Pics.
It feels somewhat pedantic to say this so late in the thread, but I think Bricker is oversimplifying Grigg here. Grigg does not set forth a per se rule that a Terry stop cannot be performed based on a report of a completed misdemeanor. It says that the court (and by extension, therefore, the police officer on the street, without the luxury of time, legal research, and legal education) must perform a balancing test, weighing the “manifest interest in identifying the perpetrators of crime, whether the offense be minor or major,” against the “traditional and constitutionally preserved interest in personal security from governmental intrusion.” In doing so, the court/police must “assess the potential risk to public safety associated with the nature of the offense,” but that sole factor is not dispositive. In holding that the police were not justified in pulling over the defendant’s car on suspicion of having played music too loudly at some point earlier in the day (which was the offense at issue in Grigg), the Ninth Circuit also took into account that the police had readily-available, and less intrusive methods of ascertaining the defendant’s identity, which they did not pursue, such as running a license plate check on the car or questioning the residents of the place the defendant had just left regarding his identity.
In short, while you could certainly read Grigg as strongly disfavoring a stop based on a report of a completed misdemeanor, it’s still a case by case analysis, and I think that on the different facts of this case (as far as we now know them), a court might reasonably find that the police were justified. (Which, by the way, would be more than sufficient for any lawsuit contemplated by Ms Watts to founder on the shoals of qualified immunity).
Legal discussions aside, what I really, really wish people would take away from this thread is the realization/reminder that they should not be so quick to assume the truth of every inflammatory, one-sided initial allegation that they hear, even if (perhaps especially if) it fits perfectly with their own biases and beliefs.
No bank, nor any City attorney involved in the Daniele Watts incident, so what the fuck are you babbling about?
…unless they’re cops.
All the cops would’ve needed to do was take a look at the area where he’d been supposedly trespassing and determine whether a reasonable person should assume the area is private or public.
If they couldn’t make that assessment without calling the city and combing legal dictionaries, then you know what? Maybe they didn’t have enough evidence to accuse the guy of a crime. Maybe their actions been limited to saying, “Hey bub, you might wanna keep moving along. There seems to be a problem here.”
If that kind of analysis is too much to expect from law enforcement, God help America.
ETA: Where is this “after hours” nonsense coming from? And he wasn’t in a lobby either.
[QUOTE=Fotheringay-Phipps]
These cops are not lawyers, and even if they were they don’t have the luxury of searching the net for case history on legal nuances every time they are making a decision as to what to do.
[/QUOTE]
I’m sorry, but the very least we can ask and expect of the police is that they know the law of the land, seeing as their job is to enforce it. I don’t expect them to know the whole book, or to be able to quote verse and scripture on every law and ordinance of the city they police in, or the Federal regulations on short lobsters, or even to know that there’s such a thing as an illegally short lobster in the first place.
However, seeing as stopping people for a wee chat is what they’re going to be doing on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, small details such as “people in the State are not actually required to identify themselves or provide ID (until they’re charged ?), much less it being grounds for an arrest” seems like a handy little tidbit to fucking pick up circa day 1 of field training. It’s not arcane lore, it’s the very basic framework of their job.
Not at all. I think there are a couple of different issues going on here:
(1) Was the cop legally in the right to persist in asking for her ID, and then detaining her. The answer seems to be “no”.
(2) What does this imply about the cop? Here is where I think it’s important to realize that while the answer to (1) turns out to be “no”, it’s not “no, of course not, no similar action could ever POSSIBLY be legal”, it’s “no, but only after a lot of thought”. Which means that it’s very plausible that the cop honestly thought he was legally within his rights. And in fact there could very easily be very similar situations (cops summoned to a scene due to a phone call, then question people who resemble those identified in the phone call) in which the cops ARE legally within their rights to ask for IDs and insist on getting them. And in fact in many of those situations it would be that cop’s DUTY to do so. So while it’s obviously very important for cops to actually know what the law is and respect it, there’s a huge difference to me between a cop who just randomly does whatever he wants whenever he wants because he assumes his badge means he’ll get away with it, and a cop who oversteps his authority but in a way which is understandable due to a legal situation complicated enough that it has clearly fooled MANY educated commentators. (Of course, it’s possible that this particular cop in fact IS a wanna-be-jack-booted-thug who just happens to have stumbled into a situation in which his actions were ALMOST legal purely by chance…)
(3) Finally, there’s the question of what we think of Ms. Watts’s actions. Here I think there are a couple of different angles:
(3a) Were her actions understandable?
