Do you actually believe that yelling at cops, threatening to kick their asses, or even just accusing them of racism is going to create this society?
Personally, I think the opposite, reacting to normal police activity this way creates more bad behavior on the part of police because it sets up a confrontational environment before anything even starts. If they come in with a bad attitude towards minorities, you’re not changing it, you’re reinforcing it.
If you want to change harassment, torture and abuse, you don’t do it at the beat cop level, you do it at the police chief level, at the training level.
Yes, when it prompts them to go full throttle in their abusiveness, in ways that would shock the denial out of their staunchest defenders. It happened in the 60’s. It is happening today.
We would not be talking about Currie’s situation if he hadn’t “talked back” and been pepper-sprayed. There is power in that.
As I said, you seem to advocate … . I’ve attempted, numerous times now, to get you to explain your position in more detail, even including hypotheticals for you to work with, and yet, here we are numerous pages and posts later, and you still haven’t even attempted to. And you insist that somehow I can’t “read for comprehension” for not being able to read your mind.
I very specifically said: “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.” Right there, I point out the difference between resisting and resisting to the point of physical violence. Clearly there is a difference, and I’m not conflating the two.
If you don’t want to offer an opinion on the propriety of Mr. Currie’s actions or the appropriate level of resistance to a lawful investigation, then don’t. But don’t blame me for not being able to read your mind.
You seem to have a problem distinguishing between passive civil disobedience and resisting arrest, threatening violence, and striking a police officer. As has been pointed out numerous times already in this thread, most of the civil rights movement was founded upon passive resistance, not active resistance of yelling, threatening physical violence, and striking officers trying to do their job.
And there is something to be said for the difference between Jim Crow laws and burglary. But nuance may not be for you.
Can you grab me a telescope, because you moved those goalposts a fucking mile and a half.
You asked me about an officer arresting someone for a crime they didn’t commit, and are now trying to expand that to a police officer murdering a civilian. It’s patently ridiculous.
I don’t think that violent reaction to police officers attempting to do their job does anything to forward living in a society free of harassment, torture and police abuse. What it does is make those police officers less trusting and more likely to resort to reacting with hostility and guns drawn.
Now you’ve thrown in Nazi’s to go with the civil rights movement? Damn, I’m having trouble keeping up with all your strawmen.
Again with the “murder and mayhem” from law enforcement. I’m all for resisting murder by police officers.
But that’s not even close to what we’re been talking about. When you find yourself having to reach for extremes, build strawmen, and resort to inflamed rhetoric, it might be time to reconsider your debate style.
Why do you advocate the shooting of police officers who are just trying to do their jobs!!! That’s what the Nazi’s and Aryan Nation did!!!
Does that response of mine indicate to you how difficult it is to respond to your rhetoric? I advocate the resolution of potentially explosive violent confrontations between police officers and people with passive resistance and resolution through the court system, and you go to me hating the civil rights movement and refusing to stand up to Nazism.
It’s just silly.
But, in a last ditch effort to provide you with some resolution, I will say I support passive resistance in the face of perceived injustice done by the police. I do not, however, support threatening violence to police officers, refusal to remain calm, and physically striking a police officer to avoid a lawful handcuffing.
Honestly, I think most of us are shaking our heads at him and wondering what was so hard about just sitting down and allowing the cops to finish investigating.
As I read it, the cops varied in their interpretation of Currie’s level of anger. The cop who included the most vituperative and threatening language in his report is the same one who sprayed Currie, and he claimed Currie was the most violent when there were no other witnesses to support his claim.
I’m suspicious.
And I’ll repeat: the cops did nothing to de-escalate the situation. They didn’t explain to him that they’d had a report of a break-in and offer a pre-emptive apology. Contrary to what others have said, I don’t think they ever asked Currie how to get in touch with his adoptive parents (i.e., the house owners): it sounded to me like the parents found out about the attack on their son from other sources. Their verbal interactions with him consisted of:
-Yelling that they were the police
-Demanding he stick his hands up
-Asking him why his ID showed a different address (essentially an accusation that he’s a lying robber)
-Asking him why he’s not in any family pictures (holy shit, dude, that’s a burn)
-Telling him to stop cussing.
