Cops are trained to look for unusual responses. Guilty people interact with cops differently than most people and cops are trained to notice that. Putting your hands straight up in the air is an odd response and the policeman was right to investigate further. He probably asked the friend out of the vehicle to check for impairment and to see if the had contraband in his lap.
No it’s not. It’s just as easy to shoot him out of either window if it comes to that. Cops approach the passenger side these days so that they’re not standing on the traffic side of the car, especially when pulled over on a freeway or other high-speed roadway. Lots of cops have been smashed to death between the parked car and drivers not paying attention - or hit on purpose during traffic stops.
I hadn’t actually looked that up–I was just remembering what I had read.
But it turns out that I was right.
If you take the time to think through the driver’s positioning when the cop is on the driver’s side vs. the passenger side, you will quickly see why this is so.
It is pretty weird to hold your hands the way your friend did during a traffic stop. I think the police officer was probably offended by it, and didn’t know how to tell your friend to chill out without making it even more weird and awkward. It’s very possible that the officer was more concerned with your friend than with you, because you were behaving normally and your friend was behaving oddly.
I agree. Putting myself in the cop’s shoes, I’d be thinking “WTF is up with this guy in the passenger seat? I’m just telling them that the license plate light is out, and this clown has his hands up like I’ve pulled a gun on him.”
I imagine it’s pretty easy to go from there to “What’s he up to? Why’s he acting like that? Why doesn’t he quit acting weird?”
Unless the cop is very new to the job, I am sure it is not as strange to him as it is to you guys.
He’s either extra-sensitive about it lately… or he is deliberately fucking with the guy.
A perfect illustration of how fucked you are when you’re black, really. Put your hands up like they tell you to do when they think you’re a threat and… you’re a threat.
Act like a white person acts and hey, sometimes they shoot you and they don’t know why they shot you. But at least you weren’t acting weird.
As was stated earlier the office is looking for behavior out of the norm. I was in a truck as a passenger when pulled over and the officer said the turn signal didn’t work. My friend started to get out of the truck to look at it. I calmly stopped him from doing so but the door was opened. The officer wheeled around on us VERY quickly. That single act ramped up a non-situation to a “conversation”.
When I get pulled over I do the following:
Turn the car off and put the keys on the dash where they can be seen.
turn the dome light on
roll down all the windows if I’m driving a car with power windows
have my license and CCW in plain sight.
Answer questions quickly and honestly
hold my hands palms up on the wheel.
The last one is a new addition. Closed palms allow a driver to hide a knife behind the steering wheel.
I’ve run in to a couple of what I would describe as “rogue cops”. They appeared to be trying to evoke a response. You want me to do take a sobriety test in front of your dash cam, glad to. Don’t like my answers, well bless your heart. Not falling for it.
Example: why are you driving down this road if you live at this address?
Answer, because I WANT to. it’s a better road to drive on and I like to drive and listen to music.
Example: what are you doing out here. Answer I’m helping this lady change her flat tire. Question: how long is it going to take? Answer, as long as it takes. I’m not an Indy 500 pit crew.
I keep the answers I’d like to give to myself. Gets me back on the road instead of jail.
And if you think bad cops skate through life the first officer had his ass reamed by the judge for not showing up in court (he wrote a bullshit ticket).
But he knew why the guy was on edge, so why did he pester him about it rather than ignore it? It’s obvious he was more concerned about the passenger than the OP; the question is why should he have been when he correctly assessed the basis for the guy’s “weird” posture? It wasn’t him being a criminal it was because he was scared. Cops gonna get offended by that now?
By ordering the guy out of the car and repeatedly trying to control his God given right to be “weird” with how he held his hands, all the cop did was make it that much harder for the OP’s friend to not act weird the next time a cop accosts him. These kind of encounters essentially train black people to expect harassment and disrespect, which means relaxing and acting normal requires an enormous act of will that is next to impossible to summon on demand.
Exactly.
People forget (or maybe they don’t know?) that the police are not our friends. They don’t pull us over just to chew the fat. They pull us over because they believe we’ve committed an offense. Anything you say or do can be used to charge you with something. Doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or not–simply being charged with something can seriously fuck up your life.
“Just act normal!” is incredibly STUPID advice. In a so-called normal interaction, if someone asks for your side of the story, you can ramble as much as you want. But if a police officer asks for your side of the story, you had better tread very very carefully. In a “normal” interaction, if someone puts his hands on you, you are allowed to run away or defend yourself. Not so with a police officer. In a normal interaction, you have civil rights. But when interacting with a police officer, rights don’t exist until proven otherwise by an investigation or court of law. Teacher might tell you differently because of what it says in the textbook, but that’s how it works in the real world.
In a world governed by “normal” behaviors, two men would know how wrong it is to tackle an 8-mo pregnant woman to the ground for the non-crime of refusing to identify herself. In a normal world, we would all agree how abnormal that behavior is. And yet I’m guessing many of the people in this thread don’t see it that way. “She shouldn’t have been such a sass-mouth!” they would say. But being a sass-mouth is not against the law either. It is normal to be sassy when the police aren’t doing their jobs.