(3b) Were her actions wise as far as her self-interest was concerned
(3c) Were her actions likely to lead to increased social justice
(3d) Were her actions “nice”, for want of a better word (and does it matter?)
My quick responses are:
(3a) It’s hard for me as a white man to really try to understand what growing up black in America is like, so I don’t feel qualified to pass judgment
(3b) I’d argue clearly not. If the cop is some kind of corrupt stereotypically racist bad cop, then being load and abusive is just going to make him MOREso. If he’s a saint, then you’re not gaining anything over asserting your rights in a calm and respectful fashion. And if he’s somewhere in the middle, you risk pushing him from treating-you-respectfully to not.
(3c) Possibly… but again, the same result would be MUCH more effective with calm but stubborn resistance. If you actually want to change people’s minds about the interactions that cops and black people have, a video clip of a stereotypically entitled obnoxious person is going to change a LOT fewer minds than someone demanding in a dignified and respectful fashion that their rights be respected
(3d) I think the answer is pretty clearly that she was NOT nice. And I think it’s crucial to point out that from the descriptions I’ve read, she was not nice long before the cop did anything that was illegal or over the line. It would be one thing if she was dealing with him in a basically decent fashion, and then he demanded her ID and refused to let her leave (which as we now know was illegal), and then she responded to that in a less-than-calm-and-dignified fashion. But instead she was apparently hostile and combative from the first moment. So… does that matter? Not if it’s a question of “what were her rights”, certainly. As others have pointed out, being a jerk in no way decreases your constitutional protections. But it’s pretty much human nature in a situation like this for our reactions to the actions of the individuals involved to become in a sense proxies for our reactions to the larger societal issues.
Well… no.
If he was in a private area:
(1) it’s still an area open to the public
(2) so the police would also have to have some reason to believe he was told to depart
(3) by someone authorized to do so
And at that point, I agree they would have been entitled to briefly detain him.
But since California has no law requiring a person to identify himself if detained, the police still had no legal power to compel him to identify himself.
If my boss locks me up my office at 5pm until I finish a ream of TSP reports, should I remain calm and respectful lest I invite more punishment on my head? Or is it okay for me to yell at him so that he isn’t under the false impression that I consent to his mistreatment. It goes against my self-interest to make it easy for him to mistreat me, because it increases the likelihood he will keep the damn lock on the door instead of letting me free.
While it’s nice to think that being meek and mild is always the prefered solution when confronted with an intrustive cop, I think it’s unfair to criticize people for not adopting that stance as a matter of habit. Having your rights violated is viscerally unpleasant thing, so if someone snaps when that happens, I’m not getting this impulse to fault them for that.
No she wasn’t nice. When I step on my cat’s tail accidentally, she isn’t too nice either. Only you and a few others seem to think that this matters. If she sues the LAPD, do you really think her niceness or lack thereof will be entered as evidence?
[QUOTE=you with the face]
While it’s nice to think that being meek and mild is always the prefered solution when confronted with an intrustive cop, I think it’s unfair to criticize people for not adopting that stance as a matter of habit. Having your rights violated is viscerally unpleasant thing, so if someone snaps when that happens, I’m not getting this impulse to fault them for that.
[/QUOTE]
Excluded middle here. There is a middle ground between being meek and mild and pulling your forelock and flying completely off the handle. You catch more bees with honey than bile and all that.
