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An unbelievable abuse of authority This YouTube video on the Volokh Conspiracy shows a truly outrageous incident where a policeman in the USA tasers a man who was at no point threatening anyone and who was actually calmly walking away from the policeman. The longer CNN coverage gives more context and makes it more clear to me that this was a completely unjustified use of force.
Yet more proof no state should have a monopoly on the means of violence. The incident is astonishing and at least it does show the value to the public (and without doubt to honest decent policemen) of having all traffic stop incidents videoed.
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Why “unbelievable”? Surely “outrageous” or “all too believable” or even “criminal” would be better?
Nothing particularly new- the taser seems to be a weapon of convenience for police officers who do not want to ‘get involved’ with conventional detainment.
sure I’m going to catch hell for this but…..
not unreasonable at all. not that it matters a whole lot but keep in mind this guy is wrong: there was a 40 mph sign and he blew by it.
the cop driving back to the sign with the guy to show him he’s an idiot is not an option and would never happen.
the guy has already refused to show his license and registration and refused to sign the ticket, refused to put his hands behind his back which is resisting whether you like it or not.
Assuming the cop is not going to just let this guy tell him he’s not going to get a ticket let him drive off, then he’s got to make a decision.
Does he let him get back into the car where he could retrieve a weapon, flee, or run him over? No.
does he physically engage or use his nightstick to get the cuffs on and risk a brawl on the side of a busy highway? No.
Should he pepper spray him and hope he doesn’t try to fight or stumble blind into traffic? No.
Should he draw his firearm? quite and escalation when there is another option.
tasing this c**t was the safest for both of them. If he lets him return to the car he’s ceded authority and put himself at risk. had the video shown the guy getting back into the car and firing at the cop from it, or speeding off, it would be a new training video on what not to do and the discussion would be about how poorly trained the police are.
sign the stupid t ticket and take it to court and prove you’re right. had this ass clown just signed and gone back to snap a picture with his phone, he would have felt the mild sting of realizing he’d acted like a snotty little bitch while being completely wrong rather than the much greater sting of the taser.
spidly,
Fuck you.
I’m not sure about this – we can’t hear the conversation they are having prior to the tasering, and we never hear the cop in questions side of the story on the CNN video. But I don’t see how its an ‘unbelievable abuse of authority’. The guy got arsey and disobeyed orders from a police officer.
James: why does it go without saying that he should obey orders from a police officer, or anyone else for that matter? Is he on a police force, and somehow a subordinate to the said police officer? Or was he a threat to the police officer or anyone else when he was stopped? Did he pull a gun on him? Also, why did the police officer insist on him signing the ticket? Why cannot he just take the license number to court, along with the taped evidence of speeding?
I would like to think that this is an isolated incident, and I will, unless shown evidence to the contrary. But even one such incident is enough to make one think about Perry’s point.
The guy got arsey and disobeyed orders from a police officer.
Yeah, so?
Bad idea maybe, but so is accepting drinks from strangers. You gonna make that argument?
James, you can’t hear any of the conversation? 1st the guy refuses to produce license and registration then finally does it seems. then he refuses to sign the ticket and tells the cop that they’re going back to “find this 40 mph sign” then the cop finally tells him to get out of the car.
the guy’s being a dick from the get go and cops do not have debates – it’s a good way to get everyone more angry. right or wrong you never argue with the cop, you don’t tell the cop he has to tell you what you did wrong before you show your license and registration as this punk did – you’ve just set the tone and put the cop on guard…
I would have had the urge to kick him in the head a couple times after I tased him. amazed that doesn’t happen more often.
I agree.
The cops are doing hard work, in difficult conditions, and are often at risk.
One should obey a cop and not argue with him, not beyond a very polite exchange.
if you tell a cop to go fuck himself, it is his job to just stand there are take it (yes, really). Unless you threaten him, and no way no how was that cop being threatened, the cop has no justification for using force like that. If I had been that guy’s wife and I’d been armed, I would have shot the fucker for what he did and been quite happy to stand in court later and say I was right.
never give a cop lip? why not? The cop has all he needed already to file any charges, so there was no justification for that power trip. I tend to take a cop’s side in most situations but this was pure bullshit.
Because that’s what police officers are for, that’s the definition of their job. You can, later, argue in court, or lodge a complaint against the police officers, but you can’t argue with him. They are not the instance you argue with.
Some more information on what the authorities thought about it…
http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_7592075
This is a lazy, arrogant, cop who thinks that he should be obeyed instantly simply because he has a badge. He should be criminally prosecuted.
Although the conversation is not clear the driver does seem to be a little less than polite, but who can blame him when the cop doesn’t even bother with a “Good afternoon” before barking out his demand for papers. I’m just about able to accept that “failure to obey an officer’s instructions” can be an offence but the cop should say “if you don’t do this you will be committing an offence.
If the man’s pregnant wife had got out of the car and shot the thug-cop dead she would have been acting legitimately.
That is the logic of the police state. If a cop is not following the law 100%, you should NOT obey the cop and you should feel no obligation to kowtow (“be very polite”) to someone just because he works for the state. Threatening a cop is both foolish and unreasonable but no one has a right to demand you be “very polite” to them.
I recall driving in a car with a friend in New Jersey many years ago and we were stopped by a policeman for a random sobriety check. My friend (who was driving) ask the policeman to show him in writing the method he used for picking us (such as ‘every fifth red car’ or whatever).
The cop admitted he did not have a method but insisted he show his licence and registration anyway. My friend informing him in that case the stop was not legitimate (and quoted the specific regulation why that was the case… yes my chum had worked as a reserve policemen himself for many years before joining the air force… Willi if you are reading this, do you remember this incident?) and so he would not comply and he simply drove off without further ado.
And guess what… the cop made no attempt to stop us.
I showed this to a mate of mine who’s currently in the local plod and he just shook his head in disbelief. I’d be interested to hear what Sunfish thinks as he certainly has a relevant perspective!
Police agencies in the US pride themselves on taking great care to weed out recruits who have had any prior negative contact with law enforcement, been within a hundred yards of a smoking reefer, paid for a blow job or bet on sports. Perhaps they should concentrate on pyschologically testing to turn away those who believe that they are superior to civilians and have an untramelled right to order people around and torture (what else is unjustified tasing) those who disobey.
Further to Perry’s report of challenging a police officer in NJ. I was waved to a halt by a very young police officer while driving in Puerto Rico. This was to allow the police to deal with a car that was driving the wrong way down the one way street (a common occurence on the island.) I waited while the offending car did a U turn in front of me and pulled over to talk to some other police officers. Since the danger had passed and the officer who had waved me to a halt had moved over to the side of the road and turned away I set off again. The police officer who had stopped me rushed out into the road, banged on the front of my car with his fist and started shouting. I wound down the window and asked him what the problem was. He said that I shouldn’t have moved until he told me to (there were now many cars stuck behind me.) I told him not to be so fucking stupid, he didn’t like this and starting speaking faster than I could understand (in Spanish.) At that moment an older cop came over and waved me on. I hope that young cop learned something that night.
So, did I deserve a tasing?
The logic of a police state Perry? I fear your getting a little overwrought. Like I said at the top, I’m unsure about this incident, as I cannot accurately understand the conversation prior to tasering, and we do not have the cops side of the story on CNN. It seems a little harsh to me to taser him, but like I said before, if he was speeding, refused to sign the ticket, and then resisted arrest I don’t see what he’s got to grumble about.
If it’s legal to refuse to sign speeding tickets given out by statetroopers in Utah, then I’ll take it all back, and agree the cop was in the wrong.
Wow. That’s one bone-idle copper. What I’d like to hear from those who support his actions, is what would be appropriate in the absence of a taser. Would it be OK to maybe shoot the driver in the leg? Or may one hard blow to the side of his knees with a baton? I guess putting him in an armlock would expose the office to unecessary risk.
I love the way he tells the woman to get back in the car and shut the door, as if it’s a crime to stand on the side of the road watching the police do their work.
It’s some comfort the UK police aren’t able to do this kind of thing yet.
Far from it. The notion you MUST be polite to a cop because he is a cop and obey what he says no matter what (which was what the comment I was replying to suggested) is indeed the logic of a police state.
Ok, so if it is not legal to refuse to sign, administering summary violence is justified then, is that what you are saying?
Besides, the quesition is not if this is legal, but if this is right – not the same thing, obviously.
Jacob:
No it is not, it is “to protect and serve”.
On a pragmatic level you are right, of course, and that driver was not the sharpest pencil in the…whatever. On a principled level, you are dead wrong. I should be able to argue with anyone I damn please, Jacob, you, police, even god himself. The fact that it is not always the smart thing to do is beside the point. It is not the policeman’s job to argue with people. He should have let the guy go, and taken what evidence he had to court, that’s all. But instead he decided to have a power trip.
I suppose I ought to choose a new name, to differentiate me from supporters of police states, but never mind…
I find it slightly harder to imagine our plod drawing a taser on someone for such trivialities, especially when, from what I know, they only really draw on their CS spray when faced with violent situations. That’s not to say that anything to the contrary has never happened- I just have not heard of anything as yet. It goes without saying, though, that the thought of routinely arming plod with tasers is gravely uncomfortable.
I have to wonder if the styles of policing in the US would make this more likely to have happened in Utah than, say, New York? I can imagine a New York police officer has a much broader tolerance of ‘shit’ than someone from the back of beyond.
I apologise for misintepreting your comment regarding a police state; I agree, an individual should be under no obligation to be polite to cops.
If it’s illegal to refuse to sign, then the cop should use whatever method he judges best to arrest the individual in question. Like I said in my previous two posts, tasering in this instance seems harsh, but it’s not clear to me that the cop in question had many other options. Draw his gun? Maybe, but then what if the guy had continued to walk away? Is he just going to ignore him and let him drive off, or retrieve a weapon from his car, because he obviously can’t shoot him for a mere trafiic violation. Wrestle him to the ground? Maybe, but then he risks injury and he may end up doing the perp more damage than if he was just tasered – leaving aside the fact that they’re both feet from a busy road. Some form of violence has to be administered if this guy really was acting illegally – see spidly’s first post.
*Misinterpreting
Also, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with forcing somebody to sign something against their will? What is it worth? It’s simply signed under duress, which I’m sure is worthless where the law is concerned.
WHAT??? For a simple traffic violation? The guy did not sign the ticket. Fine, so if that is indeed illegal then add that to the charges that will arrive with a court summons a few days later in his postbox . He was not drunk or engaged in ‘furious driving’ and so posed no clear threat to other drivers. No force was justified whatsoever. None.
I got the distinct impression he was tasered for being disrespectful.
Exactly.
And is there a problem with that? In most US states, driving is legally a privilege, not a right. Common respect while exercising a privilege is simply common sense.
And let’s not all second guess in comfort what a man doing a very trying job did in the heat of the moment. He was the one in the arena, making the decision. Remember, some of the 9/11 hijackers were pulled over for routine traffic violations. If someone was being non-cooperative, I applaud the instinct to taser the bum, rather than shoot him. If this officer is a consistent problem child, his superiors will deal with it. Don’t need CNN keeping us safe.
Personally, I try to be respectful to everyone. And especially if he is carrying a gun
Why not? That is exactly what those video recording are for.
So he gets to taser a few folks every now and again for shits-and-grins then does he? Just so long as he does not make a habit of it, eh? Nice.
Yes, we most certainly do.
That is quite possibly the worst of all possible reasons to be respectful to someone who works for the state.
Cops have a thankless job and I am all for cops being armed. I am all for EVERYONE being armed. But if a cop carries a gun to compel respect rather than to protect himself and others, then he is not there to ‘protect and serve’, he is there to oppress and should be viewed accordingly, ie he should be feared, not respected.
James #1:
Cops are pretty much the same everywhere. The main difference is that west of the Missipp cops will arrest other cops for DUI, domestic battery what have you. Manhattan cops are just as bad as deep south cops. Post-Guiliani they feel insulated from administrative reproach and civilian oversight is unfortunately toothless.
My brother got tossed in jail for the day on the west side highway b/c the prats in the local station wanted to impress a rookie on her first day. They made up some non-existing traffic ticket which supposedly was outstanding and hauled my brother off to jail. I was in the car and inquired as to the reference number of this ticket and whether or not I could pay for the ticket at the station. Of course, they would not produce either the ticket or the reference number and my brother stayed in jail all day.
I was pointedly told at the station that my brother was in a single cell and having taken the hint, I shut up and waited for his release. He said the cops were joking about it all day and were pretty pleasant and attentive, especially the non-participating brothers in blue.
We reported it to the civilian hotline and completed a legal affidavit for the oversight board but nothing of course came of it.
Dont much like cops.
I’m torn on this one. The cop obviously wasn’t too effective in explaining to the driver in a courteous yet firm manner his obligations under the law.
But in refusing to obey the officer and essentially walking away, you have a problem. Some here say, so what, it was just a speeding ticket. Okay, but what happens if we all start walking away from police in such situations? The law unravels and to some extent, so does society.
If we want to challenge the law we do it at the ballot box or in court. We don’t do it on isolated highways because we feel like it.
Even if you accept the idea of it being right for him to use his taser on this guy, there is still the distinct possibility that this officer was acting in violation of state law and/or his department’s policies on the use of force. Seeing as how he had not begun to affect an arrest, and being an ass about not producing your license and registration is not a criminal act that warrants immediate use of force to stop, I’d guess that this cop could be disciplined, fired and/or brought before a criminal court for his actions. In theory, anyway.
I don’t buy that, not one bit. You send him a damn ticket and a summons in the post. The actions of this cop are how gunfights start for no good reason. Like several people have said, if that was, say, my wife who had just got tasered under those circumstances and I had been in the car and armed, I would probably have shot the bastard. Would I have been justified? Not 100% sure. But that is quite possibly what I would have done given his actions.
The policeman chose to escalate the situation when NO ONE was actually at risk. He could have let him drive off (and we have no indication that is actually what he was about to do) and still enforced the law by just issuing a summons.
Sorry but I strongly suspect this guy tasered him for being disrespectful. Unacceptable.
Janine,
when the guy begins to return to the car after refusing to put his hands behind his back, he is threatening. I didn’t hear anyone being a dick other than the driver and he was just taking the abuse of this a-hole. just calmly doing what he’s supposed to do. listen to him when he walks up to the car. he’s being perfectly nice and sounds like he doesn’t really want to be pulling the guy over “how you doing, going kind of fast, can I see your license and registration” and the driver immediately becomes a douche. Then the cop becomes monotone and is not on a power trip. sure he already has all he needs to file charges but it is also the cop’s responsibility to take him into custody.
fear of someone like you getting out of the vehicle is exactly why he was being such a big meanie.
