She was not getting tased for refusing to sign a ticket. She was getting tased secondary to resisting arrest/assault on a police officer.
He had already told her he was arresting her before she drove off, and after refusing to sign a ticket. Refusal to sign = you are getting arrested.
No cop I am aware of is going to let that slide, ever.
it is a few seconds of torture that leaves no lasting effects. Tasers are deployed because they are actually LESS likely to cause injury than physically overpowering the suspect or engaging with ASP or other baton type weapons.
I think this guard overreacted to a very large degree. However local law enforcement has pretty much zero rights in an IRS service center and many other federal installations. He has no rights to carry his gun into the building. If they have a warrant to arrest an on duty IRS employee, they present it to security and security brings the person out to the police. I have several friends who have worked security at local IRS facilities in my town (there are IIRC 7 here totaling around 11K employees) requests from PD to detain IRS employees is a weekly thing for them.
For a while there, I thought she was one of those sovereign citizen types. When a cop tells you that you are under arrest, “No, I’m not” are not the magic words to cancel the “arrest spell”.
As the expert commentator in the video put it, it was “lawful but awful on camera”. As to why the cop had his weapon drawn after the chase, there very well may be rules of procedure which required him to do so. Perhaps one of the coppers or lawyers on the board could weigh in on that.
For a broken taillight? For a broken taillight, I’d advocate the “smile, wave, and followup letter” method for compliance. Or does that $80 ticket go away if the person doesn’t sign it?
Read my explanation above, in post #14971, of why you need to sign the ticket, and why signing the ticket is not just the legally required action, but also the smart thing to do.
The city of Chicago has a Police Board which is, according to the city’s website, “an independent civilian body that decides disciplinary cases involving Chicago police officers.”
Apparently, the Chicago Police have been, for at least six years, conducting secret background checks and other investigations into every member of the public who spoke at the Police Board meetings.
IMHNLNCO, the rationale behind why you must sign the ticket is, oddly enough, for your protection. Otherwise cops could just write a whole pad of tickets for grins and chuckles. Signing the ticket, as mentioned in this thread, and printed on the blame thing (and in my experience, mentioned by the ticketing cop) is merely an acknowledgement that you received the ticket. Also in my experience and gleaned from conversations with my aquaintances who happen to be cops, the cop will generally go with the verbal warning first before ratcheting it up to a written warning or ticket. That is, unless somwthing else is going on with you. Bitching out a cop generally isn’t conducive to keeping the incident at the conversational level. Driving off in the middle of the traffic stop and then assaulting the police officer probably won’t help either.
That seems kind of high. Are they generally for traffic ticket scofflaws or something more serious?
Military bases are more stringent than your general government office buildings. Forty-five years ago I was gate guard for a week at Corry Field in Pensacola, a lot fewer than 11,000. I was told if the police are in hot pursuit of someone wave 'em on through and let our internal security sort it out later. If they come up with an arrest warrant direct them to the JAG office, rather like your IRS cases I imagine, but it was not handled at the gate.
Yes, a bunch of lawmakers with their heads up their asses thought it was a good idea to require a bullshit, completely unnecessary step in the giving of a traffic ticket that exposes drivers to arrest. Nobody should ever be arrested because they didn’t sign something.
Arrest people who represent a danger to others. Poor documentation should be treated like a document problem, not a criminal problem.
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Actually, if you get pulled over for a traffic infraction like a broken tail-light or speeding, and you refuse to sign the ticket, you’re not actually being arrested for refusing to sign. What you’re being arrested for is the traffic infraction. As the California link that I provided earlier explains, “If you refuse to sign the ticket the officer is required by law to take you into custody and present you before a judge for arraignment on the charges.” The charges, in this case, are the traffic charges, not refusal to sign the ticket.
Basically, the traffic infraction itself is an arrestable offense. But because lawmakers and police departments understand that these offenses are relatively minor, and because they understand that it would be a logistical nightmare to bring every traffic infraction to court, they have put in place a system that allows you to avoid arrest and deal with your infraction at a later date - either by paying the ticket (and essentially pleading guilty to the offense), or by coming to court in order to challenge the infraction notice. In order to take advantage of this workaround, however, you have to sign your name in order to acknowledge that you have received the ticket, and that you will, in fact, either pay the ticket or come to court in order to challenge it.
And, as Monty suggests, there’s a certain amount of protection for the citizen here too, because it prevents rogue cops from writing tickets that the driver never knows about.
I’m not arguing that this is the best system. I’m not even arguing that it’s a good one. But it’s how things work in quite a lot of states, and simply signing the damn ticket would have allowed this woman to be on her way. Then, fixing the tail-light within 48 hours would have enabled her to have the ticket voided.
There is a distressing lack of specifics in the brief article: what non-profit group? Where is this study published? What city’s police forces were reviewed in this manner?