Is that really what you got out of that answer?
It wouldn’t matter if he raped and killed every virgin in the city. You don’t beat someone to death, or even use excessive force to a degree you could kill them. That defeats the whole purpose of having the courts. We don’t have loan rangers going around deciding who to kill and not to kill.
Let me get this straight … we’re talking about “interfering with a police officer during the course of his/her official duties” … IANAL but I’m pretty sure that’s going to get you into tons and bunches of trouble … we do have the right to video the incident, which means we can’t stop the on-going butt-kicking, but we can raise Holy Hell with the police department afterwards … if indeed the police officer was out-of-bounds with that particular ass-whuppin’ (c.f. Post #14) …
In any society, there comes a time where an individual needs to have the living shit beat out of them just to keep them from hurting others … think an inflamed mind full of PCP … so in our society we have a few people specially trained, monitored and given all the equipment to do this pounding out of shit in a lawful and fair manner … when someone comes up with a better way, then we as a society can change our laws … but for now all we can do is record, report and scream at our elected officials …
Someday there will be a police officer in the right place at the right time … and we’ll be thankful …
He is posited with a scenario in which an officer is committing a crime: beating senseless a defenseless suspect, not resisting.
His response is: How do you know he didn’t deserve it?
Yes, that’s exactly what I got from that answer.
The whole point of the question is what if he is breaking the law, your apparent penchant for police brutality not withstanding.
I film it and it’s automatically saved to the cloud. Attempt to stop the crazed cop? Not my job.
Actually police officers are not “just regular citizens”; by being employed as a law enforcement official for a municipal, county, state, or federal agency, they have special statute defined abilities and limited immunities that the rest of us do not enjoy, among them: the ability to enter and search a home or vehicle with sufficient probable cause; the ability to detain a suspect under suspicion of having committed a crime; the ability to present subpoenas to and arrest a specified person listed in a bench warrant; the ability to enforce municipal and state misdemeanor violations by issuing citations; general immunity from prosecution due to incidental damages and harms while performing their duties in a non-negligent fashion; legal authority to carry various devices and weapons which may be highly regulated or prohibited to normal citizens.
In order to assure that police officers do not abuse authority they are trained in various aspects of application of criminal law, are required to demonstrate minimum competency, and are typically held to a higher code of behavior and appearance, depending on agency and state. However, enforcement of behavior may be variable and when figures in authority act in ways that encourage bigotry, abuse of power, or outright corruption it undermines both their legitimate authority and public trust in their entire agency. There is an unfortunately growing mentality among law enforcement that views the public with an “Us and Them” mentality, particularly when police officers are not representative of the population they are policing.
As a private citizen, you have little or no authority to arrest, detain, or interfere with a police officer or law enforcement agent who is acting in an official capacity even if they are behaving in a way that is contrary to law, and you may well be legitimately prosecuted even if it turns out that the officer was not acting in accordance with agency policy or law enforcement standards. Attempting to do so may not only get you in trouble but the officer may claim justification in responding with “appropriate force”, which depending on circumstances may include the use of lethal force. You do have the right to defend yourself against unreasonable threat from a police officer but while the standard of proof is not technically higher than with respect to another private citizen, in practice you’ll find it more difficult to make a credible case unless there is clear record of offense by the officer. Deliberately entering into a conflict with an officer, even if you are “righteous” clearly places a burden on you to show that there was no other reasonable alternative.
You’ll also find that as a private citizen, if you use force to do something as ill-advised as breaking up a fight, you may be held criminally and civilly liable even if your actions were ostensibly justified. This is why police enjoy a certain extent of immunity, so that they can enter a hostile or continuous situation with the ability to respond without having to be concerned about basic liability. Of course, it should be the intent of a police officer entering such a situation to de-escallate conflict and avoid violent response whenever possible, but this isn’t always practical, and some people working in law enforcement actively seek conflict, a problem exacerbated by the general avoidance of admission of mental health issues or seeking psychological counseling.
Police officers are technically obligated to report crimes they observe, including those committed by other cops, and stop them if they find the crime in progress. The pressure to turn a blind eye at peril of harming or ending one’s career can make that a difficult choice especially in the moment of action, which calls for better support and leadership throughout law enforcement organizations to assure that officers do the right thing. Unfortunately, higher positions in law enforcement are often political appointments and genuine leadership is often a quality that is lacking, exacerbated by the fact that many large agencies have difficulty recruiting qualified applicants and often lack manpower or budget for adequate regular training. I don’t know of a good answer to this except that police officers should be held up to a higher standard of conduct and vigorously prosecuted for gross negligence and abuse of power instead of being excused, and we need to treat law enforcement as a true profession where misconduct is seriously addressed and corrected before it gets to the point of harming or threatening a non-offending citizen.
