And what should a cop do with a suspect? Go give them a big hug? He was taking control of the situation.
He was doing his job, he didn’t shoot anyone or even touch anyone, so I don’t see the problem.
Just remember, it can always be worse. A lot worse for this woman.
Shot to death by a police officer in Phoenix over prescription drug fraud. :eek:
Sorry for your incident. Having a gun pointed at you is nobody’s idea of a good time.
The only thing in that she had in common with the person they were looking for was being in a white vehicle. Was the policeman going to pull his gun on EVERY person driving a white vehicle? There isn’t any indication that she attempted to evade him, and, in fact, wasn’t even the sex of the person the police were interested in.
He fucked up and a complaint is certainly understandable.
Mandarin, if you are insinuating that the President of the US has a great influence over the behavior of local cops during traffic stops, then I politely request that you keep your polemics to yourself. If that’s not what you meant, I will welcome your explanation.
Re: OP
Sounds like the cop definitely overreacted (assuming that “white vehicle” was all that was said, which does seem odd…)
Bear_Nenno, having a contrarian viewpoint is just fine, and I rather enjoy seeing one. It’s just that a lot of us feel that in your initial post you… overreacted.
Um…BOLO?
katie1341, sorry to hear about your experience. I don’t think anybody has a right to criticize your reaction until they’ve had a loaded gun pointed at them. For what it’s worth, I also think Bear_Nenno forgot what forum we’re in when he responded to you - he was over the top.
Forgive my ignorance, folks, but what exactly is a BOLO?
Perhaps he had to file an incident report because HE pulled his gun and it was more than likely on his dash-mounted camera. Not because you did anything, but because he blundered.
The cop deffinetly screwed up on his part. I don’t know about harrasment but he deffiently caused you some emotional trauma. And no matter how much I hate people playing that excuse card, I think it applies in this situation.
Sometimes a “silver vehicle” is all the information a cop has to work with. If, for example, that woman DID knock over a bank and the witnesses only saw a “silver vehicle” then that’s all they have to work off of.
Oh and BOLO = Be-on-the-lookout
What!? wait a second. what happened to “serve and protect”? Guns go off! Having a gun pointed at you is a threat! So what if it was a cop. Cops have been known to shoot first.
He should have appologized. Profusely!
Bear_Nenno can I assume you are in law enforcement? How dare you feel you or any other public servant has the right to frighten randomly? I was once stopped by a police officer who was later convicted of raping and murdering a young woman. I, for one, will never trust a cop to not shoot first.
Where exactly did I say we should forget being rational? I was saying that if she does decide to file a report, it probably won’t amount to much anyway. How did you get from point A to point B here exactly? Also, you were being a jerk by being a [insert pit-like description here] in your post. All of your points could have been made without implying that the OP is a blubbering idiot.
Yeah, um, OK. So what you’re saying is that if a cop points a gun at her she should neither be scared nor complain because what he did wasn’t so bad, but if she fantasizes about what she might have done, she deserves to be taken to task? Whatever you say buddy. BTW, you are a cop, aren’t you?
Or aren’t you?
I don’t think that’s a prerequisite, everyone should have their say. FWIW I’ve had both cop and criminal aim guns at me, and I was not sweating one drip when it was the cop.
Don’t forget that some people get scared too easily as well.
Assuming all cops are rapists and murderers is pretty silly. Like anything, there are a few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
:smack: :smack:
“Silver Vehicle” = “White vehicle”
woman = man
I was once pulled over by the police because of the car I was driving. I turned out that the officer had gotten a report on his radio about a “possible drunk driver in a blue sedan”. I happened to be driving a blue sedan, but I was delivering a pizza. The cop who had spotted the car in question drove past me and told the first cop that it wasn’t my car he had seen, and I was sent on my way (and when I arrived at the pizza-customer’s house, I was greeted by a houseful of people who had been listening to the whole thing on their police scanner…)
Several years later, I ended up one night with six cops pointing their guns at me. Strangely enough, I wasn’t at all frightened. Of course, I was extremely drunk at the time, so that may have had something to do with it. But there’s also the fact that my dad was a cop, and so I was very aware of how to behave in that kind of situation. That ended up being the very last night I ever took a drink of alcohol - the “joy” of being drunk wasn’t worth risking getting into that kid of situation again 
katie1341–you ever file a complaint about this?