Perry, he didn’t get tased for being disrespectful, he got tased for ignoring the cop and trying to return to his car. You do not let a driver return to the car under any circumstances and people having a hissy fit over a splooge stain like this driver getting put down just makes it all the harder for cops to what they need to do.
video-cop killed-why you dont let driver return to vehicle
why you don’t let other people get out of the car
non-felony traffic stops are relatively dangerous (better than 10% of deaths) so police do not screw around with non-compliant putzes.
If anyone can simply walk away from an officer because they don’t think they did anything wrong, the cops could not do their job. tasers are safefor the arestee and a hell of a lot safer for the cop than wrestling someone down.
The speeding charges against Jared were dropped. This does not say much for the cop pulling him over. If the poor fool cop really did FEEL threatened, he is not fit to be a cop.
The whitewash “report” clearing the cop is exactly what one would expect. Many cops see their role as “To serve and protect me, us, the cops”.
If cops were nice people, they wouldn’t be cops.
“And let’s not all second guess in comfort what a man doing a very trying job did in the heat of the moment.”
Why not? That is exactly what those video recording are for.
That is a negative, Perry. The video recordings are so that others can know what happened, don’t have to rely on recollections and incomplete observations. Second guessing is a game for backseat drivers. And you are better than that, Perry.
Look, I am as willing as anyone else to play the armchair quarterback in the strategy game of what Hannibal should have done after he got the elephants over the Alps. That is part of the learning process, and a way of helping ourselves think. But it is silly for anyone to ridicule the split-second choices that an officer had to make on the kind of traffic stop that has too often ended up in life-changing injuries for the officer. Not unless we are prepared to do that job ourselves — and I for one am not.
So Perry, we are simply going to have to disagree on this one.
lethal force in response to non-lethal force? wow. if that’s the case the cops should shoot speeders if they get uppity on the assumption that the situation is out of control and potentially deadly. actually, judging by your and janine’s view on the continuum of force, they should immediately shoot all passengers and then politely ask the driver again.
or maybe in that situation it is your job to say ‘honey, STFU and give the man your license.”
let him drive away and send him a summons? that’s just pushing the problem onto some other cop. at some point someone is going to have to haul him in for non-compliance. well, not if he never refuses to comply in a “threatening manner.” the cops should only be allowed to follow people around and say “please…. please…. please…. please…..” until a suspect gets annoyed enough to pack it in.
maybe cops should just accept a finger gesture out the window as “i don’t want to be stopped” and give up. send the ticket to whatever address comes up on the plate and hope for the best.
smite control? huh.
cant figure out what is smite-worthy about what I’m trying to post dag nab it. even removed the mild expletive from what I quoted from perry’s last post…
Forgive me for being a little rumpled here. I haven’t had a chance to organize my thoughts.
The whole purpose of a traffic stop is normally to produce a driver for court on an assigned date and time. Historically, that’s been done by arresting him, booking him into the jail, and then having him either appear while in custody “without undue delay” (usually meaning the next court day after the arrest) or post a cash bond and sign an agreement to appear at some later date.
The whole point to having a driver sign a citation at the roadside is to bypass the whole process and allow the driver to appear at the later date and time without having to be transported, searched for weapons, fingerprinted, photographed, etc. Statute sets out certain instances where the law prefers such a summons-and-release, or where the law allows it but doesn’t identify a statutory preference, etc.
Signing the citation isn’t an admission of guilt: otherwise, the courts would hammer us for requiring a signature. The block that says “Without admitting guilt, I agree to appear at the time and place above” means exactly that.
In a few states, refusal to sign really does mean an intended refusal to appear. I do know that a custodial arrest for a minor traffic charge is legal in some states, at least where the driver expresses an intention to fail to appear. I don’t know what Utah law is. Hell, I don’t know if the violation in question is civil or criminal in Utah.
Anyway, once a custodial arrest happens, resisting is resisting. The order to “turn around and put your hands behind your back” may not always be the beginning of such an arrest, but it usually is.
With regard to the taser usage:
In the US, police decide what level of force to apply based upon a model or continuum. We decide where to enter the continuum (or how much force to start with) based upon the “totality of the circumstances.” That means, they look at factors such as size/strength/training of the subject relative to themselves, the numbers of people present, the orientation of any crowds, the number of cops present, the possiblility of the subject or a bystander obtaining a weapon to use on the officer, and any number of other factors. They then employ that force which they reasonably believe will be needed to overcome any resistance.
Legally, the severity of an officer’s use of force depends on the possibility of harm resulting from that use of force. That’s how we work out where guns, batons, sprays, less-lethal rounds, tasers, and any number of other tools and techniques fit into the continuum. Unfortunately, taser is new enough that there’s no real consensus as to where it fits in. It doesn’t help that every known “taser death” of which I’m aware involved either an overdose-quantity of stimulants or an underlying cardiac pathology, or both. As a result, we have a century worth of data about guns and batons, three decades about OC spray and the empty-handed techniques (mostly derived from Aikido), and a good picture of all of the above. “Edison’s Medicine” is new enough that we just don’t know. Correction: everybody knows, and no two people can agree on just what they know.
Spidly: Couldn’t get either of those videos to load. I’m going to guess one was Darrel Lundsford and the other was a new-ish deputy sheriff in Georgia and a driver who pulled a Garand out of the truck? Either way, that’s why, if a passenger tries to get out on my stops, I give one of two options: either stay in the car with the door closed or pick a direction and walk without turning around. Getting out after being told to stay in has been a prelude to an assault all too many times in my own experience. I don’t need people just hanging around and flanking me.
Either way, you correctly note that so-called “routine” traffic stops are relatively dangerous. Actually, traffic stops in rural areas are, most years, the single most dangerous thing that cops can do.
If some driver wants to sit there and motherfucker me all day long, I’m paid by the hour and love playing those tapes in court.
Janine:
The last time I was assaulted at work, it looked an awful lot like this stop. But feel free to show your knowledge, training, or experience, to tell us all how you know what is and isn’t a threat.
DocBud:
I was going to respond to this, but I don’t want to get IP banned just yet.
Now, if everyone will excuse me, this mean fascist pig thug is tired from a long day of violating civil rights. I’ll be back in the morning.
sunfish
one video is Dinkheller in GA who’s got a crazy guy jumping around demanding to bee shat and whatnot. Dinkheller draws but does not shoot as the guy dances his way back to his truck and retrieves what looks like a kel-tec carbine. Dingheller does not shoot for a while. then ultimately looses a gunbattle.
the other video is trooper steven stone TX, he is distracted by a passenger leaving vehicle then both draw and shoot the officer.
I cannot find the video of the officer who is wrestled to the ground, stabbed, disarmed by the passengers he has repeatedly ordered back into the vehicle, and then shot to death with his own gun. maybe you remember this incident.
sunfish, the one I was thinking of is the Darrell Lunsford video. it does not seem to be anywhere other than a snippet on a training video site here
my thought (which I’ve tried to post) is that with some people asserting that they have the right to fire on officers for tasing a loved one, police should then be similarly allowed to view uppitiness as a prelude to a gunbattle and execute the passengers. after all the car occupants are allowed to judge it an illegal stop and use deadly force to counter an officer’s non-lethal force.
“if a passenger tries to get out on my stops, I give one of two options: either stay in the car with the door closed or pick a direction and walk without turning around. Getting out after being told to stay in has been a prelude to an assault all too many times in my own experience. I don’t need people just hanging around and flanking me.”
If the passenger has done nothing wrong and it is a public place, what legal right does (or more correctly should) a police officer have to tell them to stay in the car or move away? Sounds like a good way of preventing them from being a witness to anything the cop might get up to.
I’m with Perry on this one. Long ago when this as a free country, (I’m talking UK) we used to have a distinction between arrestable and non-arrestable offences. So far as I can recall, speeding was not an arrestable offence. It seems to me that giving the state the power to take you into custody for any infringement – however minor – is the beginning of the police state and this farrago is actually some way down the line.
Seems to me though that the cause of this is fear on the part of the cop that he might be shot. We know this can happen – in the UK too – but using such violence for a routine offence, when all the evidence was there for a successful prosecution is inexcusable. It is the first step towards what happened to de Menezes in London.
Of course, just to throw Avgas upon the BBQ, there’s also THIS (Link)one as well …
The blogger Mad Ogre who lives near the area and is normally pretty pro law & order has posted this on the subject (no permalinks I’m afraid, so I have posted the lot here):
“The video of the Utah State Trooper tazering the guy for allegedly speeding: Lots of emails on this and I do find this to be an outrage. I can see a lot of points of view about an Officer’s use of Force… but this crosses the line. I live in the Uintah Basin. I know right were this happened. In fact, I often go shooting about 200 yards away from where this happened. Quite a few of my magazine photos are taken there. This is on highway 40, just west of Vernal about two miles at most outside of town. If you watch the video carefully, you will see that the patrol car gets in front of the 40MPH sign and it would be very easy to not see the temporary sign because of the cruiser. Normally the speed limit is 65 there. The guy wasn’t going very fast at all and the guy stopped immediately… that shows compliance. The trooper never answered the man’s reasonable questions. When the Trooper said the guy was speeding and the guy didn’t think so, the trooper could have said, the sign is right there, and pointed to the 40 MPH sign. Notice that when the officer puts down the clip board – he immediately pulls the Tazer. He doesn’t give the proper warnings, and tags the guy so he’s laying in the traffic lane – and then leaves him there… even leaves him there in handcuffs. This is in violation of Utah Highway Patrol’s guidelines for use of the Tazer, and a blatant safety violation, putting the guy’s life in danger. When you handcuff a guy, you do so to protect his safety as well as your own. The trooper didn’t do that. The trooper only handcuffed the guy because he was on a power trip. You don’t Tazer a guy just because he instantly doesn’t fellate you because you think you are a god. This would never have happened if the Trooper had the attitude that he was enforcing the law – the law which is there for the purpose of keeping citizens safe – instead of having the attitude that all must be subject to The Crown and obey instantly. A big part of being an Officer is communication and calming people down so you don’t have to use force. It looked to me that this guy failed at every step. This trooper should not have a job. I understand the use of force, and I do understand that the driver was being a stupid punk… but if the Trooper handled this differently, none of this would have happened…. stupid punk or not, the trooper has the responsibility of handling the situation properly. I know the Deputy… he’s an alright guy, but obviously didn’t see what happened… because it didn’t happen the way the trooper reported it to the Deputy. If the Trooper was in the right, why did he have to lie to the Deputy? He lied because he knew he was in the wrong. Simple as that. When I first saw this video 24 hours ago, I reported it to the Vernal City Manager and the local DA. I know a lot of the Troopers and other Law Enforcement Officers out here… I sell them guns and ammo… most of them are good folk. But this Trooper’s actions reflect poorly on all of them, and Vernal City as well This situation reminds me of the movie “Anger Management” when Adam Sandler is in the airplane, “Sir, Please calm down!””
and later on this :
“11-24-07: Later: The Utah State Trooper Tazer Incident: There is more to this story. First off, the normal speed limit is 65MPH. The very short construction zone has no warning signs of a lower speed limit ahead. Instead of a 10MPH drop down before the 40 zone, it just drops all the way down to 40. And the signs in both directions are not at the beginning of the zone… they are right about in the middle. Meaning it’s a blatant speed trap and not ticketable. You take this to court, they will have to drop it. The Trooper made so many mistakes in regards to officer safety that it isn’t even funny. Yes, the driver was a punk, but the Trooper could have done a whole lot better according to the video. Now, here’s the kicker. The video is heavily edited. We don’t know what the whole story is. The driver got the video from the UHP and cleaned it up and posted it on YouTube. While the natural reaction is to be pissed… I sure as heck was… it’s time to look at it objectively, and understand there is more to the story that we wont know for some time. Also, in the State of Utah, the Trooper could have wrote “Refused to Sign”, handed the driver the ticket anyways. If the Driver didn’t go to court or pay the fine, bench warrants and suspensions would have followed forcing the driver to step up. Another kicker… it doesn’t look like it, but the driver was going 68 when the Trooper locked him in on the radar… that’s speeding in or out of the construction zone. The Troopers I’ve talked to about this incident wouldn’t have normally pulled him over for 68, but in a construction zone, yeah. Now, I still don’t like the situation at all… I don’t believe in speed limits at all when the road goes across the surface of the moon and nothing is out there between towns like out here where I live… but I can calm down about this all now.”
Leaving aside the comments about the tactics employed by the officer in question, it does explain a little of why the driver was questioning the speed limit.
You should be polite towards any stranger, that’s good upbringing. The cop does something unpleasant to you (gives you a ticket) – but that’s his job. It’s an unpleasant but necessary job, and that’s why you should be doubly polite to him.
If you feel you have been wrongly ticketed, argue your case before those whose job is to hear your argument. Being disrespectful toward a cop is mean and ill mannered, beside being somewhat dangerous. The cop is not the one to vent your anger upon.
Nope, not if the stranger is acting unreasonably.
Wrong again because the issue here is not that the cop gave him a ticket. Fine, that is his job (though still no reason to be ‘doubly’ polite). What is not his job is zapping a guy for mouthing off at him and then walking away. Clearly things are different in the USA but I have been stopped several time in the UK for speeding etc. and although I am hardly a pleasure to deal with when confronted by officialdom, the cops I have dealt with have always treated me with polite and professional indifference, which is probably the best for all concerned.
I think some people are forgetting that much of modern policing is based on Peelian Principles.
One of those Principles is that police officers are people drawn from society to perform the full time duty of what is incumbent upon us all normally- that is, to uphold the law.
In other words, police officers are simply our peers- nothing more, nothing less. Of course, practically there are differences (at least, in the UK), with officers being allowed the use of firearms against civilians etc., but the Principle remains the same.
So, if we take this situation to its most basic interpretation, what happened? One man said to another man (dressed in a policeman’s uniform) that he disagreed with his infantilisation of him and proceeded to walk away. The man dressed in police uniform took umbrage at his peer’s disregard for his demands and so decided to assault him.
Police officers are there to uphold the law- not to be the law.
Policemen are people that we delegate to the unpleasant job of keeping order and upholding the law. They work in difficult and frequently dangerous circumstances. They deal, on a daily basis, with the scum of society. They do it for us, they allow us to avoid these unpleasant tasks and live in relative safety.
.
The least we owe then is respect and courtesy, even when they are, sometimes, wrong. Even when one is upset (getting a ticket), one should practice restraint and be curteous toward the cop and obey his requests.
(Same goes for soldiers. I am terribly angered by the leftist scum who sometimes abuse uniformed soldiers out of “ideological” reasons).
