If the police continue to not do their job, hire an attorney (if you can afford one) to go with you. The attorney doesn’t even need to do anything except be a witness.
They tell you there’s nothing they can do because they don’t want to be bothered. And they don’t want their stats to go up.
Having an attorney present bumps it up to “being fucked by court duty is worse than doing some paperwork”. Likely nothing they can do but having the paper trail of a stalking report will help YOU should the stalker escalate.
I just checked. Victims are also entitled to speak to a public defender- or anyone interacting with the court or the justice system- including cops. (a private lawyer will be way more effective, PD’s are… stretched thin and overworked. yet another thing that needs to be changed.)
Lawyers will also do free consults, so it’s worth it to at least call around to a couple of places and see how much it will cost. My partner had to do this once and one of the lawyers ended up giving us pro bono legal advice and making a call to the police just because he thought the whole situation was stupid. He was like, “I’ll call them and figure out what their plan is and then we can figure out if you even need to hire a lawyer.” (His advice after talking to the cops was that we probably didn’t need to hire him, but that there were a couple of things he could do if we still wanted to.) So that was a nice and unexpected resolution that wouldn’t have happened had we not tried to hire someone.
If the police continue to not do their job, hire an attorney (if you can afford one) to go with you. The attorney doesn’t even need to do anything except be a witness.
They tell you there’s nothing they can do because they don’t want to be bothered. And they don’t want their stats to go up.
Having an attorney present bumps it up to “being fucked by court duty is worse than doing some paperwork”. Likely nothing they can do but having the paper trail of a stalking report will help YOU should the stalker escalate.
You know, that’s a good point.
I just checked. Victims are also entitled to speak to a public defender- or anyone interacting with the court or the justice system- including cops. (a private lawyer will be way more effective, PD’s are… stretched thin and overworked. yet another thing that needs to be changed.)
Lawyers will also do free consults, so it’s worth it to at least call around to a couple of places and see how much it will cost. My partner had to do this once and one of the lawyers ended up giving us pro bono legal advice and making a call to the police just because he thought the whole situation was stupid. He was like, “I’ll call them and figure out what their plan is and then we can figure out if you even need to hire a lawyer.” (His advice after talking to the cops was that we probably didn’t need to hire him, but that there were a couple of things he could do if we still wanted to.) So that was a nice and unexpected resolution that wouldn’t have happened had we not tried to hire someone.