Noooo, being thrown to thrown to the pavement does not mean that she was airborne at any point in time. Its semantics but it accurately described how she was manhandled.
Do the words excessive force mean anything to you?
Like I said, I am not shocked by a cop pulling a gun. I don’t think it was warranted but I don’t think its all that important unless he ends up shooting someone. Like I said in previous posts we don’t know what happened before the video was shot so we don’t know what else might have factored into the decision to draw his gun but based solely on the video, I believe it was an overreaction.
No idea whatsoever? Despite a statement from the police chief saying that this guy was out of control and acted inappropriately? Is the police chief of this relatively conservative town succumbing to political correctness? Throwing this guy under the bus?
Excessive force is illegal. It doesn’t matter if the order was legal if it is enforced illegally.
But if you’re a teenaged black male whose home is besieged by cops who presume you to be a criminal, you’re somehow supposed to know the difference. Sit down, shut up, and don’t complain about your rights being violated. Or you’ll be maced or worse.
I don’t think the force he used was that excessive.
He wanted to arrest her, she kept on resisting him.
Just a bit of a scuffle really. Purple boy got it worse, from the other officers.
That is indeed a troubling idea, but I’m not convinced anyone but a couple of extremists in this thread and a tiny percentage of authority fetishists in the population are actually pushing this as an absolute rule. Interactions between civilians and LEO’s need to be considered in context.
Your decision whether to resist an instruction/order from a cop is in essence a risk decision with a distinct ethical element, as are your subsequent choices regarding the means and degree of resistance. The cop’s decision to instruct/order/detain/arrest you is a legal/ethical decision with a definite risk element.
We can all think up scenarios where it would not only be the safest course but also morally and legally appropriate to refuse an order or resist arrest. But those hypotheticals seem, to me, to be “special case” examples where the specific legality of your actions to protect yourself or your principles against a transgressive LEO isn’t the primary consideration any way. “Special cases” are also called “extenuating circumstances” which is just another way of saying that’s when you can justify deviating from the rule. It doesn’t mean the rule itself is wrong, and in this case it doesn’t mean the legal expectation for you to obey lawful orders is fascistic.
This idea of, “just do whatever the cops say and fight it in court later,” is a bit of a flight of fancy, if you ask me. Like, it’s a simple turn-key operation. Arrested, abused, manhandled and tossed around on Friday … cash that sweet check on Monday, huh? That’s the way it works? You wouldn’t just end up in jail on trumped up charges that you couldn’t disprove because the cops have all the power? You wouldn’t end up broke, hiring lawyers to try to save your skin? Or you wouldn’t just end up dead at the cops hands anyway?
I’m reminded of the scene in Seems Like Old Times, where Chevy Chase is hijacking his ex-wife and her black driver. She says to Chevy, “If you’re innocent they’ll never send you to jail.”
Chevy asks the driver, “Is that the way it works, Chester?”
The response, “Not in my neighborhood.”
I actually think it’s more fruitful to talk about those situations that aren’t universally viewed as “extenuating”. The ones that are temptingly easy to excuse and minimize because they don’t involve life and death.
It’s easy to argue for the side of citizens when the hypothetical cop is demanding someone jump off a bridge, but what about the cop who shows up at your front door and demands to gain entry without a warrant? Or the cop who decides you need to be handcuffed and detained because you–a pedestrian–didn’t blindly hand over your ID at his request? Or the cop who drags a girl to the ground and sits on top of her because she mouthed off to him and didn’t kowtow enough to his authorteh?
Any rule that says we can’t resist cops even when they are clearly and aggressively violating our rights is a dangerous rule. If we make the dividing line for exceptions start at the point of threatened physical safety, we’re basically making it okay for cops to almost murder and almost maim us. Our standards need to be much higher to sufficiently counteract abusive policing.
Your second sentence is at odds with your first sentence. You say the police response, except for Casebolt, was appropriate and then immediately follow that with implying that the overall police response was racially inappropriate because they skipped over the white kid. And that’s exactly what I was talking about: plenty of people think the overall police response had a racial element.
And it is not true that police “arrested black kids that lived in the neighborhood and had a right to be at the pool.” First of all, they only arrested one person - not kids plural. And secondly, I have seen nothing to indicate that the person who was arrested lived in that neighborhood. Do you have a cite for that? (And yes I know that a few kids were from the neighborhood, but from everything I’ve read the absolute vast majority were not.)
I’ve already addressed why I don’t have a problem with the white kid getting skipped over. There were very few white kids there and at least at that time he must not have been doing anything to draw the attention of the police, unlike those that were detained. And those detained must have been doing something to cause them to be singled out from all the other black people there, so it wasn’t just them being black. Most of the black people there were not detained.
And BTW Casebolt himself did detain a white girl too from what I’ve read. Why didn’t she get skipped over?
If you can’t tell the difference, then you have to make a choice and live with the consequences. I doubt that assuming that they weren’t real police if they were would get you much sympathy in court.
Do you have any reason to think people are actually pretending to be cops to rob houses?
Is that legal? Serious question, by the way - my understanding is that you’re supposed to pull over as soon as it’s safe, and I don’t know whether your definition of safe would be acceptable.