When people say “just act normal” with the police, I wonder what “normal” is in their minds. Because in my mind, it is normal to get angry when the police overstep their boundaries and shit on our hard-earned civil rights. But getting angry can get your ass thrown in jail for three days. In my mind, it is normal to be nervous when you’ve been pulled over. But being nervous can get you shot. In my mind, it is normal to be afraid of the police when you know you “fit the profile” of any suspect that might come to mind. That fear may make you run away (Walter Scott knows this is a death sentence). That fear may may you resist (Eric Gardener knows this is a death sentence). And that fear may make you hold your hands out in a “bizarre” way, which invites further scrutiny and potential escalation. Maybe if a white guy hadn’t been in the front seat, the story would have ended differently.
The police officer had the opportunity to respect the OP’s “normal” behavior and shrug off any offense he might have taken away from it. But he blew it by being a dick.
By all means, do the opposite.
Yeah, just go ahead and reach for your ID. It’ll be fine.
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in my hand before the officer comes to a complete stop.
This definitely shows, there is a ways to go.
From the young white officer’s perspective, I can see where he might want to diffuse the situation, but clearly went about it all wrong.
Not sure if he was trying to be a jerk, or just came off as one. But I agree, the best way to have handled it would have been to just ask for my license and tell me what the offense was and move on.
I can also see that if someone is behaving weirdly, that he might be more suspicious (trained to suspect odd behavior), but as was suggested, this did nothing to make my friend feel more at ease with any future interactions.
I do shutter to think how bad the outcome could have been had my friend been alone or if one of the other black gentlemen from church had driven him home.
Thanks again for all the insights.
Are you genuinely confused about why this isn’t a conversation about you?
I had a chance to talk to my buddy last night about this. It is still weighing heavily on us both and of course for vastly different reasons.
One thing I had never really considered in all of this is a perceived level of severity. What I mean by that is, it does not matter what was in the cop’s mind, what matters is what was going through my friend’s mind as well as my own.
At no time have I ever been worried about being shot or anything during a traffic stop. I was taught to respect the police and that if I do so, it will all be fine. That if I am not doing anything illegal (other than the speeding or whatever that caused the stop), I will get a warning or a ticket and be on my merry way. Sure, I will be nervous and my heart my race and I might lament over how I have to come up with $300 to pay a speeding ticket, but that is the extent of it.
And honestly, I am fairly risk averse, so I do not believe I have ever faced death. Sure I have gotten scared for an instant when a wave is pushing me under, but I have always popped back up. Or if something has logged in my throat, I might have an instant of panic, but there has never been an extended fear of being harmed. Even when I was in the middle of wrecking a motorcycle or a car, those were instantaneous and no general belief that it could happen at any point in the future.
But in talking with my buddy, I realized that his experience is vastly different. As a husband and father, his chief concern is to return home safely. And if being as non-confrontational as he was, still generated such a negative reaction from the officer, any stop could become fatal.
I had said in my initial post that I wanted to tell him to put his hands down, but I was not going to presume to tell a grown man how to act in that situation. He said he wanted to tell me how to behave during the stop because he felt I was too casual (I left the truck running, did not turn on the dome light, did not take the keys out of the truck, did not tell him how to roll his window down, just sat there as if it was no big deal).
And then to realize that no only was it this interaction that was currently affecting him, but that knowing that in the course of the rest of his life, there are likely to be further interactions and that brings that fear again.
I told him what had been discussed on the board and the insights. I assured him that there was nothing he should have done differently to have a less contentious stop.
I told him about what was mentioned by at least one poster that the difference in normal interactions vs those with police. That normally, if someone were hassling him, he is on an even playing field and can push back. We have a fight or flight response, but that can get you shot and killed in interactions with the cops. So I could see during the stop that he was suppressing his desire to assert his rights and not show his ID. That he was suppressing his right to ask questions and seek answers to why the stop was going like that. All because he did not want to end up as the next story on the news.
I believe the majority of police officers are good people and do good things. But after seeing first hand how quickly an officer can escalate the situation and how someone that is not mature enough and mindful enough to suppress his fight or flight response could easily end up in an out of control situation, I do think we have a long road ahead to fix this issue.
“push back” might get you or him shot and killed in interactions with non-cops too. Best to try to avoid confrontation and de-escalate contentious situations, and not just with cops but with everyone.
Did you read the thread?
Because your friend’s bizarre behavior is probably what made the cops get him out of the car and tell him to repeatedly stop “acting weird”. I bet if he had sat calmly with his hands on his knees none of that would have happened. The cop may not have been perfect but your friend should really change his “around cops” behavior.
What bizarre behavior?
This is the definition of white privilege. A white person reaching into his pocket is getting his license and a non-white person is reaching for a weapon.