monstro, other stuff occurred between “I live here” and the pepper-spray, right? It would be helpful if you read the police report. I’m not saying it’s gospel, but it contains more assertions of fact than the news reports do, including the sequence of events that the police are claiming occurred prior to their use of pepper spray to subdue Currie, from the perspectives of each LEO involved.
As for “polite, courteous, non-humiliating” these are difficult to determine out of context, aren’t they? Is there a non-humiliating way to detain someone in their own home? Or should we be asking rather “did the cops exacerbate the situation through abusive language and rough treatment?” I’d be interested in your critique of how they reportedly handled things.
Are you saying that being made to sit down is an onerous imposition? Or that it’s improper for police to ensure in such a way that a possible intruder stays put while they establish his identity and his permission to be in the house?
He was left -initially- unrestrained and was asked to sit down while officers made sure the house was safe and followed up with the home owners. In which multiverse is this unreasonable?
Really, don’t establish his right to be there before leaving him in the house, don’t finish checking the house for other people/hostages, or for damage, or for open safes and a pile of loot on a blanket in the back bedroom? Yes, there’s no downside for the police taking that approach! I’m sure hypothetical homeowners who were actually being burgled would be OK hearing “Well, we didn’t want to make the young man uncomfortable, and he seemed like a nice enough kid.”
OK. Where and how? Who stands where, and how does your proposed procedure both minimize contact with Currie and also establish the safety of people and property in the house? They hadn’t yet established whether others were present or whether anything was amiss on the property; how should they have done that in a more appropriate way?
Look, Currie seems to have reacted badly and belligerently to the police. While the anger and humiliation is understandable, I find it unacceptable to place the responsibility for Currie’s behavior on the cops instead of on Currie himself.
“How might the police act to reduce or prevent angry reactions from subjects” is an interesting academic question and has some procedural implications, but it isn’t completely relevant to the questions “Were the police justified in their initial entry, in their questioning and in their detention of Currie, and was Sgt. Taylor justified in his restraint of Currie and in his use of pepper spray upon being resisted by Currie?”
He got pepper-sprayed because he yelled at the officer.
He’d already been frisked, so he didn’t have any lethal weapons on him.
It’s clear from Taylor’s report that the kid wasn’t responding favorable to the admonitions to stop cursing, so the officer should have allowed him to loudly but non-violently fume while the others searched the house. All that time he spent trying to get Currie to “behave” could have been spent verifying his story.
I’m not a police officer, but like a police officer I am a public servant. On a rare occasion, I have to deal with angry citizens. They have always contacted me by email, so I’m lucky. Other coworkers aren’t so lucky and have been yelled at in person (one was even held hostage at gunpoint). We are not authorized to pepper-spray people who yell at us and call us names, though. I support giving the police more authority than the typical government employee, but not that much more.
Yes, Currie threatened violence with the typical machismo of his age demographic and he used bad words, as anyone who is pissed off tends to do. He’s not going to win the Emily Post Social Graces scholarship any time soon, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t give the state the right to punish him for yelling at an officer. And that’s what Taylor’s account adds up to, IMHO.
Now think about that. The cops are in the house, they don’t know if he’s a burglar or a resident. They don’t know if he’s alone or if there are others upstairs. They don’t know if he’s about to pick up some item in the room and attack them, or if he’s passive.
The first thing the cops do is take control the situation, and if that means asking the guy to sit while they get to the bottom of the matter, than that’s probably the LEAST intrusive thing the cops could do at this time. Certainly being asked to sit isn’t an abuse of police power, or even slightly humiliating.
This is why we have warrants, right? If I leave my front door open while I take out the garbage and a police officer decides this look suspicious and walks into my bedroom, where I have a mountain of cash spread out on my bed, he’s not allowed to do shit to me about this, right? Or no? Because if not, then I need to call my congress critter.
I really hope that it takes more than a phone call from any joe-schmo to give the police license to come into a house and look for the elements of a crime. I am law-abiding. I have no contraband to hide. But just the idea that I could be jammed up over something innocent (like maybe I won that pile of cash at a casino…and now under civil forteiture, it’s suddenly no longer mine) makes me very uncomfortable about giving the police the right to do as they did in this case.
My take of the report is that it wasn’t being told to sit down that pissed Currie off. It was being told to calm down and stop cursing AND sit down. The officer wouldn’t even allow him to express anger, and that is what made Currie react the way he did.
Not only was the guy being detained against his will in his own house, he was being told how to react to it. And then he’s punished for his reaction.