Well, you’re supposed to sit down and shut up regardless of your race or age. And if that’s the same case that was discussed on here a few months ago, the guy did a bit more than refuse to sit down, he threatened the cop. Pepper spray was a proportionate response.
You know what might convince me that more than a tiny handful of these cases are actually police overreactions? If this thread wasn’t full of Internet Tough Guys saying how much they would stand up to the police, how they Know Their Rights (and are wrong about it), and how they have no respect for the people who protect them and allow them to live in a society where it’s not just allowed but encouraged to use your freedom of speech, including to make absurd criticisms.
If it didn’t seem like everyone at least wants to resist the cops, for no good reason, I’d be more likely to believe that people aren’t actually doing it.
No, you won’t end up any of those things if you do what the cops say, if you’re actually innocent, and if you actually have a case. At least, in all but a handful of situations.
You aren’t being manhandled abused and tossed around if you do as the cops say.
You aren’t in jail on charges that you can’t disprove, because that’s not how it works. You don’t have to prove your innocence. But - remember this, it’s important - the cops have that same protection. They don’t have to prove their innocence either, because they are also people and also subject to the same protections you are.
And you won’t end up broke hiring lawyers if you actually have a case, because they’ll get some proportion of the millions you get as a payout, and you’ll get the rest.
Or, you could start of by resisting and stop any of that from being possible, because as soon as you resist you’re a criminal. I still have no idea why people resist, anyway. What possible good do they think will come from it?
This is not an inconsequential point. My background is industrial/manufacturing with a focus on processes, so I may be biased away from the “bad apple” theory of institutional malfeasance, but please, bear with me.
Any type of misconduct that becomes common enough to be seen as a problem in an organization cannot be completely fixed by removing the “problem people”. Because people really aren’t full time assholes. People sometimes do stupid or shady things when given the chance. Some people do that much more frequently than others do, but IME out of that set only a few are incorrigible or untrainable.
Every time in my career that I’ve participated in a department, division or business level effort to correct a perceived problem -high injury rates for instance, or quality defects, or productivity drops, or high scrap, or pick a problem- the initial management focus has been “employee behavior” or “training” even before the first process or area set up had been examined. And company efforts to educate or correct employees directly sometimes even had some initial positive effects. But the problems usually persisted until the processes and the work environments were studied, the opportunities for error were eliminated or accounted for, the bad or inappropriate tools were exchanged for proper or working tools, the lighting and surfaces and workspaces were adjusted for the specific needs of the processes, the people and the materials, and in some cases until organizational structures were revised.
I think if we want our police forces to be less militaristic, we ought to look at their militaristic policies and their military hardware. If we want them to produce fewer Officer Rambo types and more Sheriff Andy Taylor types,we should maybe look at whether a police force resembles the civilian population they’re policing in significant demographic ways. Maybe we should consider that cops rarely live in the neighborhoods they police, and see if that can or should be changed.
But if we keep our laws the way they are, and keep our police procedures the way they are, and keep the tools and equipment we provide as they are, we shouldn’t expect to change any of the behaviors the current structure produces just by weeding out some bad cops.
And in a refreshing change of events re: Tamir Rice’s being immediately gunned down, a Judge has ruled that the officers can be charged with manslaughter, homicide, and/or reckless homicide.
A snippet from the relatively shortarticle at Raw Story : “Judge Ron Adriane of the Cleveland municipal court said there were grounds to prosecute officer Timothy Loehmann with murder, manslaughter and reckless homicide.”
Be very interesting to see how this plays out eventually, no? Its only a municipal judge, but I do not know how/where charges are filed in that jurisdiction. Pretty damning, though, when a judge of any sort says they look guilty enough to go to actual trial over their action(s)…
That may be all that matters to you, but a Wisconsin Winnebago County Sheriff has no jurisdiction in Denver, Co.. Unless, of course, he’s there to pick up a strawman for training purposes.
I remember in particular a story, sometime ago, of how a smallish town had a cop-impersonator pulling people over and robbing/harming them, etc. The Police Chief went on the news to say that persons were encouraged, until perp caught, to call 911 (which could not verify real-v-fake cops before she got to HQ) and to get things safely taken care of per Chief’s directions. Apparently, the memo did not get to the patrol units…
One woman did exactly that during a routine stop, and was given a number of ‘resisting apprehension type’ fines and treated as if Chief had never said such a thing. IIRC, she was roughed up a bit, as well, for not pulling immediately over. Sorry I don’t remember too much detail other than approx what I said above (and Google not much help for this one), but it was shocking enough to be memorable, for dang sure. When Chief makes a big deal out of making sure to go to HQ for citizen-safety, and officers fully ignore such public outreach, it makes things possibly deadly for average citizen that listens to statements from officers’ superiors/boss that went out of his way to make citizens safe during a time of high-risk of impersonator doing the traffic stop.
I also know a Deputy who had most of his ‘duty’ uniforms taken from his apartment one time - and it caused a BIG stink in Dept over how to deal with such.
Impersonating an officer is a LOT more common than most may think, and this was told to me by many LEO’s, fwiw.
Look at the video again. There is a very large individual standing next to the cop and yellow bikini. If I had to guess, and that’s what you’re asking me to do, I would guess that the very large individual was a retired, or off-duty, LEO, or he was pool security. Maybe yellow bikini was afraid of being squashed before she could run? What’s your guess?