You should be polite towards any stranger, that’s good upbringing.
PdH: Nope, not if the stranger is acting unreasonably.
The cop does something unpleasant to you (gives you a ticket) – but that’s his job. It’s an unpleasant but necessary job, and that’s why you should be doubly polite to him.
PdH: Wrong again
Damn, Perry! This incident really touched a nerve with you, and has quite driven you off your normally sensible game. Is there something in your past you would like to share?
DocBud: you really did not stop and think before you posted this, did you?
Jacob,
Being respectful and courteous is advisable in the interest of maintaining good manners. In a free society, good manners are adopted informally, not legislated; they are a precondition for being respected by others not for avoiding punishment by the state.
It is true that policemen are doing their job. The Mafia’s hit men are doing their job and the local postman is doing his. The mere fact that you are doing your job does not contain any information about whether your job is legal or illegal, useful for society or not, morally acceptably or not… The question in the present case is whether the police officer’s conduct was morally and legally acceptable and this should be unrelated to whether he was doing his job or acting as an unpaid volunteer.
First off, that looked like one hell of a head hit when the guy went down. I’m surprised he was conscious afterward.
Secondly, if the trooper was at all concerned about his own personal safety, he should be dismissed or reassigned immediately.
A. After deciding the contact was unsatisfactory, he turned and walked casually back to his car with his back completely to both of the people in the vehicle.
B. The trooper walks in front of the driver after ordering him out of his vehicle, with his back substantially to the person he is arresting and trooper’s hands are full. If he seriously thought the guy was potentially an armed threat, this was nuts.
C. He tasers the guy (in a lane of traffic!) and stands there with the spent taser in his gun hand and his back to the driver’s partner who exits the other side of the vehicle and approaches the trooper from the cover of the vehicle. He continues holding the taser in his gun hand and apparently completely dismisses her as a threat.
Okay, that last has to be the most dangerous moment of all. He has violently assaulted (at least to her perception) the partner of a pregnant women. She sees the father and guardian of her unborn child down and thrashing, under attack by a hostile and unfamiliar male. Does anybody need to wonder at the stupidity of this? Even if he didn’t fear her, he should have. I don’t think he is the sort of person who takes women seriously.
He had a cavalier attitude to the arrestees and his own safety and to protecting himself from getting shot, and he tells the driver that “I am placing you under arrest”, “because you did not obey my instructions.” He then tells the guys wife “I tasered him because he did not follow my instructions.” He told many lies to the deputy including “oh, he was completely in charge” and that he (the trooper) was fine with the guy not signing the ticket, and that the guy was “jumping around”.
A good friend of mine used me for a character reference when he applied for and was hired by the Madison Police Force (huge pool of applicants for very few jobs). He was our club’s safety officer, I was on the executive committee, we were both instructors, and he was my instructor mentor; I shadowed his lessons before teaching my own. To give him a character reference I had to think quite a bit about his character and how he dealt with combative, drunk, belligerent, frightened or otherwise uncooperative people.
Most of the people who knew him said “He has no temper. He never gets upset.” But by virtue of working with him to resolve numerous ‘situations’ at our club, I had a different opinion. He did have a temper and I could tell when someone had set it off. His speech slowed down. He used small words and short sentences. He repeated himself and tested different phrasing in an effort to be understood. He reflexively adopted a discrete defensive stance and became (to my observation) very peripherally attentive to everything around him. The college age drunks wandering through that we often had to deal with typically traveled in multiples.
During one of his lessons that I was shadowing, we had an injury to one of the students. She could have panicked, but he immediately made contact with her (we were all in separate boats) and began giving her quiet, repetitive and calming instructions. He quickly assigned the other students things to do to keep them involved but out of the way, and he assigned me to contact lake safety and keep him informed of their response.
My thoughts while considering what to say about his character can be summed up with “if any cop every enters a dangerous situation where I am present, I want it to be him.”
I’ve been drawn on by a cop with a big nickel plated .45 auto. He had good reason to believe I might be a drug thief because the when the employees responding to the burglar alarm let him into the (drug distribution) building to search it, they forgot to tell him there was a night shift computer operator on the second floor in the office (split alarm system). Fortunately for me, it was an older and seasoned cop. He behaved very cautiously but safely, pointing the gun at my knees while the employee who had let him in came down the hall yelling “He belongs here. He belongs here.”.
I’m glad it wasn’t that Utah Trooper. I’d probably be dead. Nobody is safe with him around. Not the citizens, and certainly not the trooper himself.
Perry said:
“Sorry but I strongly suspect this guy tasered him for being disrespectful. Unacceptable.”
In 2006, 48 policemen were killed on duty in the US. Often, this happened when an innocuous call suddenly turned violent.
So I think it’s an acceptable restriction on my liberty to follow the reasonable directions of an officer, even if that officer was being rude.
If we want to challenge the law we, as a civilized society, have mechanisms for doing that.
There are about 670,000 policemen in the United States. If your numbers are correct, this puts their deathrate at 0.007%. That ignores the risk of injury, of course, which I imagine is considerably higher, so I don’t want to make light of the often dangerous work that policemen do. But do think you are overstating your case a bit.
DocBud:
I’m not going to get into moral authority or questions or ‘should.’ Assertions about moral authority are typically as provable as convincing my ex-wife that shoveling snow, washing dishes, bathing the dog, and doing laundry count as helping around the house.
As for legal authority, there’s a US Supreme Court case called Maryland v. Wilson. The case basically amounted to saying that routinely ordering passengers out of the car during traffic stops was not a Constitutional violation. Some of the wording in the decision suggested that telling passengers where to stand or not stand could also be Constitutionally permissible.
The Court cited a case called Michigan v. Long, which stated: “..nor did they act unreasonably in taking preventative measures to ensure that there were no other weapons within respondent’s immediate grasp before permitting him to re-enter his vehicle. The fact that respondent was under the officers’ control during the investigative stop does not render unreasonable their belief that he could injure them.”
Significant words: “investigative stop.” The drivers’ detention was based upon reasonable suspicion as defined in Terry v. Ohio, and not probable cause. And you’ll point out that Long referred to the driver. And I’ll respond that I’m also not preventing the passenger from leaving. I’m only preventing the passenger from flanking me or forcing me to divert my attention from dealing with the driver and not being hit by another car.
See also California v. Brendlin: “It is also reasonable for passengers to expect that a police officer at the scene of a crime, arrest, or investigation will not let people move around in ways that could jeopardize his safety.” While the main subject of Brendlin was whether a passenger was “seized” and therefore had standing to contest the stop’s validity for the purpose of suppressing drugs as being illegally seized, my point stands. Especially since “Don’t stand around here” is a very minimal seizure. Brendlin and Wilson both assumed that the officer would use a show of authority to prevent the passengers from leaving on foot, which I’m not doing. I don’t actually force the passenger to stay unless I have some specific reason for doing so: passenger is also a suspect, whom I have a legal basis to hold, or passenger is a child who would be endangered if he were to walk off, or something like that.
They can be a witness from inside the car. They can be a witness from a safe distance away. They can leave a tape recorder running. Hell, they can turn on the CIA spy satellites for all I care.
Perry and others:
As for the reasonableness of the taser, I know at least one agency that uses the PPCT model and classes it as a “soft empty hand” technique. That makes it the legal equivalent (until that’s tested in court) of the arm-lock that somebody mentioned above. I have my doubts that it belongs that low on the continuum, but as I mentioned this is a very new area.
That video was heavily edited. If lipping and walking was all that happened then I’d be inclined to agree. However, I’m not going to go there until somebody produces the unedited version.
Jacob:
I’m with you 95%. I’d say ‘obey’ when the request is actually supported by law. And frankly, I’d settle for receiving the level of civility which I extend to others: that alone would be a significant improvement
Comments about sending the citation to the vehicle’s owner if the trooper couldn’t identify the driver: no good. At least in this state, speeding is a violation committed by the driver and cannot be prosecuted if the driver is unknown. There are speed cameras (called ‘photo radar’) in some areas that seem to be an exception, but legally a cite issued on the basis of a camera can’t have points associated, which I think are a better deterrent than any fine (To say nothing of the whole “video surveillance in public” issue.)
Fair enough.
Nope. A civilised society does not permit armed representatives of the state to use force unless there is a bloody good reason (but if there is a bloody good reason, it should indeed stand with them). Also NO ONE who works for the state (or anyone else) should expect unconditional respect simply because they have a badge and a gun.
and in a civilized society every good mamma would see the tape of her son being such a punk and would tell him
“you’re just lucky it was an officer with taser and not me young man, if I ever catch you……”
So you were taught you to be obsequious to people in authority because they are in authority and that is its own justification eh?
If you have an argument to make, kindly make it.
I’d say, you better obey. You can’t and shouldn’t argue with the cop, or, worse, disobey him. You can politely indicate where you think he acts illegal, but if he insists you obey, and argue later with his chief, or with the judge, or sue for damages.
If a cop says: “stop” or “freeze” – you stop first, and argue, politely, later.
As I said, we hired the cops to stop people. It’s part of their job description, agreed upon by us. That’s why we must obey them. If a cop acts illegally (in our opinion) we can later complain and have him disciplined. The remedy is not to disobey him or curse him.
Alisa, I always think about what I say/write. While I accept that some nice people become cops, and fewer still remain nice after a few years in the force, I do not believe this is generally true, and my experience and those of my family (and noone in my family has had more than a speeding fine) tend to support this view.
According to Jacob “Policemen are people that we delegate to the unpleasant job of keeping order and upholding the law.” This is not the case, noone is forced to join up, society makes available money to people who wish to volunteer to carry out certain tasks. It is a simple business arrangement between two consenting parties. The problem as I see it, is that the sort of person who is inclined to volunteer for the police, is the sort of person who easily moves from upholding the law to believing that they are the law. The sort of person who believes that they have a right to infringe the freedom of others for their safety irrespective of whether or not there actually is a threat. Police forces around the world tend to become self-serving institutions for whom the greatest loyalty owed by their members is to other members.
Well, DocBud, I am not going to argue with you over generalizations on an issue I know little about. But I will continue to treat individual people as just that – individuals, be they cops, speeding drivers, or blog commenters. I hope you have not lost the ability to do the same.
BTW, just to make things clear: I do appreciate the hard and dangerous work policemen are doing, and I have the same amount of respect for it as for any other profession with the same level of difficulty and danger. It still does not mean that I have to obey a policeman just because he is a policeman. I will obey him if his instructions seem to make sense and reasonable, or, failing that, because I might get into too much trouble if I don’t. Just like I would follow anyone else’s instructions if they made sense to me, or give my wallet to a mugger that pointed a gun at me. It has nothing to do with respect or authority.
Must say, I’ll have to land on “S’fishs” side on this one-(note to self-NEVER ask a Copper “does this mean I’m under arrest?” because the answer is always “YES”.)
Sorry if I contribute nothing to the conversation, kick me out if you wish.
Interesting. According to a third year law student over on Volokh, by Utah statute, a peace officer may arrest without a warrant “for any public offense committed or attempted in the presence of any peace officer . . . . “
So an arrest can be lawful, but the law student goes on to cite the rules for an arrest:
And the law student adds the following comment on case law (precedent).
It seems to me that ‘a’ is clearly not the case by the officer’s own words and actions. ‘b’ is out unless you believe that the driver was required to physically give him self up to an officer that has not expressed any intent to arrest him and that this refusal to turn around and offer his hands behind his back justified arresting him without telling him. That’s kind of circular by my thinking. As in ‘arrest him by surprise for not complying with an arrest he didn’t know about because it was a surprise arrest’ Hhmmm …
So that leaves ‘c’. Clearly the driver pulled over, stopped his car and exited the vehicle when told to do so. So a predetermination of intent to escape is absurd. We must rule out that the traffic violation is the offense for which the element of surprise is justified. The officer must conclude that a surprise arrest is justified because the driver is attempting to escape. Which brings us back to the circular reasoning. The driver didn’t know he was under arrest, therefore he could not know he was committing “an escape”.
Furthermore, I don’t have the statute and don’t want to read the 300+ comments over there again, buy it sounded pretty clear that Utah law permits the officer to write “refused to sign” on the ticket. Remember, the officer had the guy’s driver’s license and vehicle registration and could state under oath that the driver and his license matched.
It’s pretty clear to me at this point that the officer committed an act of fairly substantial violence without justification. He put the guy down hard on hard pavement risking a potentially serious head injury. He did it in a lane of traffic. And he left the guy there for over two minutes. In a construction zone with 2-way traffic and quite a bit of it.
I find it very difficult to defend the legality of this trooper’s actions, much less the reasonableness of them. The situation suggests rather strongly to me that it was an officer administering punishment for something (not signing) that is not even illegal. But I imagine the officer will get to defend himself in court. As will his superiors.
Ken said:
Are you in the UK or the US? Under US law, being temporarily unfree to leave doesn’t automagically create an arrest. Police in the US have the legal authority (recognized in the 1968 USSC case Terry v. Ohio and codified by statute in most or all states) to temporarily detain someone on reasonable suspicion, prevent that person from leaving, and in limited cases conduct a limited search for weapons.
So, in the US the answer isn’t necessarily ‘yes.’ If you’re not handcuffed, I can virtually guarantee that it’s not an arrest. If you are, it’s worth asking just to clarify your position.
In the UK, no idea. UK criminal law and criminal procedure is utterly foreign to me[1]. Nothing written in English should be that hard for me to understand.
Midwesterner:
Is speeding a criminal or civil violation in Utah? In Colorado, it’s a (usually) civil infraction under state law (and therefore not arrestable) UNLESS it occurs in a home-rule city or county which has adopted the model traffic code into its own municipal or county ordinances. So speeding is TECHNICALLY arrestable when I stop someone for it, but I’ve never actually done that.
In Colorado, when someone refuses to sign a summons, what I do next depends on what I’m actually charging. If it’s assault or something like that, he might realistically end up jailed. If it’s a minor traffic charge, he’ll get told “You’ve been served and the court date is on the front. Miss the court date, the judge puts out a warrant, and we’ll talk again.”
I think that telling him to put his hands behind his back (the beginning of handcuffing[2]) may have been intended as the beginning of the arrest. Handcuffing is always part of an arrest, but very rarely part of a detention under Terry.
The reason I’ve been so cagey about the video is because of two things:
1) There are fifty-odd ways of doing things, thanks to our federal system. The law may require something in Puerto Rico that the cops have discretion over in Vermont and Illinois and aren’t allowed to do at all in Washington DC or Guam. Normally I think that’s a good thing, but it makes internet discussions just a little more complex.