I understand having sympathy with the officers, because they didn’t know the kid was innocent. But I don’t understand why people don’t have more sympathy for Currie. From his position, being instructed to stay quiet in his own fucking house was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I haven’t ever been that angry before, but boy, I can totally understand it. I just wish more people would.
So, IYHO Taylor used the spray as punishment and had no grounds to fear violence from the 200 pound belligerent 18 year old who couldn’t establish his right to be in the house and who was standing “3 inches from [Taylor’s] face” while threatening to “beat your fucking ass”?
Great. Glad to see your experience as a public servant allows you to place yourself in Sgt. Taylor’s shoes so profoundly and with such confidence. I myself would’ve been fearful of Currie and thinking that he -and I and my colleagues- would be safer if I placed him in restraints.
I don’t know what you do for a living, but are you allowed to pepper-spray customers who yell in your face?
Because if having a person yell three inches away from your face was a crime worthy of pepper-spray, every retailer would give their employers permission to go to town on people.
If someone yelled in my face and I sprayed them with pepper-spray, I’m pretty sure I could get in trouble for assaulting that person. And I’m a person who can’t fight herself out of a paperbag, so pepper-spray would be my only defense.
The 18 y/o isn’t required to prove he had a right to be in the house. It was his fucking house he had every right to be there. The officer made an assumption of guilt which is why the whole incident was a problem to begin with.
A racist neighbor saw a black man enter the house. The police accepted the casual racism as fact and we’re racist in their assumptions. If the neighbor saw a Hispanic woman enter the house all the involved parties would have operated under the assumption it was a house cleaner. Maybe the should have looked for signs of burglary or forced entry rather than skin color.
Currie’s anger was understandable and your interpretation of the sticking point is entirely plausible. Now tell me, did expression of that anger legitimately require repeatedly threatening the police with violence?
In what fucking world should the officers ignore direct threats of violence against them by a full grown, unrestrained individual who, as you say, they don’t know belongs there, and who has been reported by a neighbor as an intruder into the house? For how long should they ignore them? Should they continue to ignore them if the individual stands up and attempts physical intimidation, as Currie did?
You want to focus on Taylor’s demands that Currie stop using the abusive language and continue to sit, but you ignore the clear, adult choice Taylor gave Currie: stop the abusive language and the threats or I’ll put you in cuffs. Having an unruly subject sit instead of stand is proper. Telling him to stop cursing and threatening you is proper.
You have sympathy for Currie, but you don’t appear to have any expectations of him. He’s an adult; there are standards of behavior for adults that don’t allow full blown expression of anger in certain circumstances, because of their effect on other members of society. Throwing a tantrum in an interaction with law officers is not acceptable and can only be interpreted by responsible officers as an unstable mental state, placing them on higher alert when dealing with you.
I sympathize with Currie’s anger. I do not accept his display of that anger as appropriate in the context. And IME I don’t believe letting him rant and rave would’ve calmed him down or stabilized the situation.
The officers were required to establish Currie’s right to be there. That’s why they looked at his ID and the photos on the wall. It’s why they attempted to run his DL # and were contacting the home owners. It’s why they didn’t initially put handcuffs on Currie while they did all of this; because they did not make an assumption of guilt.
Possibly the neighbor wouldn’t have called 911 in that instance. Who knows? But if he had, you really think the police wouldn’t have entered the home and questioned the Hispanic woman?
But here’s the problem. The police in this case weren’t acting unlawfully. Yet you seem to advocate that Mr. Currie was within his rights to resist them and their actions, even to the point of physical violence.
It seems to me, then, that you’re not necessarily consistent in your viewpoints.
So you’re saying that the police officer is effectuating an arrest against someone who committed no crime?
Yes, they have to submit to the arrest. And then sue the fuck out of the police officer and the city. Because physically resisting the police, even when they’re wrong, has more bad consequences than good. The fact the police officer was wrong to pepper spray the person doesn’t mean that person gets to beat the shit out of the police officer, or, if the police officer has the upper hand, get the shit beat out of them in return. We, as a society, agreed that things are better settled in a courtroom than on the streets with extremely angry people and guns.
As I said, a vast majority of states have agreed with me, that you simply don’t get to resist arrest just because you think you’re innocent. Because the consequences are far worse when you do, than if you don’t.