Can you not see how they could have included some more verbal interactions with him that would make him feel less terrified, humiliated, and angry, and how these additional verbal interactions would not in any way compromise their safety, even if he were a lying robber?
Finally, it’s interesting to me that with three cops in the house and one resident/robber, they decide Currie can safely be handled by one cop downstairs. If he really were on the edge of a violent explosion, all three cops badly misread his body language at the point where two cops went upstairs.
When Taylor (?) sprayed Currie, he claimed that CUrrie was shouting at him. But the cops upstairs just reported that they heard Taylor shout “spray!” and came downstairs to see. Did they not hear these shouts?
Be suspicious. All three reported the same behavior and language, however.
The mother arrived on the scene while the EMS were decontaminating Currie. It’s in that police report we’re discussing. It’s not explicitly mentioned whether she was contacted by police or whether she arrived on the scene without prior knowledge. Reading between the lines, I think it’s the latter (she had no knowledge the police had come to the house), but I’m not certain. In any case, they did attempt to further ID Currie prior to cuffing him, an attempt which Currie allegedly disrupted by his shouting.
You left out
-Advising Currie to stay calm until they can “figure out what [is] going on.” That may seem minor to you, but it indicates to me they were not “essentially” accusing him of lying. Also, the report does not say they asked Currie about the photos, it just includes Officer Stancil’s comment that he wasn’t in any of the photos.
Can you see how it’s difficult to talk reasonably with someone screaming at you and threatening you? At what point did the cops have an opportunity, in the sequence of events as reported by all three responding officers, to use that conciliatory and calming language? Was it before Sgt. Taylor tried to calm Currie down while they “figured” things out? In between Currie’s shouts of defiance and threats to beat their asses and have his dad beat their asses?
Or they all three assumed that if they could get him to sit still and show him they weren’t going to arrest or mistreat him, he’d calm down and they could go about establishing the facts.
Sigh. I wish people would stop talking confidently about what happened while indicating they haven’t actually read the report thoroughly. You’re confused about who did the spraying, but you think you know exactly what the other two reported. Shockingly, you’re wrong about that.
Officer Lane reports: “Officer Stancil continued into a bedroom while I covered the main area of the upstairs. It was at this time I heard yelling coming from down stairs. Currie was saying ‘get off me man’ and at that time I heard Sgt. Taylor yell ‘spray.’ I heard chairs being knocked over and it sounded like a struggle coming from down stairs.”
Officer Stancil reports: “While clearing the first room to the left up stairs, I heard Sgt. Taylor and Mr. Currie shouting at each other. I then heard Sgt. Taylor say, ‘Spray!’ I heard Sgt. Taylor’s OC spray being administered. I advised Officer Lane to stay and cover down on the rest of the upstairs. I then holstered my duty weapon and ran downstairs.” After recounting helping Sgt. Taylor cuff Currie, Stancil says: “Mr. Currie was shouting and acting very aggressively throughout this encounter, and resisting placing his hands behind his back.”
Now you may bemoan the lack of calming and empowering language and the absence of explanations of what was happening, but I’d like you to explain how and when they could have accomplished that in the course of those first few minutes in the house. Seems to me none of that can be done for a person who isn’t listening.
“Most” of us are not. I’ve been following discussions of this incident at several message boards and blogs for the past week. Let’s just say the SDMB is competing for the title of the most bullshit defending forum on the internet. It is far out of pace with what seems to be the average opinion, excluding the FoxNews crowd.
Legally, perhaps. Morally, no. Because if there was another option, then by definition none of what they did was justified.
