It does very much sound like a nicer version of “nice place you have here. Sure wouldn’t want to see it… burn down.”
In traffic stops where I was cited for less than I actually did (or not cited at all), the news regarding clemency wasn’t given until the end of the traffic stop when they were handing my license back to me and telling me to drive more carefully. In my cases, no threat could be imputed to the officers because I had no behavioral choices to make after being informed of their clemency.
@pkbites has explained how he uses clemency to help mellow an agitated contact - not as an implied threat, but as a way to inspire a sense of relief and a mood of “this traffic stop isn’t going so bad afterall” - and you’ve flat-out accused him of lying. There’s a big difference between you feeling subjectively threatened (your first two sentences) and claiming an officer deliberately intending to threaten you (your third sentence).
While I might be relieved that he’s not going to cite me for X, Y, and Z, I’m still going to see it as a threat that he still can cite me for these things if I don’t act better.
As to whether he’s lying or not… the person with all the power in an encounter is in a terrible position to determine what actions are threatening to the person with none of the power. Sometimes a Carrot can look an awful lot like a Stick, depending on where you’re seeing it from.
The most generous reading of pkbites’s stance is that he is unfamiliar with the concept of an implicit threat.
Calming somebody down by telling them just how much worse you could make things for them, if you wanted to, is a threat. It is reinforcing the fact that you have power and they don’t, and that you are capable of exercising that power at any time.
And it’s not so much “calming them down” as “inhibiting (potentially agitated) action”. I can’t imagine anyone feeling calmer after being told that.
You wouldn’t feel calmer after being told you’ll only be cited for 10 over, instead of the 30 over that you were actually doing? If not that, then what would put you more at ease during a traffic stop?
The wording and timing matter. If the opening line is “I’ve got you on radar at 30 over and could take you to jail right now. Now what’s your SSN and Twitter handle?” feels like more of an implied threat than if the entire interaction is concluded with “I’ve got you on radar at 30 over, but I’m only going to cite you for 10 over.” There’s no implied threat or quid pro quo in the latter statement: it’s just an explicit declaration of what the officer is definitely going to do, with no conditions included.
I was once pulled over for driving without registration. (We’d failed to renew it.) The police officer was visibly relieved when he realized that I was the owner of the car. He asked me if I had a smart phone with me, and told me that it wasn’t legal for me to drive without registration, and he ought to have the car towed, but if I promised to register it right now, on the side of the road, he would let me go and just issue a ticket.
And he went on to say that if I challenged the ticket it would likely be thrown out.
I didn’t feel relieved. Until he said that, it hadn’t occurred to me he might have the car towed. I mean, I wasn’t going to do anything crazy anyway. I’m sure I didn’t look like I was likely to get violent before he said that. But that made me a lot MORE anxious. Not calmer. And I think he WAS being nice. Literally the only thing he asked me to do was to register my car, which was totally appropriate for him to request.
If he’d asked me for my social media handle, I WOULD absolutely have considered his comment about towing the car to be a threat.
I was once on my way to pick up my kids (shared custody). I had stayed late at work and I was cutting things close, so I was speeding.
When I saw the flashing lights behind me I was pissed because now I’d definitely be late. Plus, I was being stopped close to my house in a speed trap I knew about, since it was set-up once a week or so. When the cop asked if I knew why he was pulling me over, I replied “yeah, because you’re manning a fucking speed trap that is right after the speed limit drops for no reason”.
Turns out he agreed with me about the trap. He told me it was for town revenue and that 90% of those stopped were not from the town. But, he pointed out i was flying, doing close to 70. That was embarrassing for me and I explained about rushing to get my kids. He was recently divorced and he commiserated a bit about custody issues, etc.
Then he asked for my license. That’s when I realized I’d left my wallet at home. I asked if I could run home (two minutes away) to retrieve it. Never mind the license, just show me your registration. Turns out I had just renewed that, but it and the sticker for my plate were on my desk at work.
I forget what else was wrong, but he had me for six tickets. Then he started laughing. From the moment he pulled me over he thought I looked familiar. When I mentioned my name he realized he knew me from my business. He let me go with a warning, well six warnings.
You’ve explained how a police officer cutting you a break can look like a threat (instead of the defusing gesture that was intended), and in the next breath you’re claiming you definitely didn’t look like you were a violent threat. If you want to be given leeway to misinterpret the officer’s behavior, then it’s only fair to give the officer some leeway to misinterpret your behavior (or at least to err on the side of caution and preemptively choose to go easy on you).
I’d guess that roadside clemency doesn’t just serve the purpose of defusing potential physically violent detainees - surely it goes a long way toward defusing detainees who could just become nonviolent pains in the ass. Someone who starts screaming abuse at the cop, or has a panic attack, or starts crying so hard that they can’t drive away afterward. It can be hard for an officer to know how a detainee will react before they actually explain what the final penalty is going to be.
If a cop told me “I’m supposed to tow your car, but if you register your car right here/now, I’ll let you go with just a ticket”, I’d take him at his word, register the car, and address anything after that as an independent issue. OTOH, if he says “I’m supposed to tow your car,” and then immediately starts asking for things that I’m not obligated to share (“what’s your Twitter handle?” “Can I search your trunk?”), I’d politely ask him to take care of the reason for the stop before moving on to anything else. It’s possible that will factor into how he deals with the reason for the stop, but I’m never going to consent to a search, and I’m never going to deliberately link my meatspace name with any of my social media accounts.
In fact, the police officer looked very anxious as he approached my car. After he looked at my driver’s license and saw that I was one of the owners of the car, he was visibly relieved. And he was much nicer to me after he stopped thinking I was likely to be a threat than he was before that.