Stranger
and we wonder why there is so much violence in our society.
i think most of us believe you about this, but do you have actual cites? this is the OP’s question. as we can see from most of the responses so far, instinctively most of us feel we dont have any standigng to interfere, but what is the actual law?
mc
It will vary from state to state, but in every code that I’ve looked at there are statutes that that read to the effect of “Interfering with a Police/Probation Officer” and “Assaulting a police/probation officer” as well as “Resisting arrest/non-compliance with a legal order”. They generally have some language about “lawful duties” or “lawful order”, but unless you are able to clearly demonstrate that what they are doing is knowingly unlawful you are going to find yourself on the wrong side of a set of bars, and prosecutors are all too willing to charge someone who attacks a police officer even if there is credible justification. The only scenarios in which I would expect you could interfere with an officer and not be facing prosecution is if the officer was preparing to summarily execute a detainee or was clearly engaged in illegal activity like robbery or rape, and even then you’d really want video evidence to back up your story.
Stranger
I once raped a rapist to stop a rape in progress. To make a long story short, the nine of us were arrested for a different crime.
how does the op’s scenario of beating a helpless victim unconscious not fit into the category of clearly engaged in illegal activity?
what if you are a leo from a different dept or jurisdiction?
mc
Not to get too deep into the hypothetical here, but let’s say you observed the scenario presented in the o.p. and intervened using necessary force against someone illegally. The officer is administratively disciplined for exceeding his agency’s use of force policy but is not prosecuted for battery or other crime (an all too common occurence) and is found to have been operating in his lawful capacity. You are left with the rather weak case that you were acting out of civic duty in attacking a police officer without any threat to your person to invoke self-defense, and a prosecutor who is probably being pressured to make an example out of you lest the incident be seen as an invitation for open season on police officers in general.
Scenarios like these are obviously not cut and dried because they depend not only on statute law but the politics of the situation (Does the prosecutor need to appear tough on crime or get the endorsement of the police union for his upcoming re-election?) but also the perception of whether the cop and citizen were respectively abusive and justified in their actions. But it is very possible that even if the officer is dismissed with prejudice that a prosecutor would go ahead and prosecute the citizen for attacking an officer rather than calling for more help or filming the scene. And frankly, this is actually kind of the right move, because even if the citizen was adroit in this particular circumstance, we don’t want to live in a society where people authorized to enforce the law and protect public peace may be openly attacked with seeming impunity. Nor do we want to live in a society where law enforcement officers can act like thugs and bullies (and to be fair, most don’t), but a single instance of a citizen beating down an offending cop does nothing to resolve that issue, which is a systemic problem with leadership and ethics.
Stranger
http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=ilj
Although not the main thrust of the article, it discusses the common law right to resist an unlawful arrest, even to the point of lethal force if the arrestee reasonably fears death or serious bodily injury.
Still legal in ten states, but ill-advised for all of the reasons mentioned above, except in the most dire circumstances.
Why does this reasoning apply to the cop but not to YOU? You have the right to be judge and jury but the cop doesn’t?
He posited a scenario in which an officer is using physical force. How do you, who have entered the story in medias res and have absolutely no knowledge of what happened leading up to this, know that the officer is “committing a crime”?
The term was “excessive physical force”, and the scenario involved beating the shit out of a person not fighting back. I think the main question posted in the op was
Does the law state that citizens cannot physically interfere in any way, no matter what they see? What are the legal limits?
There is a wide line between doing absolutely nothing to intervene, and beating the cop to death.
Do you have some examples of this? Offhand I can’t think of one, let alone so many that it indicates media bias.
Today we have the right and the means to video an incident. In previous decades the technology wasn’t as widely available, so an intervention like the one reported in Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly would be a more common response.
Back then, of course, the city police were not likely to be heavily militarized the way they are today, so bystanders like R. T. Jones would face less disincentive to direct intervention. Nowadays when an intervening bystander might well get shot himself, the “passive activism” stance of taking video footage, and reporting the incident after the fact to the officers’ superiors or the court of public opinion, is the default reaction, and direct intervention the exception.