At least, that’s my take on authority. It’s an extremely limited privilege we grant certain people in order for them to do a certain job. Your power only exists when it is absolutely necessary.
This seems to me to be necessary for any free society to exist. You aren’t really free if people in authority are free to restrict your freedom more than absolutely necessary.
If the cops went beyond the minimum, then, as far as I’m concerned, they abused their authority. Their actions were not justified, and that breaks the entire chain. There is no question of whether the cop was right to cuff or pepper spray because those shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
If the law doesn’t agree, which is more and more seeming to be the case, then that is a problem with the law. It is not serving its purpose of protecting the rights and freedoms of the citizens.
This doesn’t make any sense. Someone not listening does not prevent you from saying anything. They might not hear it, but you can still try. The fact that someone is upset at you does not in any way change your ability to say things to them.
As for points where they could have said something: When he yelled “What are you doing in my house?” They could have said “We got a report of a possible breaking and entering.”
That alone could have deescalated the situation.
We also have the point where Taylor told the kid to stop cursing. That’s escalating the situation, so simply not doing that could have helped deescalate. The cursing wasn’t the problem, and he has the right to curse if he wants to. He also could have actually tried anything at all to calm him down. Instead we have him ordering him to sit down, and then threatening him with handcuffs. Do I have to point out that a threat is escalation?
We also have a point before that where he was told to sit down, and he said “Don’t yell at me,” along with a threat. There’s another point to deescalate: “Sir, I apologize for yelling at you.” Yes, that would be against your instincts when someone has just threatened you, but that doesn’t make it impossible. (And, no, it doesn’t matter if he was actually yelling or not.)
Finally, I will note that you are incorrect when you say that “All three reported the same behavior and language, however.” Only Taylor reports any profanity during the first part when all three officers were together. And the behavior described is different in all three reports: Lane makes him sound compliant, even though he does become profane when being asked to sit. Taylor has him not only cursing but being being extremely belligerent and threatening, while Stancil has him not quite compliant but still much less belligerent.
Should I accuse you of not reading thoroughly for not noticing this?
Now my observations: I’m more inclined to believe Stancil’s version. Lane comes off as leaving out unessential information, and Taylor seems to want to justify his request to stop the profanity. Which leads me to another odd thing: none of them seem to have actually been fazed by his threats of violence. Of all things, that would be the one thing I could see Taylor “advising” Currie to stop doing. Not telling an angry man to stop using profanity. That’s insane!
And that really seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sure, he wasn’t exactly calm before that, but he didn’t get fully non-compliant until that point. I think I would have even cursed out a cop that told me to stop cursing. And I don’t exactly like to be heard cursing in real life.
Can you explain the bolded sentence for me? I can’t make sense of it. Maybe I don’t know which word or concept you’re referring to with “by definition” but if you mean to say that the availability of other options prevents justification of any one particular option, or that only one option out of multiples can be justified in any one circumstance, then I don’t think that’s ethically or logically supportable.
What do you mean by the minimum, or by absolutely necessary? I think you mean the least intrusive interactions and methods which can be utilized to perform their legitimate law enforcement duties. If so, I agree in principle that this is the ideal we should seek from law enforcement, but I think we have to go through a lot more effort before declaring the police actions in any particular case were excessive or abusive.
Determining a minimally intrusive sweet spot for a scenario requires a shared vision of what exactly *legitimate law enforcement duties *are. Then we have to agree on what the least necessary intrusiveness would be in order to perform those duties fully and conscientiously in each likely exigency. Then we have to demonstrate that the police went beyond that point in the case under consideration, and only then can we say their actions were improper or substandard.
But in order to declare that such a less than ideal performance is an abuse of authority, we have to find either a willful disregard for the rights of the parties involved or for the relevant legitimate law enforcement duties (malfeasance), or a level of incompetence that effectively infringed on those rights or failed in those duties (misfeasance).