2) Note that the video was heavily edited and appeared to have been released by an interested party. Therefore I think it’s reasonable to suspect that the edits were at least a little self-serving, and in any case we simply don’t know what was left out and whether the omissions were important. Don’t know means don’t know and I hate to play guessing games.
[1] Non-consensual stop-searches without cause when someone says “terrorism?” Home searches of arrestees (arrested away from home) without warrants? And people give ME a hard time?
[2] For some systems of techniques, anyway. Not the one I use, though.
perry, you don’t have to be a complete douche like the driver to make the point you are not servile – so no, I wasn’t taught to be obsequious to authority – just what I made clear. I would hope your mamma would slap you upside the head if you behaved like such a dick to ANYbody. that’s what mammas do in a civilized society.
DocBud:
I’m sorry that your local PD can’t afford pre-hire psych testing, then, or that they shot your dog or whatever it is that they did to you.
People getting out of the car and then just hanging around are closely consistent with the beginnings of assaults. I’m not dreaming up any of the times that it actually had happened to me.
Or are you suggesting that I should wait for someone to try to jump me or grab my gun before I act to prevent it?
Actually my one taught me that when someone acts like a jerk, treat them like a jerk, regardless of their personal sense of majesty. That generally does not involve electrocuting them however unless they are threatening me.
“how’s it going…going kinda fast….”
Perry, ask your mother to teach you what a jerk is again.
horrible sense of majesty in that officer. how dare he ask the driver “how’s it goin” like he’s so damn high and mighty. He should supplicate before the speeder, and humbly beg to know the condition of his highness… and did you see how he turned his back on the speeder when he walked away and said “I’ll be with you in a minute”….he should have kept his head lower and backed away, this is how one treats a living god. he did not refer to the speeder in the 3rd person as is custom…..
jeez, it is plain to see who was being an ass in the exchange.
There is no question … the police officer was correct.
for anyone who was taught to escalate a situation by being a jerk to a jerk here’s a textbook contemporary conflict resolution
Alisa,
So, I assume, you’ll act politely towards cops, same as you treat all people.
But cops deserve more consideration. Not because they are some “authority”, but because they act on our behalf, in difficult circumstances, to protect us from crime.
You whining bunch of pantywaists. You surprise me, you really do.
Read what Sunfish wrote. I wish I’d written it.
The guy refused to cooperate, initially, then refused to sign the citation, then got out of the car and continued to argue with the officer.
Over a speeding ticket.
Then, when the process of arresting him had commenced (the officer’s instruction to ‘put your hands behind your back) he walked away from the officer and back towards his car.
At that point, what is the officer supposed to do? Let him go?
He wasn’t Tasered/arrested for what he said, or for being arrogant, idiotic or rude to the copper – he was arrested for what he did – refusing to accept the citation, and then walking away from the officer after doing so. As Sunfish wrote, refusing to accept the citation means you get arrested and bailed to appear. Just like in the UK. I have been arrested by the side of the M1 for speeding while driving on a US license – had I argued with the officer, and walked away from him, he would have had every right to restrain me, by force if necessary, to effect the arrest. That’s his sworn duty. This is no different.
For all you overwrought libertarians out there claiming the right to open a debating society on the side of the road – read what Sunfish wrote. It’s quite true that the officer doesn’t have the right to be judge and jury at the roadside – but neither do you. You can cuss at the officer all day, if you like – in fact, I can link you to dashcam video all day long that shows officers standing there at the driver’s window and taking abuse that not one of you would tolerate. As long as you cooperate in the legal activity taking place – give him your documents as required, disagree with him if you desire, but accept the citation once he has decided to issue it to you – you’ll be on your way.
Many of you are arguing for the absolute right to decide for yourselves whether or not you’ll accept being stopped and cited by a LEO. And the right to open what amounts to your own personal law school by the side of the road, in which you get to decide whether the officer is in the right or not. And all this based upon one YouTube video clip, and the story told by the person arrested. We haven’t heard word 1 of testimony from the officer, or anyone else, yet.
You’ve no idea how silly and stupid this makes you, and by extension, the ideas presented on this site, look.
Bravo, Sunfish – good job in the face of all that.
llater,
llamas
llamas hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t agree more.
Regardless of whether the guy should have gotten ticketed in the first place, one does NOT turn and walk away from a police officer in that instance. It is all about safety. The proper forum to contest the issue is in court.
Watching even the edited (to what extent we do not know) video, I believe the police officer acted within reason.
To Sunfish I say, thank you for your comments, your service, and your professionalism.
To put it bluntly, your are fool. The notion that the response to a wildly disproportionate use for force is, to paraphrase your crapulous remarks, just take it like a man, makes me question not just your opinions but your wits.
Wrong again. Suggest you read some of the comments which quote the officer’s remarks to the deputy who arrived as backup later and point out how they do not jibe with the events seen on the video. Does that not set the alarm bells ringing yet?
And as you are quoting Sunfish’s remarks in what you are presenting as a self-evident case, I will to do the same:
So unless it was edited sufficiently to material change the context (which is of course possible), Sunfish would agree the use for force was not appropriate (with the important contingent caveat he stated). On the available evidence to us (the tape as seen now), the cop acted appallingly.
Jacob:
You don’t have to assume, as you yourself just quoted me saying precisely that.
No they don’t, no more than say, firefighters, soldiers, doctors or all kinds of emergency workers. Most of the people in these professions are doing hard and essential work on our behalf, often under dangerous circumstances. This is not meant in any way to demean the cops – on the contrary. People like Sunfish are a great asset to any society, but this is not because he is a cop, but because the kind of person he is. CO is just lucky that he happens to be a cop, and if he had chosen any other career, he would have been just as good. The only thing that makes cops different from the other professions I mentioned is that they are given power by the state to apply violence to their fellow citizens. This is a good power in the hands of the likes of Sunfish, but can be very bad in the hands of someone like that trooper (unless that video is so heavily edited to the point of being useless). And, BTW, just to reiterate, the driver in question was a jerk, but this is precisely when a good cop is tested: dealing with jerks, because dealing with smart and polite people is easy for most of us anyway. “How is it going, going fast” etc. The trooper does start the conversation politely, but this does not reflect on his later behavior. He approaches the driver with the full expectation of cooperation. It’s when the latter refuses to cooperate is the real litmus test of the cop.
Perry said :
Without wishing to stir up a different argument, this is becoming increasingly not the case. As the security theatre at airports demonstrates, the police are increasingly being used (with support from senior officers) as an occupying force controlling, not supporting, the local population.
Perry de Havilland –
Well, my wits have been questioned before. Big deal. I note that you don’t have much substantive to say to rebut my points.
You have decided, based on seeing just a part of only one side of the story, that you completely understand anything and everything that went on here, and you have issued what appears to be your final judgement, including such definitive expressions as ‘wildly disproportionate’, ‘unbelievable abuse’ and so forth. Pardon me if I reserve judgement just a little bit, and if I perhaps see where there might be justifications for the events we see, where you have already rushed to judgement.
As you say, the video is heavily edited – and yet you still feel entitled to issue your final judgement on the whole matter? Come, now – who’s the fool, here? If a police department were to issue an edited dashcam video of a questionable incident – would you take it at face value? Like hell you would! So why do you take the claims of this person, with his edited tape, at face value?
I suggest that this particular incident (and others in like vein that have been discussed here in the past) feeds the prejudices and the confirmation biases of many of the participants here, and perhaps some of the hosts as well. There is often a strong presumption here that every state act, and every state actor, is, by definition, inefficient, ineffective, malicious, incompetent, or corrupt.
Sometimes – oftentimes – they are. But sometimes – oftentimes – they are not.
Was the guy speeding? I’ll wager he was. I’m pretty sure that he admits it, somewhere along the way.
Was the speed-limit signage questionable? Maybe it was. That’s what traffic court is for. But traffic court is convened in a building with lawyers and judges and such – not by the side of I-10. If this man was even halfway grown-up – he would know that.
Did he argue unreasonably with the officer? Yes, he did.
Did he refuse to sign/accept the citation? Yes, he did.
Did the officer have the right to arrest him at that that point? Yes, he did.
Did the motorist submit at that point? No, he did not – he walked away.
Did the officer have the right, at that point, to perform the arrest? Yes, he did.
Was the officer brusque? Yes, he was. Do you suppose that this would have come out any differently had he been the soul of politeness? Would it, heckerslike – the motorist would have argued the toss with him, no matter what. It wasn’t about the officer’s demeanour – it was about the motorist’s arrogant assumption that he was in the right and that the officer was in the wrong. A grown-up knows that such a question will not be decided at the side of the road. The motorist, instead of knowing and accepting that like an adult, decided to act like Violet Elizabeth Bott.
So what’s the issue here?
Many folks here get all het-up about the Taser. Unlike virtually all of you, I’ve been Tasered. I’ll bet Sunfish has, too, as part of Taser training. If it’s a choice between the Taser and a fistfight, or a takedown, or a baton strike, or pepper-spray – I’ll take the Taser, any day.
The motorist got up and walked away, and suffered no permanent injury at all. He decided to pit his pride and his arrogance against the officer’s doing of his duty. He lost – but he got away very lightly. The officer made him comply with lawful acts and instructions while doing him no permanent harm – isn’t that a goal we should be striving for?
Yours, at his wits’ end.
llater,
llamas
You mean other than pointing out where you are incorrect?
I am not a court of law (which is where I hope this policeman ends up), so I feel no need to to state my opinion on anything based on a legal standard of incontrovertible truth… the preponderance of evidence available to me is quite enough to start typing. If I later decide I was wrong, I usually blog that too (and have done on several occasions). Yet strangely you seem moved to state your opinion on the basis of evidence that might or might not exist to rebut my take on this. At least my informal opinion is based of what I actually see in the video rather than what might be on the virtual cutting room floor.
Sure, but irrelevant. I was not criticising the stop, I was criticising the tasering.
Sure but also largely irrelevant (although it does justify the man’s annoyance at what may well be nothing more than a revenue raising shakedown by the municipality).
No, not unreasonable for the above reason, but also largely irrelevant.
Sure. And also irrelevant, unless you think the cops was claiming the tasering was done for refusal to sign.
Possibly so, but then he should have made his intention to arrest absolutely and unmistakably clear, which he did not.
In his position on the basis of that video, I would not have thought I was being arrested either, so why the hell not walk back to the car?
Of only incidental relevance because is not the fact he tried to arrest him that is matters but the way in which he did it.
“In 2006, 48 policemen were killed on duty in the US.”
Too fuckin’ bad. For all kinds of reasons, I don’t care one whit, and I’m goddamned sick and tired of people moaning for these assholes. They make their own trouble with the laws and policies that they enforce, and they should have known the job was dangerous when they took it.
I remember an America before these judy-boys, when cops were men and laws were within squinting-range of being rational.
My contempt is boundless. Fuck ’em all, right out loud.
There are 870,000 sworn law enforcement officers according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
In 2006 there were 145 deaths in line of duty, all causes. (Also according to NLEOMF)
This means that 16.6/100,000 of these people who are paid to protect us every year die in the line of work.
For comparison, year 2006 fatalities in other occupations (PDF, page 13):
16.3/100,000 – Transportation and warehousing
27.8/100,000 – Mining
29.6/100,000 – Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting
In the spirit of Peel, I find justifying violent behavior towards non-violent people (the trooper clearly did not believe either the man or his partner to be a threat) because “the job is dangerous” to be wrong. Furthermore, there are a great many people wanting the job. We can/should stipulate competence as a condition of employment.
This trooper placed himself in unnecessary danger several times. The first rule of being safe is don’t be stupid and don’t take unnecessary risks.
And then there was his astonishing disregard for the safety of the person he pulled the surprise arrest on.
I watched and timed the recording. The trooper left him laying in a lane of traffic, in a construction zone for over two minutes. The arrestee then removed himself from the lane of traffic at the clear risk of being once again tased for not following instructions. He did this with his hands cuffed behind his back.
I have driven countless thousands and thousands etc of miles across this country, and the idea of leaving a guy laying with most of his body in a lane of traffic in a construction zone appalls me. A significant percentage of drivers leave no extra room to a vehicle on the shoulder (cop cars included as I’m sure several here can attest). Especially when they have a vehicle beside them in the left lane while they approach the vehicles on the shoulder. To expect them to take their eyes off of the flashing lights and the vehicle to their left and notice a body lying longitudinally in their lane is clearly optimistic in my experience.
I think it is surprising and disappointing that so many people here think that being a jerk for whatever reason (maybe the trooper interrupted a marital fight, maybe the driver was fatigued and confused, maybe both) is reasonable cause to have an officer of the law play Russian roulette with the driver’s life.
The trooper had the driver’s license and registration. The trooper had the option of writing “refused to sign” on the ticket. With those in hand and that option available, nothing comes close to excusing the trooper’s behavior or his deliberate and almost provocative escalation.
I noticed everybody is ignoring what Utah law is regarding surprise arrests. To quote from my earlier comment “The person making the arrest shall inform the person being arrested of his intention, cause, and authority to arrest him.” The exceptions are clear in the law. I really don’t think any of them apply but that is an assumption I make without seeing the unedited recording. However, the “cop was right” crowd are making far, far more unsupported assumptions.
Perry de Havilland – OK, so we have it boiled down to your opinion, namely
‘ . . . because is not the fact he tried to arrest him that is matters but the way in which he did it.’
If I read you rightly, you agree that the arrest was likely lawful, so your quibble is ‘it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.’ Feel free to correct me if I read you wrong :).
So what is wrong with ‘the way in which he did it’?
He told the motorist, multiple times, what to do. He told him when he was walking towards him, he told him while he was stopped, he told him when he was walking away. He told him 4 distinct, separate times, what to do.
The motorist isn’t listening. He’s vapouring on about how they’re going to go and look at some road sign or other before he’ll accept the ticket, he’s waffling about how he has the right to this-or-that, he’s doing everything except pay attention. Then he walks away, making some silly-ass sarcastic comment along the lines of ‘what’s wrong with you?’ He’s obviously not paying attention, not processing what’s happening, and not going to comply. If I didn’t know more, and seeing just that little bit of video, I’d have suspected that he was drunk.
If you couldn’t have told that you were going to be arrested at that point – just as he could, apparently, not figure it out – I’m sorry, but your situational awareness is just as bad as his. He was so wrapped up in his own delusional world, where he was going to hold traffic court by the side of the road, vindicate himself in the eyes of the officer, and Drive Away In Triumph, that nothing that the officer was saying was getting through. You can see his bovine incomprehension in his movements and his actions.
