I have no trouble believing the police exceeded their authority based on the description of the crime and the ruling that unobserved misdemeanors do not justify a Terry Stop. I do think this had zero to do with race. At least on the part of the police officers. Whether it had anything to do with race is up in the air with respect to the complaintant, and undeniable with respect to Watts.
After listening to the audio, I have to identify my two favorite bits. First is Watts being on the phone with her father, choosing to go to him for advice. A person who, by her own description, has had “countless” bad experiences with the police. Yes, that would be MY go to person for advice.
Second, the very end of the audio, where the cop is apparently talking to her boyfriend and saying “I’d have been gone already” and the BF is “Ohhh, God” as it cuts off.
Right, all the best prostitutes have sex with their clients in broad daylight in front of witnesses. Which, to be fair, is probably breaking some sort of law even if money didn’t change hands…
Do you believe they would have treated her any differently if she had shown her ID?
What I want to know is, if we have video from four different angles of the Ferguson shooting, where’s the video of this? The witnesses had the time to call it in, but nobody pulled out a cell phone and took a picture? I’m guessing we’ll be seeing pictures & youtube soon, but this is taking longer than I expected. If, in fact, that’s what happened.
I’m not getting the leap from PDA to prostitution. Hookers and the men who pay them generally go about their transactions surreptitiously, not in broad daylight on a busy street.
Prostitutes also rarely look like they are running Saturday morning errands in their pajamas. There is nothing about the way she was dressed that suggested she was advertising sex.
So the totality of the evidence doesn’t support prostitution.
I think the cops were summoned to the area because someone reported public lewdness, but when they arrived and observed no lewdness, they came up with prostitution. But there was no evidence of prostitution. If she’d showed them her ID and lo and behold, prostitution had turned up on her record (even from way back when), how much you wanna bet she’d be hauled off to the station and fingerprinted? Maybe the charge would’ve been dropped, but since that is a greater inconvenience than the inconvenience essentially caused by asserting her rights in this instance, we are not in the position to judge her as stupid.
Unless there’s a crime being committed, I don’t view that as a legitimate function of a person authorized by the state to enforce the law with use of deadly force. The cops should not be “asking” you to so anything unless what you are doing now is illegal.
It’s important to understand the different levels of suspicion that can exist and what kinds of citizen/police interaction they justify.
Even with no suspicion, police are permitted to approach anyone and ask them questions. This is known as a “consensual encounter.” It doesn’t implicate the Fourth Amendment at all, because it’s completely voluntary. As long as the citizen is free to disregard the police inquiries and go about his business, no seizure has occurred.
If the police have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of a felony, or of certain misdemeanors involving public safety, they can briefly detain (“seize”) a person to investigate and either confirm or dispel their suspicion. Reasonable, articulable suspicion exists when there are specific, articulable facts that give rise to a belief that a crime might be in progress.
To arrest a person, the police must have “probable cause” to believe a felony was committed. Probable cause exists when the totality of facts known to the police supports the belief that a crime has likely occurred.
And of course to ultimately convict someone of a crime, there must be proof beyond a reasonable doubt as to each and every element of the crime.
The police exceeded their authority because the report they were given described a misdemeanor, not a felony, and when they arrived they did not see that misdemeanor in progress. So the rule is that a completed misdemeanor that doesn’t involve a risk to public safety cannot serve as the basis for reasonable suspicion.
For this reason, police were certainly free to ask the pair questions…as long as the pair were free to disregard those questions and go about their business. But the moment the police seized the young lady, they implicated the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The courts have decided that a seizure for a completed misdemeanor based only on reasonable, articulable suspicion is not reasonable.
Limited to just the circumstances Bricker stated I don’t see that as abusing their authority. Even a slight change such as the officer placing his hand on his holster, or speaking in a threatening tone would change that. Imagine a person carrying a heavy object and about to trip over a curb he couldn’t see. Should the police be precluded from saying “Watch out!” because the person might believe they were being threatened with arrest? There has to be some level of reasonableness applied. I think the problem is the number of times police do exceed their authority resulting in public distrust. Police should be trained in how to be polite and serve the public without instilling such fear.
The first I heard of the story, she admitted to sitting on his lap and making out and then someone came out to tell them to stop putting on a show. That would indicate PDA rather than sex to me. They were observed using a tissue to clean up in the new revelations but no one saw anyone pulling up their pants?
The CNN article states in the first paragraph: “Legal experts say the officer did have the right to request identification if he suspected illegal behavior.” Then says nothing else about who those legal experts are or what the legal justification is. Nice work!
And I was commenting on what they should have done, not the legality of their actions. The police have pretty wide latitude in terms of stopping people, but that doesn’t mean all of those stops are wise. In this case they seem to have undertaken an overzealous pursuit of a misdemeanor offense and embarrassed their department in the process.
Christ I hate that sort of bullshit – “oh, so in you’re world police can handcuff anybody they want for any reason, but doubly so if it’s as a result of an anonymous tip” – see, I can do it too.