If we define legitimate duties in terms of protecting rights and freedoms, then we need to be inclusive of all of the rights and freedoms law enforcement officers are required to protect, including the general public interest in peace and social order.
I’m willing to invest the time and effort to discuss these things, but I’m not willing to engage in a battle of contrary assertions based on narrowly considered principles. The reason we have a large and complicated legal code is because the protection of rights and freedoms requires a lot of definition and qualification. Enforcement ethics are complicated because social interactions are complex.
It’s not responsible (as a society) for us to simply declare “use of force is not justified if there’s an alternative” unless we carefully consider the consequences of the specific non-forceful alternatives to the performance of those legitimate law enforcement duties and to the protection of those rights and freedoms. And if we’re to supervise, criticize and correct our law enforcement officers, we’d better be clear on those considerations.
So we’re ignoring the practicalities to argue the principle. That’s a luxury the cops on the scene didn’t really have.
Well first, they had to make sure he was unarmed and try to establish whether he belonged in the house. (They didn’t randomly enter the house to spot check remember, they were called for a probable breaking and entering.) During the frisking and id checking, they could certainly have explained that they were called to the house to check out a possible b&e. I’m not sure they didn’t do that. I hardly expect that every word that everyone uttered was faithfully reported; in fact, the differences between the accounts consist mainly of comments that were left out of some of the reports, but where Lane reports a comment, it is corroborated by one or both of the other accounts, and where Stancil reports a comment, it’s corroborated or described in paraphrase by Lane or Taylor. Taylor’s report contains more of the threatening speech, but that doesn’t seem inconsistent with the various roles each officer assumed; Taylor stayed with Currie and was focused on him; Stancil and Lane were focused on securing the house.
I agree. Currie had a right to curse. That was part and parcel with the threatening and abusive language though, so I can’t fault Taylor for phrasing the request around the cursing. Cautioning Currie on the cursing shifts focus away from the threats and belligerence. That was a correct thought for a couple of reasons (more on this below) but Currie does not seem to have been pacifiable at that moment.
Now this is just situationally ignorant. Sitting Currie down and threatening him with handcuffs, along with the instruction to Currie to moderate his language, were all efforts by Taylor to get him to calm down and cooperate. Unless you think police should be hypnotists or miracle workers, Taylor was not equipped to take control of Currie’s state of mind; at best he could exert control over Currie’s ability to fight (by placing him in a less apt position for violence, like, for instance in a chair behind a table) and otherwise try to be persuasive by appealing to Currie’s self interest.
Well, you do have to demonstrate that this particular threat was bound to escalate Currie’s behavior. I don’t know how much experience you have dealing with angry youth, and this is an anonymous message board, so yeah, I need to you to support your assertion.
Another point of agreement, this would’ve been an appropriate time to rephrase the order into a request and see if the results were better. You can believe that would’ve made a difference if you like. I don’t think subsequent events bear that theory out, but your point is valid; that was an opportunity to practice conciliatory language.
The three points of view are consistent with each other on every point which is jointly mentioned. All three agree that Currie was belligerent from the start. All three report threats at various points. All three quote the same word choices and phrasing from Currie. That is substantive agreement on the facts of Currie’s behavior and language.
Maybe you have a different expectation of cops, but it doesn’t surprise me that none of them were “fazed” by Currie’s threats of violence. That doesn’t mean they disregarded those threats, it means they didn’t allow Currie to perceive any upper hand having been gained by the threats. This is pretty basic male dominance shit, BigT
Unless you’re trying to get him to calm down and listen. Then maybe not so insane, if you’ve got him sitting behind a table and you’ve told him you’ll put him in handcuffs if he doesn’t control his behavior. I’m not saying it was brilliant strategy on Taylor’s part, but if you’re seriously blaming Taylor’s instruction for Currie’s behavior there’s something wrong with your basic assumptions regarding ethics, personal responsibility and the limits of rhetorical persuasion.