The officer didn’t warn the motorist that he was about to be arrested? Well, no, he didn’t – he’s not required to. It might have been a good idea – but the motorist isn’t listening to anything else the officer says, and it looks to me as though the officer decided to get the job done quickly and shut down the debating society. And then the guy turns away, making silly-ass remarks, puts his hands in his pockets, and heads for his car. He’s not listening, he’s not going to comply, he’s in a world of his own.
Rather than apply conventional force to the guy, the officer took advantage of the fact that his back was turned and Tasered him- he couldn’t see it coming, he couldn’t resist. He put him on the ground and put him in handcuffs. End of story. No harm done. The officer obtained compliance from a non-compliant subject without doing him any permanent harm. Sorry, but that’s good police work.
Your position is summed up in your ‘why the hell not . . . ?’ statement. There’s an officer telling you what to do, but you don’t have to listen to him or do what he says, because you have Rights, and he has to Show You The Speed Limit Sign, and You’re Not Taking The Ticket Until He Does, and He Has To Tell You How Fast You Were Going – forgive the free-form composition, but you understand perfectly well what I mean. In other words, he set himself up as the final judge of what’s right and what’s wrong, and decided to act upon his own judgement.
He chose – poorly.
Even after he’s in cuffs, and any fule would kno that he’s under arrest, he’s still giving law lessons – You Have To Read Me My Rights (wrong), You Have To Tell Me How Fast I Was Going (wrong), and so on and so forth. The guy wasn’t going to comply with any verbal instructions, he’s already determined in his own private courtroom that anything the officer does doesn’t apply to him. This guy has watched way too many TV lawyer shows. Using an expression from a past life – he’s a Barrack-Room Lawyer.
Best police work I ever saw? Probably not. But the job got done, and no-one got hurt. Give him a C.
Scandalous abuse? Hardly.
Incidentally – on a point of order – that doesn’t appear to me to be a Utah license plate. If it is not – if the driver is licensed and/or the vehicle is registered in another state, that would strongly reinforce the officer’s decision to arrest the driver for failing to sign/accept the ticket, because he could then simply depart to another state and is not extraditable. IOW, he’s not a Utah resident and thus immune to Utah process. It may be policy for a Utah officer to arrest an out-of-state driver who refuses to acknowledge the citation. I know for sure that that is policy in the UK. Anyone from that part of the world care to comment?
llater,
llamas
Alisa,
I agree. Cops don’t deserve more respect that those other people, just about the same amount. And you owe all these people more respect when you meet them in their official capacity, at their jobs, than when you meet them after hours, in social circumstances. It’s because of the job they do.
Actually, I read that the other way around. Probably that’s part of the reason the guy is so deadset on not getting cited – because if you’re cited far from home, tickets can be really hard to fight. I don’t know about Utah, but in the part of the country I’m from, it borders on standard operating procedure to pull out-of-staters because they’re easy money – it being more of a hassle for them to fight their cites in court than for us locals.
Jacob: right. The problem is, as I pointed out in the rest of that comment, is that some cops assume that they deserve more respect than those other people, because they have a mandate from the state to use violence. Police is different. You go to a doctor voluntarily when you are sick, and it is only logical that you voluntarily follow their instructions. You call the fire dept. when your house is on fire – ditto. Sometimes you call the police when you need help against a criminal assault, or just witness or suspect a crime – it still makes perfect sense to follow their instructions. The problem begins when you are just going about your business, and someone decides that you are committing some violation. What you, and some others seem to be saying that in such a case an individual has no right to argue on his own behalf. Next thing you know, police are going to stop us left and right, give us citations, and arrest us if we don’t comply. You have a problem with that – take it to court. Sorry, but the fact that I think I did nothing wrong should count for something, and I shouldn’t have to go to court every time some local government is trying to add a few easy bucks to its coffer. Like hell I should be able to argue all I feel like (whether I will realistically choose to do so is another matter), and with all due respect to the police, they should be prepared to argue back, or let me go, and take it to court themselves. If there is a problem of enforcement between different states, then fix it. I have been in an exact same situation years back. We lived in MO, and were on vacation in SD, I think. It was a tiny town, and it was a speed trap if I ever saw one. Of course we signed the ticket, was I going to interrupt my vacation and get arrested and go to court? Hell no. But are you telling me this is how things supposed to work?
You have, of course, the right to argue, but not with the cop, he’s not the one that hears arguments. As I said, you can, of course, also tell the cop your opinion, but in a polite way. You cannot and should not ignore him and walk away, convinced that you are right.
Well, we live in an imperfect world. Cops sometimes err. Arguing with a cop and cussing him gets you nowhere.
“Well, we live in an imperfect world.”
Which is, naturally, a great reason to give cops the power that they wield.
Honest to god: there is a great pile of despicably myopic horseshit in this discussion.
Sunfish asked “Or are you suggesting that I should wait for someone to try to jump me or grab my gun before I act to prevent it?”
Well, actually, yes, i.e. you have to wait until a crime has been committed or is clearly about to be committed before you are entitled to infringe someone’s liberty.
Well that is certainly not my view. I am just saying that THIS was not an appropriate use of force. What I am not suggesting is that the desirable opposite of an inappropriate use of force is suicidal behaviour by a cop that prevents any use of force until it is too late.
DocBud said:
The response to a gun grab is not a minor infringement of someone’s liberty. The response to a gun grab is that the grabber VERY WELL COULD DIE.
That’s right, an attempt to grab a cop’s gun is prelude to a deadly force assault and the typical trained response is to use deadly force to prevent it. That means that the grabber will likely die.
Sure you don’t think it’s worth heading that off? Or did I just prove myself to be a trigger-happy thug in your expert opinion?
Llamas said:
Possibly. There’s an interstate agreement where most of the states have agreed to enforce each others traffic citations and license restraints. Meaning: Failing to pay in another state will mean that action may be taken against your driver’s license in your home state, IF both states are compact members. However, if he blows off his court date, a warrant may be issued in Utah (see my posts above) but it’s highly unlikely that it’ll be served in another state. Serving an out-of-state warrant is a little tricky, and I don’t think Utah will pay the cost of having him shipped back from wherever he’s picked up.
Now, if the violation was a civil infraction (probably not, if the trooper was attempting to arrest the driver), then there won’t be a warrant. Rather, the court will continue the case once or twice and then enter a default judgment (the normal procedure where a defendant does not appear to answer a civil matter) and failure to satisfy that judgment will lead to action against the driver’s license.
Alisa:
Let’s say I stopped you for whatever. I think that a citation is appropriate. You disagree. The citation process is designed to put the whole matter in front of a judge (leaving aside chickenshit speed-trap towns as you mention above and me in another discussion). At that court date, you enter a plea of not guilty and we go to trial, and I get to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you were doing whatever you were doing.
I’ll fully admit: when I cite someone, I’m biased. I observed whatever I observed and I trust my own observations. Do you want me to be the judge when I’m also the accuser? I don’t like that idea either.
Billy Beck:
That’s right, ‘enforce.’ Not ‘make.’ Do you really want police to decide for themselves which laws are for real and which ones to blow off?
That’s a dangerous place that you’re going with this.
Midwesterner mentions some statistics about how some professions are statistically more-dangerous. If I were whining about how the policeman’s lot is not easy and digging for sympathy, that’d be relevant. The reason I bring up risks and hazards is, I think, a legitimate one: Certain exercises of power (like not letting people flank me on traffic stops, above) are actually relevant to reducing the risk of assault and are therefore relevant IMHO.
If I were going to troll for sympathy, I certainly wouldn’t do it by telling a bunch of libertarians how hard it is to be a cop!
Sunfish,
I don’t think I’ve heard you ever play a sympathy card. LOL, it never occurred to me you would. Spidly, Jacob, and Chip used variations of that argument though. Conservatives tend to use the “dangerous job” boilerplate to excuse a lot of bad police work.
My concern with this particular trooper is that he wants it both ways. He wants to be really stupid about his own safety – that is if he seriously thinks a threat was some possibility (and I think he should have considered a threat from the wife a possibility). And then he wants to punish the driver for his own (possibly deliberately) bad communication skills. And he is required by Utah law to conduct an arrest in a particular way unless certain conditions are met. It strongly appears they were not.
Question for you. If, due to negligence, incompetence, or premeditation, a peace officer creates an easily avoidable situation where he must now resort to violence to regain his own safety; if the trooper violates the most basic part of arrest procedure of his state’s laws; if he issues contradictory commands (telling him to hop out of the car, observing that he was following – I checked – and then drawing the taser without any provocation, he drew the taser even though the driver had followed every instruction except for the order to sign the ticket; should this trooper have a job at the end of the day?
I quoted the Utah arrest procedure law, chapter and verse, above. When that trooper got to the part of the arrest procedure where he is required to tell the guy what crime he is being arrested for, what do you think that crime would have been? Resisting arrest? Except before the trooper carries out the arrest, he’s required to tell the guy what he’s being arrested for. Is he going to tell the guy in advance that I know you’re going to resist this arrest so I’m going to arrest you for resisting this upcoming arrest? That is circular and totally bogus. Utah law says “refused to sign” is an acceptable response to the speeding ticket. Seriously Sunfish, what do you think he would state as the arrestable crime?
I really do want to know.
BTW, I don’t know what cops are taught, I dropped out of police procedure and introduction to criminal law in the first semester, but I know private citizens are taught to never sign anything without first knowing what they are signing. The actual complete conversation regarding signing was:
Trooper: … well you’re going to sign this first.
Driver: No I’m not. I’m not signing anything until …
Trooper: Okay. Hop out of the car.
Driver comes back to the trooper’s car with the trooper and points down the road to the speed limit sign.
Trooper draws taser and starts yelling “Put your hands behind your back.”
Driver says “What is wrong with you?” a reasonable if ill advised question.
Trooper yells “Turn around” again and the driver does actually turn 180 degrees and begin returning to his vehicle. Remember that under the laws of Utah, he is not yet under arrest unless somebody can find something that complies with the stipulations laid out in paragraphs a, b or c. I haven’t.
Trooper takes several steps to overtake the driver and then shoots him with the taser. While the guy is falling like a barrel off a cliff, the trooper for some incomprehensible reason (really, I’ve tried to figure out why) yells “down on the ground!” as the guy hits the pavement.
This trooper needs to be dismissed and to find himself a new job where he has no authority and no weapons. Every now and then, bad apples slip through. This is one of them. I am assuming the trooper and his department will lose a civil suit. A criminal conviction seems unlikely to me, especially in a place like Utah, but not totally impossible.
Mid,
I suspected that a sympathy card would work as well here as asking my ex-MIL for a hug during the divorce. Even with my rare gift for saying the exact wrong thing to women, I never did that either.
I don’t know what that video was. I don’t know what anybody was thinking. Maybe ‘speeding’ was the arrestable offense, but again, I don’t know. Here, resisting arrest isn’t resisting until I do something to actually communicate that the driver is under arrest, but we also don’t have that Utah statute giving several steps to go through.
When I hold paper in front of someone, I actually tell them what they’re signing before I hand them a pen.
And I’d be very concerned about the passenger coming out, see above about me and passengers.
As far as the taser being applied without any justification…If someone tries to walk away after I told him to stay put (not saying that the trooper in the video said that or would have been justified) I usually move to techniques that are generally called “soft empty hand” techniques. That’s a term to describe a particular place on the force continuum consistent with wrist locks and touch pressure to pressure points. The use of that level of force to overcome verbal noncompliance or passive resistance is pretty well established in US law.
The reason I bring this up is, there are a few jurisdictions where the taser is considered equivalent to soft empty-hand techniques WRT placement on the continuum. Taser is new enough that there just isn’t yet that consensus on where it actually belongs.
Translation: In some agencies, the taser is equivalent to the techniques that would have been reasonable in that situation (assuming that anything was reasonable: see my incessant bitching about that video being edited beyond usefulness)
At this point, I’d pay real money to see an unedited version of that video.
If you want to see an unjustified use of force, catch me in about seven hours when I go looking for the guy who moved me to day shift this week.
Sunfish, I don’t believe you have answered my point that you are not entitled (or certainly should not be) to infringe someone’s liberty before a crime has been committed or is clearly about to be committed. A jumpy cop is certainly not a justification for civil liberties violations (even if it is quite often cited).
However, I do suspect you are overstating your case. As far as I can gather, there are ~50 million traffic stops per year in the USA. Clearly, the overwhelming majority of these take place without serious incident. I have been able to find one case of a police officer shot by a passenger (whom he was pursuing) and none where either a police officer or passenger was killed or injured in a gun grab situation.
Sunfish: I was replying to Jacob’s “don’t argue”, er, argument. I am not saying that it is always wise or productive to argue with a cop – most of the times it is not. But I am saying that I should be able to reserve the right to do so. I don’t think that we should be living in a world where police automatically assume compliance with their instructions, regardless of whether these instructions are reasonable or not. This may seem as an issue separate from the original post’s “excessive use of force”. But it is not, because if I should always automatically follow police instructions, then it logically follows that police can always use violence against me if I don’t do so.
Sunfish is making all sorts of good points – no surprise there.
Regarding out-of-state plates – it’s just a question, I don’t know, that’s what I asked. I know that (in theory) it shouldn’t make a difference, that if you depart for your home state, you are still (in theory) collectable and/or sanctionable, but I also know that, in practice, This Hardly Ever Happens.
Regarding Alisa’s assertion about her right to argue with the cop.
Of course you have the right to argue with the cop. Argue all you want, or all that he/she will stand still to listen to. Most coppers don’t care – as Sunfish has noted, they’re paid by the hour, and the courts have ruled that coppers are not like other mortals – there is no doctrine of ‘fighting words’ with a LEO, you can say just about anything you like to them and they pretty much have to stand there and take it.
If you think you can change the officer’s mind by the force of your reasoned suasion – have at it! He/she could probably use the entertainment.
But your right to argue with the copper does not extend to a right to postpone or override the copper’s performance of his duty as he/she sees it at the time. IOW, once the officer decides to cite you, your right to argue does not extend to a right to resist the citation or otherwise refuse to comply with the officer’s completion of his/her duty. The decision to cite you is solely the decision of the officer – once made, you have no lawful recourse at that time and place, whether or not the citation is, in fact, lawful, truthful or valid. This is the issue that the motorist simply fails to grasp – he can argue all he wants, but he does not have any power of decision, and if he tries to assert such a power, and it conflicts with the officer’s completion of his/her duty – well, watch the video.
Once the officer has decided – Do As You’re Told. Not ‘take it like a man’, as Perry de Havilland has characterized my position (inaccurately) but rather – behave like an adult – and like a mensch.
