The citizen is talking to a cop, pretty calmly. They are like two feet apart. The cop is clearly not feeling very threatened.
Then Mr. Super Cop comes on scene. He decides that the guy “has a problem” and “looks a little amped up” before actually interacting with him.
Rather than arresting him, he gives him an order. My take is that he gave him this order not because he was particularly scared of what might have been in that guys pocket, but because this is a quasi-legal tactic that he has used in the past and which allows him to tackle the fuck out of people on national television and score ratings.
So the citizen is possibly intoxicated, and obstinate. However, calling it obstinance presupposes that what the cop did was legal. That’s not clear AT ALL.
So, I haven’t been arrested. Under what circumstances do I legally have to care one iota about what a cop orders me to do?
I don’t think it was inappropriate for the officer to ask him to keep his hands in plain view. He could have very easily had a weapon or something like that in the pocket and been a danger to the officer.
Yes, the order was legal, and the takedown was legal.
First of all, smart cops are always nervous about where a subjects hands are. If hands disappear into pockets or other out-of-view places containing unknown objects, the cop doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. Officers are allowed to issue orders and/or temporarily restrain subjects (up to and including handcuffs and/or personal searches) in order to assure their own safety. Thus, the entirely legal request for the guy to remove his hands from his pockets.
Second, the guy is not responding to clear, direct voice commands to remove hands from pockets - in other words, he’s not behaving very rationally. Smart cops get even more nervous when this happens. Now there’s a clear need to physically restrain the subject in order to assure the officers’ safety. However, the guy still has his hands in his pockets, which contain who-knows-what. If the cop simply walks up to him and begins grappling, those hands could come out with a weapon - thus, the need for a surprise take-down, to disorient the subject before he can take any kind of defensive action against the incoming officer.
So there may be physical consequences for failure to obey a police order. OP asked about legal consequences. Failure to obey a police order does carry legal penalties.
A small hands-in-pocket story:
years ago I attended a public speech by then-vice-president Al Gore (along with his Secret Service entourage). After the speech Gore was walking down the line, shaking hands. He was preceded and followed by a couple of Secret Service agents, each of whom was watching the crowd for potential troublemakers. As they approached me, the leading agent noticed my left hand was in my pocket; he calmly reached across the rope and physically removed my hand from my pocket before Mr. Gore reached my and shook my right hand.
It was obvious that it was the ‘supercop’ that was a little amped up, but also that person was standing his ground and didn’t show expected respect to authority. It was the not showing that type of respect which seemed to be what bothered the supercop. as I viewed it.
So when you are dealing with expected though not required submission to authority it may be enforced illegally.
If you really believe “please take your hands out of your pocket” is about nothing more than commanding “respect” - and if you’re comfortable with a subject refusing to do so when asked - then you will not survive long as a police officer.
The police can do whatevr they want. Whether it is legal, is for the courts to sort out later. Even if there is videotape, fighting back is a bad idea - anyone who sees you fight with or assaulting a police officer will say so in court, or any evidence you touched him, and your troubles are compounded. Assault and resisting arrest are crimes regardless of who started what. After all, if the second cop jumps in and tries to arest you, regardless of what #1 did, you better not fight him.
What’s legal and what cops do may or may not be the same. Howevr, rarely doe a misbehaviour on their part give you a free pass.
File a complaint, and at the very least, when he steps way out of line sometime, his complaint list will be there to haunt him, I suppose…
Paraphrasing the Ron White joke: I don’t know how many cops it would take to kick my ass, but I know how many they are going to use. That’s a handy piece of information.
Lesson: Do what a cop tells you. If he violates your rights, call a lawyer from the privacy of your home instead of from a pay phone in a jail cell or that hospital phone by your bed.
I gather you feel the officer in the video acted inappropriately. Put yourself in his shoes:
-Would you have been concerned for your safety when you witnessed the subject putting his hands in his pockets?
-If you would have been concerned for your safety, would you then have ordered the subject to remove his hands from his pockets?
-If you would have been concerned for your safety, and you would have ordered him to remove his hands from his pockets and step over to the car, what exactly would you have done when he refused to comply with either or both of those commands?
-Do you believe the video depicted the officer “beating up” the arrestee? Or do you think it was a reasonable application of force necessary to subdue a resistant arrestee without unnecessarily risking the safety of the arresting officer? Note that once the arrestee was on the ground with his hands in a safe place, there was no more violence taking place.
As you formulate your responses, keep in mind that many police officers do not live to see retirement; there are people out there who, when their freedom is at stake, will kill a police officer if given an opportunity to do so.
Paying somebody’s salary does not entitle you to abuse them. I used to hear that bullshit all the time in my various government job capacities. Compliance and politeness go a long way toward a mutually agreeable solution to any police-citizen interaction. In my two years as an auxiliary cop, those who observed those two axioms always fared much better than those who did not. Even if the order seems unreasonable, do it anyway and let the lawyers/courts decide if it was proper or not. Reaching for one’s pocket or glove compartment (in a traffic stop) is a recipe for potential bloodshed. If a cop is telling you to do something, there is almost always a good reason for it. Err on the side of personal safety.
Ah, but I’ve already differed from the way the policeman dealt with the guy.
I really don’t care about your argument. Sorry, I’m very, very annoyed that any policeman can walk up to me, be rude and insulting, and beat the hell out of me if I resist in the slightest of his whims.
“I pay your salary.” Police love to hear that. Look at the average salary of a police officer. (Google it for your area) Then ask yourself what the likely hood of you being shot at just for doing your job is. No matter what the salary is for the police officer its not high enough.
Remember this. When everyone else is running away the police officers are running towards. (Also fire and rescue workers as an aside.)
Back to the OP.
In my area in MD the police are well known for their almost military level of respect. This however will only take a suspect so far. Failure to follow any order will very likely end in being taken down. Given what they know could happen to them and any bystanders, they have no choice.
Remember when the suspect starts shooting the bullets don’t stop moving if they fail to hit the officer. Many innocent people have been hit by stray shots. I personally would rather the officer take out that possibility long before I get shot while standing next to my window minding my own business.
I think the OP is wondering if a cop just walks up to him out of the blue and starts ordering him around (“Take you hands out of your pocket and go to my car!”) for no reason, is he legally expected to comply?
But I think the courts tend to give cops the benefit of the doubt, and the burden of proof is on the citizen, to show that whatever the cop did was not in any way justified–after the fact, in civil litigation. That’s just my understanding of how the courts have ruled: in general, they view things from the practical position of the cops, who may have some report or other information that matches a person’s description, so they have to have the authority to tell people to do certain things in order to get their job done safely.
It might seem to you that the cop is ordering you around for no good reason, but you still are expected to comply. If it turns out the cop was in fact acting out of line, all you can do is demonstrate that later if you want some kind of vindication.
That is certainly very annoying, but what does that have to do with the price of wheat?
The officer’s instruction was a reasonable request. He wasn’t rude or insulting, rather his demeanor was appropriate for the responsibility and authority his position entails. I even thought he was more polite than he had to be.
Yes. The thing to keep in mind is that while there may be no good reason immediately discernible to the layman, that doesn’t mean that there is therefore no good reason.