Would you also threaten to beat his ass, step up and get in his face and tell him you don’t care if he cuffs you? Don’t you think he’d go ahead and cuff you in that case? Also, do you think Taylor was intent on stopping the foul language, or on redirecting Currie’s antagonism?
You’re suggesting that a staunch defender of the police would be shocked by this situation? Or the Watts situation? If some online discussions seem one sided it’s because the defenders of the police have no interest because it’s practically complaining about the police for doing actual police work.
These cops aren’t turning firehoses on peaceful demonstrators, they’re just dealing with belligerent, uncooperative people actively trying to prevent them from doing their jobs.
Well… yeah. Why does it have to be limited to “staunch defenders of the police”? I’m fairly distrustful of the use of force, and particularly sensitive to the use of pepper spray and Tasers as ‘punishment’ for backtalk or slowness to comply. But if the only evidence we get to see is this police report and what’s been reported thus far, I don’t see an injustice.
This is one of the few current threads in the Pit on police actions where I join the usual Staunch Defenders™ (sold by Hasbro in a store near YOU) in resisting the outrage. But I’ll note the other cases under discussion resulted in dead victims or at minimum falsely arrested ones. That did not happen here. DeShawn Currie had a very bad afternoon and went on with his life.
I don’t know as a definite truth that the pepper spraying was the best option, but I’m pretty comfortable saying the handcuffed detention was called for. And I’m also pretty comfortable saying that unless we see other evidence or contrary affidavit(s), Currie resisted lawful detention and presented Taylor with the decision of whether to use force. Taylor could’ve continued to grapple with Currie, could’ve tried to retrieve his cuffs from the floor while restraining the subject and called for help from the two officers upstairs, but I don’t see that as ending with less injury to Currie.
Possibly because people on this board (by and large) give things just a little more thought before jerking their knee. At least, that’s how it SHOULD be on this board.
Yes, you’re so sagacious and deliberate. That’s the ticket!
Unfortunately, from the outside, it’s typically hard to distinguish your calm and deliberate wisdom from severe partisan gainsay. As in, for example, months and months of “Jeez, I don’t know if the administration is bullshitting about weapons of mass destruction. That sounds like a knee-jerk reaction.”
So, here I suppose we should rub our chins and ponder things for a while. “Hmmm. Is there a bias evident in the policing of African Americans in the United States? I just don’t know about that. We need to give this a lot more scrutiny - there’s just not enough evidence in hand yet.”
Not commenting on any issues you may have with XT, but it’s possible to believe that we do have systemic policing bias against African Americans in this country and also believe that the subject of this thread is not a valid example of that bias in action.
Well, it’s flattering that you equate the board to me, Hentor, but that’s not what I was getting at there. It’s funny you should bring up the whole Iraqi WMD thing as a key point (maybe you are NFBW in disguise). I’m not sure how thinking that Iraq had WMD at that time was a knee jerk reaction on my part, but I think the key was that once I figured out I was wrong I was perfectly fine admitting that and eating all the crow shoveled out for literally a decade after that by folks like you. I’m sure, 10 years from now you will still be trotting this out as if it’s meaningful at this point (look, XT was WRONG about WMD in 2003! Holy crap :eek:), and assuming I haven’t died of old age at that point I’ll still be perfectly fine admitting I was wrong.
It’s funny you should bring up the whole Iraqi WMD thing as a key point (maybe you are NFBW in disguise). I’m not sure how thinking that Iraq had WMD at that time was a knee jerk reaction on my part, but I think the key was that once I figured out I was wrong I was perfectly fine admitting that and eating all the crow shoveled out for literally a decade after that by folks like you. I’m sure, 10 years from now you will still be trotting this out as if it’s meaningful at this point (look, XT was WRONG about WMD in 2003! Holy crap :eek:), and assuming I haven’t died of old age at that point I’ll still be perfectly fine admitting I was wrong.