Wow, this is a blast from the past! After the officer drove away, I had to sit in my car for a few minutes to collect myself. I had pulled into the parking lot of alittle store, and as soon as he pulled off someone who worked there came out and asked me if I was OK. She offered to let me use the phone or (and I thought this was hilarious) the bathroom. I had my cell phone with me, and called a friend of mine who works in the DA’s office. He said he’d look at the tape and get back to me. The officer was drivng a police car that had one of those cameras that starts running when the blue lights go on.
His supervisor was also interested in seeing the tape. I found out later that before I even got home, the asst DA that I called, called the chief of police and told him what happened. The officer said that all he did was "break leather", which apparently means that he took his gun out, but didn't point it at me. Bulls**t. Sometime in the next few days, the tape was "lost".
I decided not to file a complaint- after the tape was "lost", this guy's credibility was toast anyway, and he took a lot of crap over the next few months for drawing down on the public defender. He was also lectured to the hilt about reasonable articulable suspicion to stop a car- if I had a body in the trunk or something, it would never have been admissible since the stop was bad. The Chief Judge of my circuit was very upset when he heard about it (not from me).
I'd sure be interested to know what happened to the tape, though.Aaaach! Zombie!
Usually, yes, but since the OP came back in to answer the question, I’ll leave it open.
Google Keith Laumer
Declan
I know this is a zombie thread, and this will probably be the last comment before it drifts off again, but whenever I read something like this I always think of my oldest sister, who drives and is deaf (and therefore couldn’t hear what the officer was saying), and how terrified she would be in this situation.
Whee, zombie thread!
katie, I work with cops, and I’ll be the first to admit that some of them are real dipsticks. I’m sorry you had to run into one.
When I send out an Attempt To Locate (only rubes and n00bs use “BOLO”, and if our MULES trainer sees “BOLO” come over the printer from one of the agencies she trains you’re liable to get a sarcastic phone call) I need to include as complete a vehicle description as possible, as complete a driver description as possible, last known location, possible direction of travel, and what the driver did to warrant an attempt to locate.
I’m guessing from your description that the guy the cop was looking for had probably done something a little more heinous than just drive around with a suspended license; the only reason the cop would have had to draw his gun from the outset is if the driver he was looking for was known to be violent. (That, or the cop in question was a gun-happy freak who’d seen Starsky and Hutch one too many times, which is always a possibility; we have a gung-ho rookie working my shift at the moment whom I’m ready to club and stuff into the trunk of his own patrol car.) If we put out attempt to locates on every suspended/revoked driver in our jurisdiction we’d never get anything else done.
If the only information I had was a white car, male driver, suspended, possibly violent, I would send an Officer Safety message instead of an Attempt to Locate. That lets officers know to take a little extra care when pulling over white cars for a while.
The tape was probably “disappeared”; one thing that irks me about the local PDs I dispatch for is the “cover for your own” mentality that prevails. A couple of years ago one PD’s cop got pulled over for drunk driving by a cop from a PD further south. They had no choice but to fire them, but what got me was not only were they pissed at him for driving drunk, they were pissed at the cop that arrested him!
Being able to tell cops when they are being assholes is one of my favorite parts of this job. Still, I like most of them pretty well; at the end of the day, they’re just guys, even if I don’t like everything they do.
In New Jersey it is a 4th degree crime to tamper with the in car tapes. No way anyone would jepordize their career and freedom to protect someone over something like this. I have no idea if there is a similar law where you are. If not there should be.