You’re kinda fuzzy on the whole “officer of the law” versus “retailer” or “civil service employee” distinction aren’t you? If what I do for a living doesn’t include “law enforcement” then I don’t have permission to pepper spray angry customers who yell at me. On the other hand I may, if I’m threatened by that angry person and in fear for my safety, and if I’m in a state or country which allows it, have the right to pepper spray them. You know why? Because then I’m defending myself against a threatened act of violence against me which has every appearance of imminent realization. You have the same right by the way, again depending on your location legally, but I wouldn’t dispute your ethical right to defend yourself from direct threats of violence in any case.
And if I’m a police officer in, say, North Carolina, and if hypothetically a person I’m detaining under probable cause suspicion of criminal activity yells in my face, won’t comply with my instructions, repeatedly threatens me and approaches me while doing so, guess what specific non-lethal response I have every legal and ethical right to employ?
Why would you take that right away from LEO’s for Og’s sake?! If you and I can legally defend ourselves when directly threatened why would you not want a cop to have that right during the performance of his or her duties? I’m a bit boggled by this attitude.
You’re seeing this as some sort of violation of Currie’s rights, but which right? There’s no Constitutional right to threaten a cop with violence, or to threaten anyone else with violence. You definitely have a right to curse and rant, to insult and deride and to otherwise talk trash, and again, if that’s all Currie did, then Sgt. Taylor was in the wrong.
But I’m betting the family’s not going to dispute the accuracy of that report regarding the verbal threats of violence and the nonverbal intimidation.
But Officer Taylor does not say that he felt threatened or fearful in his report. He says Currie got close to his face and yelled “I don’t give a fuck!”, but he says nothing about Currie striking him or threatening him personally prior to pulling out the pepper spray.
The pepper spray was gratuitous. The order he gave Currie was to sit down or be handcuffed. It wasn’t sit down or be pepper sprayed and handcuffed. Any person would resist being manhandled after being fucking pepper-sprayed in the face like that. If Currie had done more than strike an arm, he may have given the officer just cause to kill him. And that would be very tragic, considering the circumstances.
It’s the escalation of an already fucked-up situation that I object to.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with Currie being handcuffed after ignoring the order to sit down. It would bother me, but not enough to post to this thread. It’s the pepper-spray and the handcuffing that really gets to me. Pepper-spray doesn’t exactly have a calming effect on people. It blinds people and inflicts severe pain–two things that can make an out-of-control person even more uncontrollable. Which would seem to me the very last thing an officer in Taylor’s position would want to do.
Factually incorrect. Did you actually read the report? Taylor may or may not have felt fearful (not a necessity for nonlethal actions) but his section of the report, along with the other two officers’ reports, cites repeated specific threats by Currie. Currie stuck Taylor’s arm when Taylor attempted to place him in handcuffs, causing Taylor to drop the cuffs. This is what prompted Taylor to use the spray. Yes, the last reported utterance by Currie prior to Taylor’s attempt to cuff him was “I don’t give a fuck!” But that’s not the only thing he’s reported as saying.
It’s hard to believe you’re this confused about the sequence of events, but here’s a breakdown: Taylor ordered Currie to stay seated and calm down or he’d be handcuffed. THEN Currie jumped out of the seat and got in Taylor’s face. THEN Taylor attempted to handcuff Currie. THEN Currie resisted the ‘manhandling’, striking Taylor’s arm and causing him to drop the cuffs. THEN Taylor attempted to grab Currie’s arm and Currie again broke the grip. THEN Taylor employed the pepper spray.
Please. Read. The. Report. Taylor attempted to handcuff Currie after Currie ignored the order to remain seated, repeatedly threatened violence, jumped up and got in Taylor’s face. When Taylor attempted the cuffing, Currie refused to allow himself to be cuffed, striking Taylor’s arm. This happened before the pepper spray.
If it made an out of control person even more uncontrollable, it wouldn’t be effective, would it? No, Taylor used it because he needed to restrain a suspect who had become violently resistive and explicitly threatening. And when he used it, he no longer had difficulty applying the cuffs. Because of that severe pain and blindness which took away Currie’s ability to fight.
Had Currie not resisted and not struck out at Taylor, Taylor wouldn’t have sprayed him. Better yet, had Currie acted like a pissed off adult rather than a pissed off child, the cuffs wouldn’t have been used either.
If the cops had been in the house improperly or if they’d established Currie’s bona fides prior to the confrontation, I’d join you in some sort of condemnation of their actions, but the police did not create this confrontation.
I suspected an honest error. Sorry I was rough about it.
I agree btw that we have a general issue in this country with the use of force and with the fairly common use of nonlethal tools by police to ‘punish’ noncompliance, and that’s got to stop. I just don’t think this incident is representative of that problem, and I think there are other incidents with far more egregiously terrible consequences that are illustrative of the problem.
