A few nights ago a few friends and I left a bar, and we were standing outside waiting for a friend to come out. A police car pulled up at the junction about 30 feet away and one of my friends, being in a merry mood and perhaps foolishly, joked, “uh oh, it’s the pigs!”. He joked a little too loudly, and the policemen immediately swerved over to us and gave us a strict talking-to about not insulting the police. We apologized and he went on his way.
I can’t remember his exact words but he seemed to say at one point that he, “could have arrested us” for it. I was just wondering if that’s true, because personally I suspect it isn’t. Can you be arrested for insulting the police, even if your behavior isn’t aggressive or threatening?
I once got arrested for calling a police officer a “fucking douchebag,” (and yes, it was deserved). In court, the judge fined me 5 dollars, only because there were minors present who had overheard me.
Sure they can arrest you because they don’t like your hairdo. Doesn’t mean you’ll be convicted of a crime. The police are given broad discretion and can detain people as the deem necessary. The courts regularly dismiss cases like panache25’s example.
While it may be deemed legal at a later date to have called the police ‘pigs’ it is still a bad idea.
They can arrest you it will be a major inconvenience and any litigation you’d seek at a later date to compensate for said inconvenience will likely be dismissed as a frivolous waste of the courts time.
They shouldn’t legally arrest you for saying “pigs”, but they should be able to arrest you for saiyng “po-lice” since if you pronounce the term that way there’s a 99.7% chance you have committed a crime in the immediate past.
The cop is the judge of you being drunk and disorderly. There is no test given you are not allowed to request one. The cop will cuff you throw in the back of his car and drop you off at the drunk tank. The next morning you are given an appearance ticket ans you are relieased. When your court date comes up the cop will not show up, case dismissed. But you spent the night in the can and probably were thrown down so you could be cuffed. If I remember right San Jose has over twice the D&D arrest than San Diego. It was in the news last month when a reporter after experiencing SJPD and a D&D did the research. The numbers are there to suport the fact that they are abusing the D&D charge.
