A friend’s son got in trouble for entering an abandoned, soon to be demolished, house. He and a friend went in to look around. One of the kids had a can of spray paint, and my friend’s son spray painted his first and last name on an interior wall.
When the police came to their house, they scolded the kid, explaining the danger in walking around an abandoned structure. My friend wanted his son to be charged with a crime and maybe have community service, but the police said that was overkill.
My meaning of “benefit of the doubt” would be more that they don’t have the agency or authority to make capital legal decisions on the street. They weren’t reasonably assessing a public danger in a professional way, and had no right to try to do that. Their legal rights in trial are separate.
Well there’s posted notices too.
“You are a FLorida law officer! I demand that you arrest this man who trespassed on my site last week!” “Hm…Where’s he “from”? Got a pic?”
I suppose it’s just what makes florida florida
Yes, taking a shotgun blast to the chest can cause injury.
If you weigh the public danger between two things:
Trespassing on a construction site to rest, stretch or check it out.
2 civilians grabbing rifles to chase a jogger down a public street in a pickup truck to entrap and question him about alleged previous crimes at gunpoint. Oh yeah: the older one had been a cop who had been involved in a prior case with the jogger.
What do you get?
We have heard here that we don’t want people trespassing. Has anyone mentioned that we don’t want people chasing others with rifles in vehicles on our streets just because they were “trespassing”?
Let’s have an honest assessment of the relative dangers of these events.
I think just about everything exists to be situationally enforced. I’ve always understood it to be for two reasons. One is to protect all of the valuable, easily removed items. Not just tools and supplies, but also the exposed copper and all the other stuff that scrappers love to get. In fact, stealing anything at all from a construction site is Grand Theft in Florida. So, even stealing a hammer that some contractor left on the ground would be a felony. Plus another felony for the trespassing. The second reason is that police have the ability to arrest people who they know were stealing stuff, but weren’t caught with anything. This way, they can still arrest the suspect for a felony just for being on the construction site in the first place.
I don’t understand what you’re saying, exactly?
Yes. In fact, it was mentioned as recently as post 176.
Meaning all the letter of the law talk is just coded speech about p.o.c. and their presence in our society, and how much “leeway” we can give “others”. The way it gets expressed is in the disparate treatments of citizens of color.
I read 176 and it seems to grant rednecks powers I never knew about.
You don’t see any conflict in claiming to be enforcing a legal citizens arrest for “trespassing”, while stalking a jogger down a public street in a truck with loaded shotguns, to entrap him into an armed interrogation? Huh?
Sorry I really felt my message was needed in this thread. I still do.
Situational enforcement is a racist’s best friend.
So, extremely heavy handed. I suspect that this is not enforced very often, if it were, and white suburbanites were going to jail for a year or more with their families for checking out the neighborhood’s newest addition, then it wouldn’t last long as a law.
However, it could probably persist for quite a while if it is only ever enforced upon the less “desirable” demographics.
Welcome to America.
What powers? The power of citizens arrest? All citizens have that power, provided they witnessed someone committing a felony.
Are you sure you read the post? Did you read the part that said:
Maybe go back and read it again? I specifically said that trespassing was no reason to chase someone down the street with a gun. I also said that even if the trespassing was a felony, it was not a violent or forceable fellony, so it would still not be an excuse to chase someone down the street with a gun. I don’t know how to be more clear than that.
So true. But, from a societal stand point, I’m not sure that a Zero Tolerance approach would be better.
I was responding to this, which I found odd: “Whether or not it was a felony is what actually matters, because that will determine the defendant’s ability to claim a citizen’s arrest.”
I can’t see how this gets to that point. The chasing is not incidental or just a separate issue to this. It is the issue, and not trespassing. I can’t see how CA can be seriously put up as a reason for civilian gunmen to “investigate” a putative "trespassing"any more than one would suggest that one should use a bazooka to “investigate” jaywalking. To say that it might be a felony somewhere and provide legal cover for the act is a strange take to me, when the chasing itself was wholly illegal and on a whole other level of evil.
The white privilege to engage in an illegal conspiracy to kidnap, assault and intimidate, and then be gifted by society with the “gentlemans excuse” that you were only making a “citizens arrest”
Or maybe have less draconian laws in the first place.
If a law, when enforced equitably, is harmful to society, it is a bad law, and is harmful to society even if enforced unequally.
We need trespass laws, and fair application, both. With only one or neither it doesn’t work. Trolls and evil actors will try to use the gap to 1) do evil and 2) look good.
There is nothing worse for the rule of law, the trespassing law, and the citizens arrest statute, than those two mfs and their lawyers trolling with legal theories. They are the trumps of racist kidnappers.
This is the excuse the defendant’s have claimed. They said they were performing a citizen’s arrest. You can find mention of that in just about every article pertaining to the incident. My point was that if this wasn’t a felony, then the entire claim of “citizen’s arrest” is out the window because for a citizen’s arrest to even apply, the crime would have to be a felony and the defendants would have had to witness the crime.
But there are situations where chasing someone down with a gun is legally defensible. Those situations are dependent on the events leading up to the chasing. Therefore, it is relevant to discuss those preceding events in order to justify or refute the defendant’s defense. For this particular case, there was nothing to justify it. And these people were completely in the wrong. They should be punished accordingly.
That’s the reason they gave. My post explained that their reasoning isn’t justified. And no, CA doesn’t allow anyone to “investigate” or even to “detain”. Any detention automatically becomes an arrest, and that arrest MUST meet the conditions necessary or the CA becomes a false arrest, which is a serious crime.
If the crime is a felony in Georgia, and they witnessed it, then they can claim it was a citizens arrest. However, that still isn’t going to justify the shooting. It may or may not justify the brandishing of firearms (IMO, it does not. But a lawyer might have some luck with it). It would definitely be used to successfully justify the chasing and the stopping, though. At that point, it becomes a self-defense issue (a la Zimmerman) and an entire other can of worms.
So, perhaps my phrasing was horrible. But the reason it matters whether or not the crime was a felony is because their entire excuse of CA is total shit from start if there was no felony to begin with.
You got all that from my post? Strange. I didn’t know they had those powers either.