No one has said everyone has to do everything a cop says to do, immediately and without complaint or not, or they have the right to kill you.
No one has said that! Nobody! No one has even implied it!
However, if you don’t do what a cop says you will very likely find yourself the subject of some sort of action intended to bring you under control and into compliance.
Maybe it will be threat of arrest. Maybe it will be threat of force. Maybe it will be force itself. But it should be obvious even to a two-year-old that the police can’t do their job if people are allowed to simply ignore them when they give someone orders.
And here you go again. For the umpteenth time, Crutcher wasn’t shot for being on PCP. What is wrong with you?
I absolutely cannot believe the stuff I read on this board sometimes. Yes, the police are public servants, but their role is not to bring you your slippers and make you a sandwich. Their job is to maintain the peace and enforce the law and to sometimes put their lives on the line in order to do so.
So what would you have them do then in the event that people refuse to “do what they say”? If they turn on their lights to pull you over and you refuse, are they to just turn them back off and allow you to go on your merry way? If they’re called to a domestic disturbance and they discover one party has assaulted the other, but the abuser refuses to submit to arrest, should they just apologize for taking up everyone’s time, get back in their cruiser and drive off? Or what if someone’s breaking into your house and you call the police, and then when the cops arrive the intruder refuses to obey their orders to stop where he is and put his hands up? Should they make several entreaties and then just give up if he doesn’t comply? And especially so since the intruder may be having an ‘episode’ and be diabetic or on drugs and confused as to where he was and therefore be in need of help and understanding and medical assistance rather than a gang of angry sounding cops yelling at him to get on the ground.
Clearly there have to be consequences to not obeying police orders, otherwise there’s no point in having a police force in the first place.
Except when there is a very clear and imminent threat of extreme bodily harm, these consequences should never include deadly force. These videos do not show such a clear and imminent threat.
That was…horrifying and infuriating. The guy uttered the word “harrassment” and that was all that needed to turn the cop into a raging psycho.
Reminds me of the incident last year in NC with that teenager (Curry) who was accosted and pepper sprayed in his own home by cops who suspected of him being a burglar. There was a thread about it and not surprisingly, several folks seemed to take it on faith that Curry acted like a “asshole” who should have responded more “appropriately” when the cops barged in, threw him against the wall, and questioned him as though he were a criminal. But of course, the only evidence for Curry behaving belligerently was claims made by the cops. The was no video to show what really happened. Who wants to bet those cops lied to excuse what they did to that kid?
Who has the integrity to go back and revise their assumptions about previous incidents (including Mike Brown), in light of what we keep seeing from corrupt, morally bankrupt police departments? Anyone?
Do you think that people are asking the question you’re responding to because they object to the idea of “action intended to bring you under control,” generally, or do you think they’re asking it because people are repeatedly being killed by police under circumstances in which we expect that police will be able to bring about control or compliance without killing anyone?
Doesn’t that seem like an extremely important distinction? The fact that it was wrongful? It seems like exactly what action the police have actually taken, and exactly what behavior it was actually in response to, should inform the way we talk about this stuff. If we were talking about a situation where the police responded to a disturbance and somebody started throwing punches at the officers – like that video that was out there recently of the fat white guy who wasn’t tased, wasn’t shot, and I’m pretty sure just got away entirely – and people were criticizing the officers involved for, like, being mean to the person, or just grabbing him roughly, then OK. Makes sense to point out, hey, they gotta police. Right? But here we’re talking about situations where the police are ending lives. And you’ve personally even already said that in the most recent case, the police fired without justification. And now there’s a dead person.
So why are you responding as though that isn’t the predicate for the conversation? Why are you responding as if the worst thing that could happen isn’t actually the thing we’re talking about? I don’t understand why it’s more important – in terms of what needs to change about the world we live in and what doesn’t – that there must be some consequences in some circumstances that aren’t the ones we’re talking about than the fact that the actual consequences in the actual circumstances we are talking about were a person being killed without justification.
I mean, the problem of course is that the function of the video is under the control of individual officers at all. Whatever system the car has should be running all the damn time.
Well, then you’re probably fucked. I’m not saying the cops are in the right here.
The article mentions this: “Cole had resigned from the Greensboro Police Department in August in light of the investigation. Because he resigned, charges against him were dropped. But he would still be able to work in law enforcement elsewhere.”
Well, well, well. Turns out that Keith Lamont Scott was quite the package. According to his wife as she sought and obtained a restraining order against him last October, he:
Hit her eight-year-old son three times with his fist.
Kicked her.
Said he was a ‘killer’ and they should know that.
Said her husband owned a 9mm handgun without a permit, was a threat to law enforcement, and asked the court to prevent him from having it.
In addition to what his wife said in obtaining her restraining order:
He shot and wounded a guy in Texas in 2005 and had a felony conviction from that.
The police are saying the gun he had at the time he was shot was previously stolen in a burglary and the burglar has acknowledged selling the gun to Scott.
So the guy was a nasty customer through and through, and not the peaceable pot-smoking, book-reading gentle giant the media has been at such pains to paint him as being in order to whip up emotions over black guy shootings. It’s also worth noting that the officer who shot him was black himself.