I disagree. @pkbites is not giving his own reading. He is telling you what the law considers a threat.
I think it can certainly be argued that the doctrine of “voluntary consent,” the idea that if a police officer asks you for permission to search your car is permissible because any one of us could ask the same thing, is legal fiction and formality of the highest order. You would would be much more confident and at ease to tell me to fuck off it I asked you to search your car than a uniformed police officer.
The basic logic of Miranda v. Arizona applies to a whole lot of situations, but any chances of it being extended beyond custodial interrogations died in 1968 when the Johnson administration fumbled the replacement of Earl Warren and gave Richard Nixon two vacancies to fill on the Supreme Court.
You are under the delusion that threats are always improper or illegal.
When in fact our entire criminal justice system is based on threats:
Do this or else there will be consequences (jail/fine/both)
OR
Don’t do that or else there will be consequences. (jail/fine/both)
And many of the things you call “threats” are actually just options. Giving choices is one of the ways to gain compliance. Subjects who feel they have choices, even if the choices are between two negatives, are more likely to cooperate.
So you admit that you’re threatening them in that scenario? Glad we cleared that up.
Yes, subjects who are threatened are more likely to cooperate. I agree.
Put it this way - if it can both proper and legal, why are you so reluctant to plainly say that you threaten the people you deal with?
Why the super careful wording about how it’s not actually a threat because you didn’t explicitly make it a threat?
“Hello, I’m a police officer who levies threats against noncompliant subjects to get what I want out of them.”
Easy, legal, and proper. Right?
So… give the officer information that I am under no legal duty to provide, or the officer will write me tickets for things he wouldn’t normally write me a ticket for. Did I understand those options correctly? And if I become belligerent (i.e. complain), the officer can use distraction techniques (hitting me in the head) to detain me (put me in handcuffs and throw me on the ground) to ensure officer safety, right?
Whether the charges stick may not be important - what the charges are is a different story. My job puts me in a position to interview/read interviews of people regarding recent arrests. Invariably , when someone says " I got arrested because I didn’t have ID" it means something slightly different. It means " I was arrested and charged with an offense that could be dealt with either via a DAT* or by being booked, fingerprinted and put through the system". In other words, the lack of ID affected how the arrest was processed not whether there was an arrest. I’m not going to speak about other states - but in my state, you don’t get arrested simply for failing to identify yourself with no other charges- but people often incorrectly describe what has happened.
* A DAT is a summons that gives a person a date to appear in court - they are typically issued for misdemeanor offenses. Receiving a DAT is in many ways no different that being arrested, booked and ROR’d at arraignment
I think you’re reading a lot into it. It’s well established in our system that the police and prosecutors have wide latitude and discretion about their law enforcement activities. Police have general discretion in many cases about what charges they arrest someone on, if they choose to make an arrest, and which charges they choose to write etc. The prosecutor has almost unlimited discretion in choosing to prosecute or not, and what charges he plans to take to court.
In both of these areas of discretion, it is legally permissible for the law enforcement officials to utilize this discretion to obtain compliance. But the suspect still has the ultimate choice.
Let’s take as an example the police are called in because an unruly bar patron is refusing to leave a bar. The patron became angry when the bartender cut him off, and threw his glass at the wall breaking it, and now refuses to leave. When the cop shows up, he has several things he can charge the person for, but mostly he wants the guy out of the bar. If he tells the patron “pay the bar for the glass you broke, and leave on your own, or I’m arresting you” you can interpret that as a threat, but it doesn’t seem particularly improper.
Hell that reminds me, I was at a sporting event once 10+ years or so ago, and we had a tailgate before hand. A friend of mine had brought a coworker with him to the tailgate. The coworker got quite intoxicated, and ended up getting detained in a “holding area” the police maintain near the game for drunks. He calls our friend and basically says “hey I’m in trouble for being too drunk, the police will let me leave but someone needs to sign me out.” My friend goes to get him and agrees to take him out of there. Now, in that actual situation the drunk could have fought the police in a sense. He could have insisted on being charged or released, in which case they would have charged him with probably disorderly conduct, public intoxication etc and sent him to the drunk tank. Since the volume of such incidents at a big football game is high, the police maintain those holding areas as an alternative to actually charging those people with misdemeanors and sending them to a facility overnight that the person frankly probably doesn’t want to go to anyway. They then release the person into the custody of a more sober individual so they aren’t responsible for what happens. It’s a situation where you could absolutely assert your rights and be non-compliant with the alternative that the police offer, and you would end up much worse off legally–eating misdemeanor charges and having to spend a night in the drunk tank instead of getting to go home with no charges.
You’re creating situations far outside of what I was responding to. I was responding to the the situation related in the OP: i.e. an officer asks for social media handles (later expanded to social security numbers). A person should be entitled to tell an officer to pound sand, I don’t need to disclose any of that, without threats of any kind, implicit or explicit. I agree that there are plenty of situations that should allow an officer to make threats, just not threats about basic rights, like the right to refuse to answer questions.
While I do not know PKbites and am sure he is a good, ethical officer, I am happy to provide several examples of other officers who have no qualms about using threats and actual violence to get information they have no legal right to.
You have every right to refuse to answer that question, as has been stated multiple times. I don’t see where anyone has indicated it’d be normal that you’d be “threatened” for not answering it, either. So I think you’re creating fanciful situations for yourself.
This discretion is also used to obtain personal information that the police do not have any inherent right to obtain. We pretend talking to a cop is just like talking to my neighbor, but my neighbor doesn’t have the discretion to arrest me for anything. I’m not relying on my neighbor’s good graces to ensure I can go home to my family tonight.