There – that should bring the libertarian purists down on me like a thousand of brick. Citing chapter-and-verse of Utah statute about how the officer should have done this, that or the other thing – as though his doing so would have made any difference in this case. But there is a ‘blue sense’, and while it’s been some time and mine has pretty-much faded, I could tell just from the video that the officer was clear that this guy wasn’t going to do what he was told – even if he had prefaced his actions with ‘Sir, I am going to place you under arrest at this time’ and citing chapter and verse of Utah law. To do so would merely have started a whole new train of law lessons from this guy – you’ll note that he’s an expert on his rights and on the officer’s failings, but too dumb to know that he’s about to be arrested.
Like Sunfish, I would be fascinated to see the whole video. There’s a reason that it was edited by the “victim”.
I’d also be fascinated to know what his driving record is like.
He is, naturally, comtemplating a lawsuit although it’s hard to know what for. He suffered a few seconds of severe pain and no injury of consequence. If he has become the subject of ridicule as the result of his arrest, well, then, he shouldn’t have put it on YouTube. Had he not done so, noone would ever have seen this.
llater,
llamas
“Even if he had prefaced his actions with…”. Amazing. That is just like questioning someone and then saying “I didn’t bother with that whole Miranda stuff because it was clear to me he was not paying attention”. For it to have any value it cannot be an optional extra and moreover if Midwesterner’s citation of Utah law is correct, it does indeed make the arrest legally unsound. “Sir, I am going to place you under arrest at this time” is exactly what he had to say loud and clearly and unless that got edited out, I sure didn’t hear it.
He did not make it abundantly clear he was arresting the man and mere inference really does not hack it.
Alisa,
Correct. Llamas has already answered this. Yes, you should automatically follow police instructions. That’s what the law says, that’s what logic says, even if the cop is wrong. You can argue a little; I recommend – in a polite tone. Then you do as told.
As to signing citations: as far as I know you’re entitled to add your remarks or protests in the form before signing.
Jacob and Llamas: I hope you notice that while you keep telling me what things are like presently (and thus add nothing we don’t already know, the jury still being out on the worthiness of that video and the correctness of Mid’s and others’ points), what I am talking about is how things should be. Now Jacob, go ahead and tell me again that this is an imperfect world, move along, nothing to see here.
Perry de Havilland wrote:
‘”Even if he had prefaced his actions with…”. Amazing. That is just like questioning someone and then saying “I didn’t bother with that whole Miranda stuff because it was clear to me he was not paying attention”. For it to have any value it cannot be an optional extra and moreover if Midwesterner’s citation of Utah law is correct, it does indeed make the arrest legally unsound. “Sir, I am going to place you under arrest at this time” is exactly what he had to say loud and clearly and unless that got edited out, I sure didn’t hear it.’
Oh, buncombe.
The Utah law, cited carefully above, says that the officer does NOT have to first tell the person that he is being arrested if
‘(a) there is reason to believe the notice will endanger the life or safety of the officer or another person or will likely enable the party being arrested to escape;’
The motorist
– ignores repeated, clear instructions
– walks away from the officer and towards his vehicle, clearly a means of escape
– puts his hand(s) in his pockets (I can’t see his left hand)
Note that handcuffing the motorist is NOT necessarily the same thing as being arrested – as others have described, above, there is an area of detention (you are not free to leave) that’s between freedom and arrest, and the courts have held that it is lawful and reasonable for a person in this condition to be handcuffed and/or otherwise restrained, by force if necessary, for the safety of the officer and to prevent him from departing until his condition is clarified.
That’s where this was going. The officer was going to cuff him, maybe put him in the back of the cruiser, and explain the facts of the matter to him, and detain him until he calmed down, adjourned the traffic-court-in-his-mind and listened to what he was being told. The officer doesn’t have to go on a country drive with him to look at traffic signs – the decision has been made to cite him and that part of the matter is now closed, and the motorist needs to be brought to terms with that before he is allowed to leave.
Instead, the motorist decides he will not comply with the officer’s instructions, he makes as though to leave, and he puts his hands in his pockets, which can be construed as reaching for something – perhaps a weapon.
So the conditions of (a) are satisfied to a reasonable-man standard. So the arrest simply is not
‘legally unsound’
and no amount of vapouring will make it so.
The citation part of the deal was done. The officer’s instructions were lawful, the arrest was justified by the refusal to comply, the arrest was lawfully made with a level of force consistent with the situation.
Was it perfect? No, of course it wasn’t.
Was it lawful? All of it? Yes, it was.
The rubric for an LEO is ‘you ask them – then you tell them – then you make them’. The officer asked him, then he told him, then he made him. The motorist’s refusal to either understand or comply is simply not the officer’s problem.
llater,
llamas
“Do you really want police to decide for themselves which laws are for real and which ones to blow off?”
These days? You bet.
No honorable person would be a cop, now.
Alisa wrote”
‘ . . . . .what I am talking about is how things should be.’
I’m certainly not going to tell you that it’s an imperfect world, and you’d better get used to it. As I’ve already made clear, this is not a perfect example of police work by any means. Could have been a lot better. The question in play was – was it lawful? – and the answer is an unequivocal yes – based on the facts seen to this point.
Now, that being said – perhaps you would start off by describing your thoughts on ‘how things should be’, by all means using this less-than-perfect example as your starting point if you choose.
llater,
llamas
“Do you really want police to decide for themselves which laws are for real and which ones to blow off?”
These days? You bet. I am afraid I have to agree with Billy here, although I certainly cannot agree with his last sentence.
Llamas: if I take this video as truthfully representing what actually happened, I think the cop should have let the guy go, and take his license plate no. to court, or whatever the procedure in Utah is. The guy was in no way violent or dangerous, just not very bright. There is no way this incident should have escalated the way it has.
Alias
So, in your ideal world, people are free to ignore cops and walk away. When a cop says “stop!” you have the option to do as you please… and the cop is supposed to stand by and applaud ?
Maybe. I, too, don’t think the cop was in danger, and there was no urgent need to taser the guy. But, as a rule, people should obey cops, and the cop, though maybe wrong (as we don’t know all the details) wasn’t terribly wrong, and probably, as llamas says, within the law.
Yes, if I did nothing wrong and was just going about my business. I am guessing that he would feel too embarrassed to applaud, as he would know that he had no right to yell “stop” in the first place. You are getting this all wrong, Jacob. Police is not there to stop, question and arrest people, nor give them instructions, and certainly not to taser or shoot them. These are only some of the means (that should be used as sparingly as possible, under very much scrutiny*) to work towards its real purpose, which is, as I already said, to protect and serve. Can you see the difference?
*Which is what we are trying to do here.
Alisa:
We have a saying: No roadside court. What that means is, we’ll produce evidence of what the speed limit was, our qualification to use radar/lidar, etc. for court. Anything that a driver wants to say about the stop will end up in the report that I write in support of the citation, but I can count on one hand the number of times that a driver’s statements have actually caused me to reverse myself at the scene[1]. But, at the side of the road the officer is unlikely to be interested in debate.
Jacob:
On our forms, there’s no place for that. There’s a place to describe the person and vehicle, a place for me to write date/time/place of appearance, a place for me to put down the exact statute or ordinance violated and a brief description of the violation[2], a place for the driver to execute a promise to appear (described in another post) and a place for my printed name, signature, and commission number.
Verbal comments do end up in my report (usually quoted exactly). However, as they all too often amount to “you f**king pig nazi tax boy mother****er” with occasional threats to rape my nonexistent children and slightly more frequent offers of a hundred bucks to make it all go away, my truthful attention to detail is not usually to the defendant’s advantage.
DocBud:
Your so-called ‘facts’ are incorrect with regard to the number of assaults and gun grabs. I regret to inform you that I survived, mostly unscathed (although on medical light duty for two days). You’ll be pleased to know that the guy was allowed to take a misd. plea deal to an unrelated matter that carried no jail time at all. I’m sure that you’ll understand if I’m done replying to you.
[1] “My husband is having a heart attack” said a panicked female driver, referring to her 50-year-old male passenger in obvious distress, being an example. Driving rather than calling 911 was badly foolish, but in that situation understandable.
[2] “Drove Motor Vehicle When License Under Restraint (suspended-excessive points) CRS 42-2-138 subsection whatever-it-is”
I got pulled over this morning at 5:30 for doing 59 in 45mph construction zone a bit past Sauvie Island on HWY 30. Gave the trooper my license, reg and CWP without being asked (don’t have to show CWP but it is a good idea so’s you don’t startle the cop if your gun becomes visible) – couldn’t find insurance card. told me how fast I was going and that it was a 45mph construction zone.
at 5:30 when nobody’s working?
.24/7.
huh.
.you packin’ this morning?
yep
.keep looking for your insurance and I’ll call it in.
. who’s your insurer?
allstate………
…..found a bunch of old cards.
.you’re current. I’m going to give you a warning…..
odd I didn’t get tased. Sunfish, what did I do wrong? I wanna whine on CNN.
I suppose I could have yelled about how I’ve been driving that stretch to and from work for a year and have yet to actually see anybody working on the bridge that is slowwwwwwwwly going up and demanded that we turn around and find just one person doing work before I handed over my info. coulda acted surprised…. 59! Hell, I usually go 70 – probably slow ’cause I’m half asleep.
he was very interested in the pile of cans and garbage on the passenger side floor. I should scoop out my trash, dirty work shirts and socks more often.
and why do I have to slow down for workers I have never seen, especially when the stealthy work is being done on a bridge a hundred feet off the Hwy?
I’m having a fair amount of sympathy for Sunfish here. He has actually been rather cautious in his statements and is dealing with a bunch of very opinionated (What! On Samizdata?) people, like me, claiming to varying degrees to know ‘what really happened’. The truth is we don’t and I would also very much like to see the uncut tape from beginning to end.
Okay. I went and looked and found the uncut versions. I’ve listened to 22 minutes and 12 seconds and taken notes on a few of the key parts. I wore headphones to hear better.
Uncut part I of III –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdLU2hzvBiU
Driver appeared to be moving quite slowly and stopped as quickly as seems reasonable and safe.
Driver put vehicle in park immediately, before trooper approached vehicle. I could not tell if he shut it off.
0:43 trooper asks for license and registration.
Substantial traffic noise during this period.
1:53 trooper has license and registration and is returning to squad car
~ 65 to 70 seconds between trooper requesting license and reg and trooper leaving with it in hand. Trooper appeared willing to engage the driver in debate (mistake?) and this accounted for some of the time.
Cop is listening to hard rock in squad. I didn’t recognize the first band but the second sounded like maybe Aerosmith?
7:30 printer in squad can be heard printing.
8:07 first and only time officer orders (or asks) him to sign ticket. (I confirmed from other internet sources that the signature is optional at the discretion of the officer.)
8:12 trooper orders driver out of car.
8:13 Driver complies.
8:18 while driver is talking and pointing, trooper says “turn around and put your hands behind your back” in normal voice.
8:19 apparently hasn’t registered yet, driver is still talking, squinting down the road and pointing with his hand, presumably to a sign.
8:19 trooper draws taser and points it at driver
8:20 driver stops mid-sentence and looks at cop “what the hell’s wrong with you?” Like I said earlier, a reasonable question but perhaps ill advised. 🙂
8:23 cop is in two handed stance and is shouting (talking assertively?)
Throughout this entire time the driver’s right thumb has been hooked in his pocket with the fingers clearly visible on the outside. It appears to be his normal stance. His left hand has remained well clear of his pocket at all times it is visible.
Interestingly, the driver does turn around at this point and begins returning to his vehicle looking over his shoulder at the trooper. His fingers of his right hand are clearly visible still outside his pocket. His left hand is swinging clear of his pants, obviously not reaching into his pocket. The trooper never orders him to stop. Only to turn around and put his hands behind him.
8:27 Cop approaches driver and fires taser. While the driver is in rigor, falling hard and hitting the pavement, the trooper orders him “Down on the ground!” I for the life of me can’t figure out what this indicates about the trooper’s mental processes. Is it some weird procedural thing?
8:30 driver hits ground
8:32 driver’s partner exits vehicle from far side.
8:38 she is screaming, obviously distraught, and returns to the vehicle. To my eye she could easily have been going for something.
8:47 – 8:50 she can be seen rapidly searching through the car for something, back seat? It could be the child but it could also be for something in a carry case.
8:52 she comes around the back corner and has the drop on the trooper again, this time after having searched her car for something. But her hands are empty.
8:54 trooper turns to her with a his already fired taser in one hand and a set of cuffs in his other. He points the cuffs at her like they are a weapon. (!!!)
New video segment at this point, new time counter stamp.
Uncut version, part II – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O5HXqDrxpA
0:10 driver “what are you doing?”
0:11 trooper is split between driver and passenger, paying good attention to neither. Tells driver’s partner “close the door. Close the door.”
0:20 Trooper “I’ll tell ya what I’m doing. I’m placing you under arrest.”
0:23 Driver: “Why?”
0:23 Trooper: “Because you did not obey my [instructions? orders? – passing truck noise].
0:33 Driver “Under arrest why?
0:34 Trooper “Because you would not sign the citation and you did not follow my instructions.”
When you are listening to this part of the tape, listen to the driver’s partner in the car. This cop is utterly nuckin futz to not take her seriously. Who knows what could be in a gym bag in the back seat?
1:06 Driver “I will take you to court and sue you for harassment.”
If you listen carefully, you can hear that the driver is picking up on and repeating her threats. Lucky for Trooper she was threatening him with court and not something else.
1:09 Trooper “Well you know what, you should have followed my instructions.”
1:32 Trooper goes to passenger side and talks to driver’s partner in car “He’s fine. I tasered him because he did not follow my instructions.”
I quit taking notes in disgust here, but I did hear one more exchange worth mentioning. When the driver was insisting on being read his rights, the trooper says at 2:19 “Do you want another hit with this?”
One more remark caught my ear. When around 3:20 on the 2nd part, the driver said “Tell me what you pulled me over for. Please.” The trooper puts on a voice and softly says “Force feeding”.
Uncut version Part III –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hfQspTM4tI
Some observations. The trooper only asked him to sign the citation once. Within 12 seconds of the one and only request to sign the citation, the trooper has the driver at the front bumper of the squad car with the taser drawn. 12 seconds from the first request for a signature to driver twenty feet away, a full arrest with taser drawn. All while the driver was following all instructions issued prior to the arrest. Remember, the trooper received the license and registration in less than 70 seconds from the first request. I am quite certain that I could not guarantee finding my own registration that fast if I was hurrying. It’s stuffed in the glove box with tons of other crap.
Another observation. He said several times that the cause of this was some variation of “he should have signed the citation” and then added “and turned around” as an afterthought. It was pretty clear from everything the trooper said that the problem was the guy didn’t sign the citation.
