The LAPD adopted the motto “To protect and to serve”, and it was subsequently widely copied across the U.S. Besides a general mandate to protect the public at large, police are responsible for the wellbeing of anyone in their custody.

Police don't have a mandate to protect the public. This has gone before the supreme court, multiple times. Even if they are present while you're being attacked, they can just stand and watch if they think it's not safe for them to engage. (And practically speaking, they can't do it anyways, they're not omnipresent - if you live in a big city your response time for being murdered is probably over 5 minutes (where I am, it's 7+ minutes). Lot can go wrong in 5 minutes)

They do have a responsibility to protect people in their custody.

They have a mandate to protect the public that doesn’t extend to a given individual person.

They don't have any such mandate.

> The LAPD adopted the motto “To protect and to serve”, and it was subsequently widely copied across the U.S.

AFAIK. it hasn't been copied in that form very widely, instead, it was popularized by TV (Dragnet specifically, IIRC), and so is culturally attached to police in general, despite the vast majority of departments with any motto having different mottos.

A motto is not a mandate.

> The LAPD adopted the motto “To protect and to serve”, and it was subsequently widely copied across the U.S. Besides a general mandate to protect the public at large, police are responsible for the wellbeing of anyone in their custody.

That is a PR slogan. That's like trying to say Google can't be evil because their motto is "Don't be evil."

The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that police do not have a duty to protect citizens, and that ruling has been reinforced consistently at lower courts throughout the country.

What they meant was a given citizen.

> What they meant was a given citizen.

No, that's not what they meant. The ruling itself is extremely explicit. And furthermore, that's how other courts have applied the ruling in the decades since.

It's simply factually incorrect to claim that the police have a legal duty to protect citizens simply because of a PR campaign that they launched, when there are volumes of case law that establish otherwise.