受害者提供更多保护。一种方法是将监护例外扩大到受害人是否受到实际拘留的考虑范围，并考虑受害人情况的事实以及警方对这些事实的合理了解。更激进的方法是推翻德沙尼，并用玩忽职守标准取而代之，该标准考虑了警方在处理受害者案件时所采取的步骤以及他们不作为的影响。法律领域将受益于避免德沙尼法院将警察行为归类为作为或不作为的误导性尝试的标准，并通过具体事实分析来澄清警察的义务。