12 seconds from request to taser draw.
Another big lie he told in front of the deputy was when the wife(?) said “the first thing you did was whip out your taser gun” is “he looked like he was leaving to me.” Wrong. He began the arrest while the guy was standing, squinting and pointing to the sign. The guy started backing and turning away after he turns and is facing a taser.
There was nothing in the uncut version to change my mind and there were several things to reinforce my suspicions.
This trooper is a walking Darwin candidate, a tin star power junkie and frankly a snide jerk. If somebody cannot cope with jerks and whiners, then they should not be cops. No exceptions. Its a major part of the job description. Frankly, the driver and the trooper were two equally matched jerks except one had a gun , a badge and a car with pretty lights. But I suspect the problem goes a lot higher than just this particular trooper. Just my 10 cents. (Inflation.)
Midwesterner – that’s a good timeline. Thank you for posting it.
You wrote:
‘One more remark caught my ear. When around 3:20 on the 2nd part, the driver said “Tell me what you pulled me over for. Please.” The trooper puts on a voice and softly says “Force feeding”.’
and it’s a perfect example of the ‘confirmation bias’ that I mentioned above. That’s what you hear the officer say. Funny, when I listened to the identical recording, and I hear the motorist ask this utterly inane question, I hear the officer’s tone downshift – just as you say – and he replies
‘For speeding.’
That’s what the motorist heard the officer to say, because he immediately responds
‘How fast?’
See what I mean? You heard, what you wanted to hear.
To use Sunfish’s expression, the motorist wanted to hold ‘roadside court’. Just listen to his endeless tirades about what he will and won’t do, his endless law lessons to the officer, and his infantile repeating of the same mantras – Why, Why, Why, How Fast Was I Going, What Are You Arresting Me For, You Have To Show Me Proof and on and on and on, ad nauseam.
Over a G*d-damned speeding ticket.
Remember folks, you’re sharing breathable air with folks like this.
Alisa – thank you for answering my question. No surprises there.
llater,
llamas
Llamas and his crew, you must be living in a shitty world to even start excusing that moron of a cop.
If you think that it is proper law enforcement for some minor infringement on a deserted road, then you really are in cloud cuckoo land.
I also noticed immediately that the cop car is in front of the sign when the other car drives by, thereby having either obscured the sign or distracted the driver so he did not notice it. Especially as the cop car was not stopped but went on the verge and back on the road. That would be a behaviour which would make me wonder what the cop is doing if I was driving behind and probably not pay as much attention to signs.
The driver is not whining, he is asking why he is being arrested which is normal as it sounds like he did not see the sign because of the above reasons.
And he moves away from the cop because he seems to be thinking that that guy is dangerous and deranged, and that whatever it was he was pulled over for did not warrant such a behaviour.
I mean, what the f… is that cop thinking laying the “put your hands on the car” and all that malarkey ?!?
That guy is not fit to be a cop. To think otherwise is scary, and pretty much confirms Mr De Havilland’s point that we are in a police state because morons now say that you cannot argue with a cop !
Cops will be thankful to him to make them look bad, I’m sure.
Llamas: any time.
Sunfish: my point is that I should have the right to be a jerk, just like that driver was. At the same time, not only it is not the trooper’s duty to oblige him, but if I understood you correctly, it is his duty not to oblige, and rightly so. The thing is, an arrest or any other application of violence should not be the only other option available to the trooper in such a case.
Mid: I really don’t see the point of getting down to the bottom of this particular case. Even if this entire video was staged, it would still be useful for police training purposes, as well as for general population education (i.e. how not to be a jerk, whether you are a cop or a driver). We all know that some cops sometimes abuse their authority, that is to be expected, as it is part of the human nature. What should interest us is what kind of system would minimize such abuses, while not hindering the ability of the police to fight real crimes.
Pascal – your lack of comprehension drips from every word of your post.
It’s not a ‘deserted road’. Watch the video. It’s a construction zone on an Interstate highway. Count the cars and trucks.
Strike 1.
The motorist is not arrested for a ‘minor infringement’ – he’s detained/arrested because he refuses to acknowledge the citation that has been issued to him. Completely consistent with Utah law.
Strike 2.
For all your noticing of signs on the video, how could you fail to notice the officer’s patient explanation to the motorist, which clarifies that that the sign we see on the video is the second speed limit sign, and that the motorist is being stopped because he blew past the first speed limit sign?
Even leaving that aside – your own description acknowledges that the motorist ‘did not notice’ the sign or ‘did not pay attention’ to the sign. So he’s not at fault, then – he missed the sign, so the speed limit doesn’t apply to him? That’s what he’s trying to persuade the officer to accept.
Strike 3.
The motorist is whining. He asks the same questions again and again, despite the fact that his questions have been answered. His wilful refusal to comprehend what he is being told is not the officer’s problem.
Strike 4.
What is the cop thinking with his ‘put your hands on the car’? Well, he’s thinking that he’s going to detain and/or arrest the motorist for his repeated, wilful and continuing refusal to acknoweldge the citation that he’s been issued. Entirely consistent with Utah law. When the motorist refused to comply with the officers lawful instructions, it escalated to an arrest, by force – but that is entirely the consequence of the motorist’s willful, continuing refusal to comply with lawful instructions. It ended up where it did because of the motorist’s contnuum of behaviour. If he had followed the officer’s lawful instructions, acknowledged his citation, and generaly behaved like an adult, he would have been on his way and none of this would have occurred.
Strike 5.
‘….morons now say that you cannot argue with a cop !’
Not this moron. Just scroll up to my post of December 11th at 2.56 pm, where I repeatedly say that it’s just fine to argue with the copper. Argue all you want. You just don’t get to argue to the point where what you are actually doing is resisting the officer’s performance of his/her duty.
Strike 6.
Now – would you care to try for double-or-nothing?
llater,
llamas
Oh sorry, I did not know that the word of a cop (especially a moron of this type) was to be taken as Gospel. And that you have to accept everything he says, otherwise you will be arrested. Somehow, I find that quite hard to believe, and to be forced to sign something you disagree with would probably break some right somewhere. The cop got the video, the guy’s papers and I really don’t see why he should require a signature.
I forgot that the US concept of a busy road is more than 1 vehicle per mile. If you call that a busy road, then God help you.
If you also call that “blowing past”, I think you are beyond help.
There is a sign with some sort of flag, then the 40mph speed limit. I might have missed the 1st one.
But how in the world can the cop say the speed at which this guy is going ? At first he is in front, then he follows him for a few seconds, having started from rest.
I thought that there were some criteria for deciding whether someone is speeding. Even here in the UK, it would not stand.
So you can talk all you want about the cop being lawful or reasonable, it does not strike me (pun intended) as being the case. The immediate use of the taser just confirms it.
The guy is an idiot. To think that people like this are let loose armed with a uniform is incredible.
That you cannot see that the cop’s actions are completely out of proportion with the original problem is the worrying thing. And where the police state mindset comes in.
I was wrong with the arguing thing, but I fail to see where the guy disagreeing with the cop means he should get arrested and tasered.
Nowhere do I think the driver is disrespectful. And as I say, if I saw a cop take out a taser, or ask me to spread it for such crap, I would be rather afraid and think that the guy is deranged.
Funnily enough, I lived in the USA for a while, and I always thought the cops there were a lot better than their UK counterparts because they were usually much better at seeing the big picture. And that was during the zero tolerance in New York.
Methinks that this guy would not survive long there.
And as someone pointed out earlier, that cop is so bad that had he been in actual danger, the passenger would have had plenty of time to blast him away, burn the car and gone away. Despite the heavy traffic (good joke that one).
It just confirms further, if that was needed, that that guy was completely out of his depth. The words glass, water, and drowning come to mind.
Confimation bias.
Your no doubt right, Llamas. Heh.
I needed a laugh this morning.
Something that is being lost on a lot of people here.
The whiner did everything the cop asked up until the taser was drawn on him.
Like I said earlier, I’m not sure I could produce my vehicle registration in 60 seconds, but this driver did. And that includes quite a bit of discussion of the reason for the stop.
If “out of the car” represented a decision to arrest the whiner, then it was exactly 2 seconds between the one and only ‘request’ to sign the citation on the decision to arrest him. 2 seconds.
If refusal to comply is grounds for drawing the taser, then it was 1 second between the normal voice “turn around and put your hands behind your back” spoken over the top of the whiner’s speaking and the taser draw. 1 second.
When the officer told him to turn around, the whiner did. It was actually kind of funny watching him walk back to his car, looking over his shoulder to continue talking to the officer. At no time did the officer tell him to “stop” or anything else that would be an instruction to stop walking.
More on this, to those of us who’s only exposure to police procedure is cop shows, Turn around and keep walking” is something the cops on those ride-along cop shows tell people when they are being a pain. This guy was being a pain and he knew it.
“Put your hands on the car and your feet apart” is something the cop show cops say when they are arresting someone. Had the cop said I am placing you under arrest for …(refusing to sign the ticket?). Turn around and put your hands behind your back.” then the case might be less than preposterous. That is presumably why Utah law stipulates that except in very narrowly defined circumstances, the detainee must be informed that he is under arrest.
The only instruction that the whiner did not comply with was having his hands behind his back while he walked back to his car. He had them in view and was not reaching for anything so the tasing is not even remotely excusable. And the second jolt while the guy was on the ground? I don’t understand that either. And threatening to tase the guy again if he didn’t shut up (2:19 of the second part)?
We have the cops own word that both the arrest and the tasing were for either not signing the citation or not following instructions. The only instruction that he did not comply with that was actually issued and not presumed to be telepathically understood, was the hands behind his back while walking back to his car.
This guy’s crime was whining. Based on that, every Samizdata commenter probably deserves a few.
I’m still laughing. Heh.
I wonder how much confirmation bias there was in the driver’s interpretation of the troopers actions and orders. The driver certainly didn’t understand the cop’s meta-context.
Alisa,
Police is there to “stop, question and arrest, etc.” criminals. But criminals look surprisingly like ordinary people. So the cop decides who’s who, and until his decision gets revised by higher officers or judges, it stands.
It’s inconcievable to have a functioning police force that is not authorized to “stop, question and arrest” people.
It’s also unreasonable to demand that cops never err and never arrest innocent people. There are procedures to help prevent abuses, but refusing to obey cops’ instructions is not one of the correct procedures, it would render the whole business of policing a joke.
If the cop thinks otherwise, it’s for the judge to decide if you did nothing wrong. You can’t be your own judge.
Pascal – well, your lack of comprehension continues.
The officer explained to the motorist that he passed a speed limit sign prior to the one that we see in the video. The explanation is harder to hear, but I heard it. In other words, the infraction occurred before the start of the video sequence that we see. How hard is this to understand?
No, the word of a cop is not to be taken as Gospel. That’s what a court is for. But his lawful instructions are to be complied with. That’s what you, and many others here, simply don’t want to have to deal with. You all want to operate in some happy Libertarian La-La Land, where each individual gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong and there’s always room for endless happy hours of debate about rights before we have to take the speeding ticket.
The fact that YOU don’t know how the cop determined that the motorist was speeding, doesn’t mean that he wasn’t. In fact, it is a lead-pipe cinch that he was speeding, because the officer has to specify in his report (note – Not on the citation, and Not to the motorist) how and where he measured the offender’s speed. The officer has no reason to lie about this and every reason to tell the truth. The court can sort it out. Any officer – and especially an officer with 14 years on the job – knows that if he doesn’t get this unimpeachably right, every single time, and he starts losing cases at trial because of it – he’s going to be having a closed-door session with the sergeant, which will not be good. Besides – anyone who drives a car sees 23 incidents of speeding per minute, on the average. Speeders are laughably easy to catch – there’s no need to lie about what they did.
If anyone is acting “completely out of proportion to the original problem”, it is the motorist. The copper just follows where he leads. He won’t listen, he won’t comply, he’s in a world of his own. The officer is neither obligated to humour him while he plays out this little theatre of the mind, nor is he obliged to tolerate his refusal to comply – no matter what his reasons.
You mentioned the UK, so I’ll tell my story again. Yes, I got arrested by the side of the M1, after being stopped for speeding. Yes, I got transported to Milton Keynes Central – in handcuffs – to be bailed to appear at Stevenage Magistrates Court. And I had my barrister – my first wife – in the car with me when it happened, so I knew full-well that it was 100% legal. Yes, it was just a speeding ticket. But had I refused to comply, or walked away from the officer, he would have been 100% justified in restraining me, by force if necessary, to effect his legal arrest.
I wasn’t arrested for speeding – it’s not an arrestable offence. I was arrested because I was driving a rental car on a US driver’s license, and I was plainly not a UK resident, and the officer had the option to arrest me to secure bail and my subsequent appearance (PACE, the 1986 version). He made the decision to do so. And I complied. I disagreed with him – but I complied.
I can see that, because I’m a half-way functioning adult. This motorist could not see that, because he chose to act like Violet Elizabeth Bott. His choice.
What you and many others – including the motorist here – cannot seem to do is disconnect the relatively-trivial beginnings of this incident – a traffic stop – from the eventual result. The two have nothing to do with each other. The result would have been the same if the original contact had been for littering, or a tail-light out. The officer has his/her duty to complete, that’s what we employ them to do. It ended up where the motorist took it.
Once again – for the slow learners – he didn’t get arrested and/or Tasered for disagreeing with the cop, or for speeding – he got Tasered and arrested for refusing to comply with the cop’s lawful instructions and for behaving in ways that made the officer decide that his duty was to detain-arrest him, and then in ways that made the officer decide that he needed to use force to detain-arrest him.
Once again – for the slow learners – if the guy had simply adjourned the traffic-court-in-his-mind, shut up and listened the the officer’s instructions, and taken the time to comprehend what he was being told, and comply, he’d have been on his way. Listen to the conversation leading up to the arrest – the officer can’t get more than a few words out before the guy cuts him off with some new round of law lessons – No, I’m not signing anything, First we’re going to do this and Then we’re going to do that, and After That You’re Going to Come With Me to this Other Place, and so it goes. The officer couldn’t even get to the point of telling him that signing the citation is not an admission of guilt, because the guy wouldn’t shut up, listen, comprehend and comply.
I know that many people here hate to hear it but yes, you do have to do what the officer says, when he/she says it. Even if you don’t understand it. Even if you believe he/she is mistaken or wrong. That is – has to be – the default position that we take as a society, because if we do not, then the administration of the justice we asked for and expect becomes a game of chance.
Disagree all you like. Question the officer if you must. But if he/she has decided on a course of action, and instructs you to comply, then, yes, you must comply. And if you don’t, then don’t be surprised if the officer goes from Ask You to Tell You to Make You.
llater,
llamas
Neither do some commenters here.