It is absolutely 100% wrong for a cop to pepper spray someone who is not resisting, pretty much no matter what. So any time a cop pepper sprays someone who is complying with lawful police orders, I will absolutely condemn that action.
That’s a separate question from when it’s permissible to detain someone, which is related to, but not identical to (as far as I know) when it’s permissible to handcuff someone. But I suspect that there’s a connection in practice, which is that people who don’t think that the police have the right to detain them peacefully, and resist that detention, will end up handcuffed and pepper-sprayed. And then you end up with a situation which, if described from one perspective sounds absolutely outrageous, and from another perspective was just standard and uncontroversial police action.
Absolutely. Although I feel like there’s a big difference between “I believe that X is wrong with society, so I will go peacefully do the opposite of X, knowing full well that I will be arrested, and when I am arrested I will hang onto a fence for as long as possible in an attempt to make a point, before I get hauled off to jail” and “this cop pulled me over for not wearing a seatbelt, and he kept asking me to do things that I didn’t think he had the right to ask me to do, so I refused to do them and tried to fight back, and eventually he pepper sprayed me and handcuffed me. I’m a civil rights hero!”
As for the actual topic of this thread, a few comments:
(1) It’s entirely probable (although not certain) that the neighbor phoning in the initial report was racist. But I don’t really see how that matters, how the cops can be reasonably expected to in any way base their actions on that. When people phone in reports of potential crimes should we keep that person on the line and quiz them until we have decided that they absolutely positively would have reported the crime if the race of the participants were all switched? If the neighbor had instead reported a very very tall bald white man that they had never seen before and didn’t think lived there because they’d met the family, it would still be reasonable for the police to suspect a burglary
(2) As to whether I think the police response was “bad” (to simplify) or not, it really comes down to something that we don’t know, which is what really happened between the cops and the guy, particularly the tone and pace and so forth. From the description we have, it’s possible that the cops were basically calm and professional, and the guy was abusive and confrontational and then became violent. It’s also possible that the cops were rude and verbally abusive and basically lured him into the slightest physical response, no matter how non-threatening, which they then used as an excuse to pepper spray and handcuff him. Another situation in which having lapel cams would be useful.
Where have I said this? I said I don’t fault him for resisting when 1) gratiutously bossed around by cops who 2) needlessly invaded his space in a threatening manner and 3) treated him like a criminal without 4) provocation on his part.
I also said that if he’d killed the cops upon them barging in the house and scaring the shit out him, I would be okay with that. But that was the only part of the situation that I condoned violence from Currie.
Resistance does not necessarily mean violence. You are conflating these two things.
Because you are too busy reacting to what I’m writing rather than reading for comprehension.
If this is your philosophy, then you must have had a problem with how the Civil Rights Movement conducted itself. People marching in the streets were ordered to leave by cops, but they refused. Not even when the firehoses were whipped out. There would’ve been no sit-ins either, if people subscribed to your “submit then sue” school of thought.
You can’t sue if a cop has killed you. If someone finds themselves up against a cop hell-bent on killing them, they have two choices: 1) forfeit their life because…WE MUST ALWAYS SUBMIT TO AGENTS OF THE GOVERNMENT or 2) fight. You’re basically saying you’re in camp #1. I’m in the second camp, and believe society would be better off if everyone was.
Depends on how you define “bad” and “good”. If you enjoy the “rule of law” no matter how oppressively it is applied to minorities, then yeah, all those resisters are causing “bad” consequences for you; it fucks with your status quo. If you enjoy living in a society free of harassment, torture, and police abuse, then the consequences are “good”. Even if it means pain for the individual, in the short-term.
I have a valid reason for disagreeing with you; history clearly shows power in resisting abusive systems. History also clearly shows the danger in not resisting abusive systems. Nazi Germany comes to mind. Do you have any examples to support putting all of our eggs in the judicial system while submitting to murder and mayhem from law enforcement? Why can’t we do both?
Why focus on beating the shit out of the police officer? Would a shove be acceptable? What about a defensive push? Is the person who is pepper-sprayed out of line for even attempting to put space between themselves and the cop by gee…running away? Resistance comes in many forms.
If you object to even the slightest posture of self-defense, including fleeing, then we are inhabiting different planets in different universes, and it’s pointless to even discuss this anymore with each other. You will never see why I think blind submission is a horrible horrible thing, and I will never see why you think it is in the best interest of society.