Not at all. But being a bit less abrasive and basically identifying herself might have had this whole thing blow over (or, failing that, simply and calmly explaining her rights and then asking to speak to her lawyer as Bricker suggested earlier), despite the sex in an open car thingy, with no fuss and no muss. I really, truly don’t get why this is so hard to do. I DO get why, after basically having sex with her boyfriend in a car and being told they were seen that she would reflexively lash out at the cops when they showed up to investigate. She really DID have something to hide, after all (though she didn’t seem concerned with that when giving the show earlier to the general public), even if what she and her boyfriend did wasn’t a felony or anything like that. And it has brought all of this up about peoples rights and the limitations of the police to require someone to give them their ID. I honestly didn’t know that the police couldn’t ask for and require one to produce that, so I learned a lot from this…and a bunch of others did too (some people in this thread not withstanding :p).
I hope she does take this to court, but I’d guess that there is enough gray area here and enough extenuating circumstances that it probably won’t happen. Still, it would be good.
You’re not real good with words, are you? I mean, it doesn’t seem to matter to you much that words have definitions; you just use them however you think they should be used. It’s cute in a child. Are you a child?
(bolding mine)
Who are you referring to with that bolded part?
If they are to be effective at law enforcement, they should know what the laws are, especially the laws that govern what they can and cannot do in the course of their duties.
:eek:
Wow.
You’re a fucking lunatic.
What a bizarre analogy, but… if your boss locks you in, then you should CALMLY refuse to do any work and CALMLY inform him that you are calling his boss, and the police, and the better business bureau, and the press, in some order. If your boss is insane enough to literally lock you into the building after working hours are done, then getting confrontational and shouty just increases the odds that he pulls out a gun and kills you, or something along those lines.
There’s a reason they had sit-ins at lunch counters during the civil rights era, not shout-abusive-names-at-the-guy-who-owns-the-lunch-counter-ins.
I love that these posts were literally back to back.
I see a lot of you guys saying things like this, but I don’t see how it’s relevant in this case. The problem with the cops was always that they overstepped their authority. The racism angle was entirely on the people reporting the issue, not the cop.
The only thing I’ve learned from this thread is that Smapti won’t stop even when proven wrong, and that F-P’s racism is even deeper than I thought.
Also that apparently there are people who think overstepping your authority is some light thing, instead of something to be fought against as strong as possible. No wonder cops so often are so ignorant–they don’t have to worry about it because, if it’s “reasonable” people are going to excuse them.
Authority only works in a democracy when it is strictly limited. Overstepping authority is not a small thing, but a gross affront. The fact that this cop didn’t know he didn’t have the right to arrest this woman is a horrible thing, as it means he’s likely harassed people like this before.
Yes, cops are only human, but they are also like doctors and should be severely punished when they mess up. Because even a slight messup is an affront to liberty.
(Is enough about justice for you, Bricker?)
Totally ironic that you would use this example. The reason they had calm and respectful sit-ins had nothing to do with appeasing racist cops and lunch counter owners. It had all to do with appealing to a public racistly inclined to see anyone with brown skin taking a stand against government-sanctioned oppressed as “self-entitled” (read uppity), obnoxious, hysterical bitches/jerks/assholes. Do these adjectives sound familiar to you? They should because you’ve used them in this thread. And despite their heroic efforts, they were still called those adjectives and largely dismissed. It took death, murder, and mahem to happen before real policy changes occured that enabled black folks to live more freely.
Civil rights protesters spent a lot of time training and practicing so that they could suppress any sign of human emotion while they took the abuse they did. I think its sickening that you feel somehow entitled to that superhuman stoicism before you can give two fucks about injustice.
Any policy change that can only be implemented through “death, murder, and mayhem” is not worth implementing.
The death, murder and mayhem was happening TO the people fighting for civil rights, not BY them.
It took those actions for the general public to get behind the victims and see how bad things really were.
I only acknowledge being wrong when I’m wrong.