This emphasizes the point I tried to make: never argue with cops, it’s impolite, it’s useless, and sometimes (when the cop acts like in this case) it results in serious unpleasantness.
You should expect cops to act like this. They deal with dozens of jerks like you each day, it’s their routine work; human patience and self restraint has limits.
I’ve been intrigued by the debate back and forth. It gave me incentive to go back and watch the video several more times and review, to the extent possible, the applicable law.
I will not rehash every last detail, since it seems that has already been done ad nauseam. But I come to the following overall conclusions.
Gardner (the officer) could have done a better job of giving direction and instruction.
Massey (the driver) was a jerk who would still be arguing by the side of the road today if given the chance. He had no appreciation for the situation or understanding of Gardner’s lawful authority.
Gardner’s tasering of Massey, while unfortunate, perhaps even ill-advised, was not unlawful. Gardner gave Massey a lawful instruction and Massey ignored it in a provoking manner (turning away with left hand out of sight). That in and of itself is justification for the use of the taser.
Some people have invoked that Gardner violated other safety procedures during the incident. That may be true, or not. It is irrelevant in any case.
I have have found the arguments and commentary of Sunfish and llamas to be very persuasive. Almost everyone else seems to be heeding the facts of this incident that confirm their normative world view. Even the title of the post “An unbelievable abuse of authority” is over the top. No, this was not. The tragic incident of Jean Charles de Menezes was an unbelievable abuse of authority.
I advise everyone to take a deep breath. Reasoned argument is good. This debate, however, seems to be degenerating to a point that I find inconsistent with the overall quality I traditionally have found at Samizdata.
Cannot agree,
No, he didn’t. If he did not make his intentions clear (and he didn’t), how can it be a lawful instruction?
Cannot agree on either point. To be honest I fear for US civil society to hear so many people even say that after seeing the unedited video.
I usually only ever argue on the basis of morality rather than legality but even on a legal basis, your contentions do not really square with the evidence for all the reasons already laid out (which is why I am not going to repeat them).
In the spirit of Tom’s comments about the direction of the debate, I will check myself here and see if I can’t help raise the tone.
Perry de Havilland wrote:
‘Gardner gave Massey a lawful instruction
No, he didn’t. If he did not make his intentions clear (and he didn’t), how can it be a lawful instruction?’
The officer does not have to make his intentions clear, to anybody, for his instruction to be lawful. For example, one of Gardner’s instructions to Massey was to sign the citation. While it might have been helpful or persuasive for him to advise Massey of the provisions of Utah law and the consequences if Massey failed to sign, Gardner was not obliged to do so. If I were him, I would not have done so, either – it’s not the officer’s place to give legal advice. The officer is entitled – I say again, entitled– to expect that his lawful instructions will be complied with, without question or explanation.
In the same vein, Gardner instructed Massey to turn around and place his hands behind his back. He did not warn him that failure to comply meant arrest, by force if necessary – but he’s not obliged to. He doesn’t have to offer Massey a choice – do as I tell you or I’ll Taser you – because Massey has no choice in law – he is obliged to comply. Gardner’s instructions were lawful, reasonable and clearly stated, multiple times.
After reading all this over again, I wonder whether all of the kerfuffle about this is because it shows the stunningly-effective application of the Taser. The thing worked like magic.
When Massey walked away from Gardner, had Gardner pursued him and stopped him by conventional means – laid hands upon him, used an incapacitant like CS spray – would the readers here have been so up-in-arms? Remember, Perry de Havilland has already stated his opinion that the arrest was likely legal and that it’s not the arrest that bothers him but the way it was done. What is it about the use of the Taser that appears to bother people so badly?
Is it, perhaps, that the use of such a stunningly-effective device points up a bright line that people would prefer not to have to face? Tom speaks of the ‘normative world view’ of many here, and I’ve tried to address the same concept – the idea that many here seem to have that they can negotiate their compliance with the law or amuse themselves by arguing arcane points about their rights while the officer stands tapping his pen on his pad. The Taser shortcircuits all of that, and simply allows the officer to enforce compliance with far-fewer concerns about unintended outcomes.
Few here would argue, I think, with the idea that the individual has a right to the means to defend him/herself against the wrongful acts of others. Yet we get all bent out of shape when an officer of the state is seen using an amazingly-effective means to enforce compliance with the law upon a person who is bound-and-determined not to comply. Is it perhaps that this incident shows us in stark contrast that all our happy dreams of asserting our imagined rights against the malicious minions of the evil state can be brought to a sudden and sharp stop when the officer has the means to make us comply whether we like it or not? Without hurting us, without giving us any reasonable cause for complaint? We wake up in cuffs and all of our comforting arguments about our rights have become merely academic. Is that what many find so worrisome?
llater,
llamas
Llamas,
2 seconds between the first instruction to sign and the initiation of the arrest? No way. You yourself cannot possibly accept being arrested for not agreeing in that time frame. Especially when that instruction is to sign a legal document.
1 second between a normal voiced instruction while the other person is speaking and looking in another direction warrants drawing the taser on the guy? Does your brain process an instruction that fast while you are simultaneously speaking? My guess is no.
You brought up a rather amusing case of confirmation bias earlier. This is what we have here. You are refusing to see that it was the officer who was deliberately and provocatively escalating this situation. He clearly had chosen his course of action in advance and was pursuing it with out any concern for actual reality. This is consistent with his other actions as well. The officer had a chip and he was going to get his satisfaction.
I’m guessing I’m done with this conversation, I can’t seeing any minds being changed at this point.
Comment to Tom. You point out that the driver had no appreciation of the cop’s situation. Well, who has the most experience in these situations? A cop who conducts them for a daily career? Or a driver that hadn’t been pulled over IIRC in 8 years?
Guys, if your going to defend the idea of professional law enforcers granted powers that are denied to law abiding citizens, then your defense has to take as a requirement, not an option, that they are professionals in what they do.
Myself, I prefer the Peelian principles. This trooper, this department, this concept, this argument misses them by many miles. If one private citizen had done this to another private citizen, he would be a convicted criminal and denied the right to possess firearms. There is absolutely no denying that reality.
Jacob:
Guilty until proven innocent? In my last comment to you I asked “Can you see the difference?” Clearly you cannot, so I’ll try again. Stopping, questioning and arresting (and tasering and shooting if necessary) are means, not ends. I never said that cops should not be authorized to use these means, like you claim, but there should be very strict restrictions as to when and where these particular means can be applied. In the video four of the means were applied by the cop: stopping, questioning, arresting and tasering. Stopping was reasonable, as was questioning, in this particular case. Arresting and tasering was not (I am still talking about my ideal world, not current Uta law, whatever it is). If, on the other hand, the cop had a good reason to believe that the driver has just murdered someone, then all of the means he applied were absolutely reasonable.
Obviously. It still does not mean that if I did nothing wrong, I have to comply with the police instructions. The guy in the video was not tasered for speeding, he was tasered for refusing to follow the trooper’s instructions. Speeding should be an offense (at least in a construction zone), refusing to follow instructions non-violently should not. Of course it does mean that a few speeders will go unpunished – I can live with that.
I think this topic is pretty much exhausted.
Yes, looks like we have hit the metacontext wall a while ago.
This is a useless discussion. The cop was a bit of a loser but where can you mandate in the law that you have a right to ignore the police and go on your way simply because you want to.
It’s a recipe for chaos.
If you think an isolated highway is the proper place to challenge the law I suggest you move to Nigeria.
There’s ‘jerk’ and then there’s ‘jerk.’ What I mean is, there’s a person who, while being a jackass, is being purely verbal about it and does not appear to be escalating to a physical confrontation. Then, there are the ones who appear to be escalating.
Depends on whether we’re talking about a Category One Jerk or a Category Two Jerk. I would submit that violence is not an appropriate response for Category One Jerks, but may (depending on specific facts and circumstances) be appropriate for Category Two Jerks.
I’m hoping that this is merely poor wording.
As I see it, my job in these situations is to ‘freeze’ them. That means, prevent them from becoming a greater danger to the public and prevent any evidence from being lost, and gather whatever information there is, with the end result of delivering the whole mess to a judge who will actually decide who’s golden and who isn’t.
As for the point that Llamas is on: Roadside court will not do the driver any favors. At some point, a reasonable officer will conclude that there’s no point in trying to reasonably explain anything to certain people.
My training in law came from mostly DA’s, a few judges, and a few private-practice barracudas: all of them licensed to practice law, and all of them currently practicing in whatever area they were training. And I keep a current copy of the relevant statutes (entire Colorado criminal and traffic and juvenile code, plus selected other items) in the front seat of the squad and refer to it as needed. Frankly, I’m not all that interested in hearing the opinions of an unknown person by the side of the road as to whether I need to call a judge to decide this RIGHT NOW or drive him to wherever. Interestingly, the same thing came up this morning…not a speeding ticket and nobody got tased, but I stlll thought of you guys when it happened.
Alisa, again:
Our whole task, on the law enforcement/criminal justice side of the job, is to deliver the whole mess to a judge who will figure it out. That means making sure that people don’t kill each other before court (hence, the misdemeanor DV arrest), that evidence isn’t lost (including testimonial evidence, hence certain protection orders that the court sometimes throws around) and so on. What I think is missing is the possibility that everybody here is looking at a situation and seeing a variety of different things.
People filter their perceptions through their experiences. That’s why, when the courts judge whether an officer’s behavior was appropriate, they don’t apply an ordinary “reasonable man” test. Instead, they try to rule on what would have been done by a reasonable officer, with the same knowledge, training, and experience. Yes, that’s a more permissive standard. That’s because relatively few members of the general public actually have the same knowledge, training, or experience to recognize when a traffic stop or an encounter on the street will become something else. Some judge had the wisdom to know that he didn’t know what he didn’t know (say that ten times, really fast). Shooting at an IDPA match once a month and watching “COPS” when there’s nothing better on isn’t training, although some of my own crew doesn’t seem to get that either.
If he had reason to believe that the driver was wanted for a violent felony, then there would have been a half-dozen cops there, bringing all of the occupants out, at gunpoint. I’d just love to see how well THAT would play on SD.
Quick, someone yell “MOLON LABE JBTs shot my dog!” before this falls off the front page!
That would be just fine by me. Any other approach would be crazy in fact.
You clearly have no experience with Nigeria then. If cop tries to pull you over in Nigeria, drive faster than he does or prepare to hand over a great deal of money for the privilege of continuing on your way.
Sunfish: of course I was referring to Cat.1 – that’s the case before us, after all. No cop (or person for that matter) should put up with violence directed at them.
What Perry said – I don’t see any problem with that, as that is the only reasonable thing to do.
I made this point earlier: I don’t think it is a good idea to analyze the actual video here, only to use it as a starting point for a broader discussion. We all are seeing a variety of different things*, any of which (at least the ones mentioned on this thread) could actually take place in reality, and probably have, at some time somewhere, and it seems useful to me to consider them all.
*Except for one thing on which I think all of us agree, and that is that the driver was at no point physically violent.
Perry: from what I have heard, it is similar in Russia, at least in some places, at least until a few years ago.
I folded my tent becasue Our Host seemed to send a sign that we were all done here, and it’s his living room.
But then Sunfish wrote –
“Quick, someone yell “MOLON LABE JBTs shot my dog!” before this falls off the front page!
Posted by Sunfish at December 13, 2007 11:27 PM”
and I don’t care who you are, that’s funny, right there!
llater,
llamas
Help! Separated by a not so common language yet again…
‘Molon Labe!’ is the supposed defiant cry of Leonidas of Sparta in the face of Xerxes of Persia at the Battle of Thermopylae. When called upon by Xerxes, at the head of a vastly-superior force, to surrender and lay down their arms to avoid unnecessary blooshed, Leonidas is supposed to have replied ‘Molon Labe!’ – Come and Get Them!
It’s a favourite motto or tag line of the libertarian/gun rights world. You’ll find it, in Greek characters, on the front page of this blog.
‘JBT’s (Jack Booted Thugs) shot my dog!’ is a semi-parody of a common type of report about the results of violent encounters with the police, often connected with SWAT raids, warrant services and so forth. It seems like every person who gets a warrant served at their home – always completely without justification, naturally – possesses a family pet who wouldn’t harm a fly, and the first order of business for the officers breaking down the door is to track down this family pet and shoot it dead.
The irony is that this does often happen, and perhaps more often than is justified. Blogger Radley Balko at http://www.theagitator.com has made a special study of the prevalence and problems of violent police actions, and the killing of the family pet seems to be a recurring theme, to the point where he often makes a point of drawing attention to it.
llater,
llamas
LOL! Thanks:-)
It has been there a couple years and I didn’t think anyone had actually noticed!
Wrong.
A small, reasonable, amount of money is the usual price. Less than the ticket usually. I find this arrangement much better than the one we have to endure in our “advanced” countries.
No, I am not fucking wrong. I was sitting in the next seat to my grandfather when a fucktard cop a few miles outside Port Harcourt simply ordered him to hand over his wallet. It was probably the first time in my life I genuinely wanted to kill someone by beating them to death with a blunt object whilst looking them in the eye.
And just for reference, it was for being ‘illegally parked’. We had stopped to let a mammy-wagon past.
Huh? The police stop you and hit you up for cash with no judicial review and that’s supposed to be more civilized than it is here? Or is it that these police who take bribes are all completely law-abiding in all other ways and would never pull over someone obeying the legal speed limit? Sterling officers of the peace who don’t mind a tip here and there?
Who cares about the amount? It’s still corruption.
Dirty is dirty. I may make allowances for honest mistakes, but ‘honest’ isn’t the word and there’s a special place in hell for dirty cops. There may be a legitimate explanation for the taser application in the video but there is none at all for bribery.
(This had to be edited a few times. I have strong feelings about this and I’ve been trying to stop cursing.)
Perry, you must have been subject to some robbery and not routine procedure. Usually, in such cases you yell at them to f**k off, and they do it.
I, too, regarded corruption with horror, but, after living a couple of years under such “primitive” regime, grew to appreciate it’s benefits.
I’d rather pay a reasonable sum to the cop I deal with, who is a poor bloke trying to make ends meet. I’d rather pay him than the jerks further up in the chain of command or in the courts who steal all the money.
I found them to be reasonable, and easy to make a deal with. Sometimes informal arrangements work pretty well, even without formal guaranties like law and courts, etc. That’s at least my experience.
I can understand and even accept the horror of people of different “meta-context”. I’m just relating my personal, empirical experience. I’m not trying to introduce corruption as a new, superior philosophy.