They can arrest someone, have the person booked and held for days, and then when it’s ruled out was unlawful they face no discipline and are immune from being sued. So totally not their call to make.
Oh, they can also take any cash you have and keep and spend it (with a bit of paperwork).
Totally not a police state.
So you are OK with being assaulted and unconstitutionally arrested for that?
Why?
Tyreek had already complied with producing his driver’s license. The officer had already turned to go back to his motorcycle to run the license when he gets all butt hurt that the window has gone back up.
There is no law requiring people to have their windows down the entire time of a traffic stop. There are not laws which require drivers to answer questions outside of providing ID.
The officer was on a power trip and acting outside of the scope of the law.
Not specifically, but the officer has leeway to take measures to assure his safety. If you insist on keeping your hands out of view while you’re talking to him, he’s within his rights to order you out of the car so that he can keep an eye on your hands - and if you keep putting your hands in your pockets after that, he’s within his rights to handcuff you, at least for the duration of the stop.
Similarly, if your window is so darkly tinted that the officer can’t see what you’re doing when you roll it up, then he’s within his rights to insist that you keep it down - and if you won’t, then he can order you out of the car.
That said, the violent extraction and to-the-ground takedown of Hill was over the top. If they’re gonna order someone to get out of the car, they need to provide an opportunity for compliance before escalating to force.
I am not Ok with being assaulted or unconstitutionally arrested in that or any situation.
However if I disobey a lawful order from a lolice officer, and roll up my tinted windows which would potentially allow me to do something like prepare a weapon out of the officer’s view, then an arrest that follows would not be unconstitutional, and physical force used would not constitute assault.
This on the other hand is a fair criticism.
I watched a couple videos by lawyers on this, and the Supreme Court ruling on this is that there has to be reasonable suspicion by the officer.
In this case, they didn’t search Hill after violently dragging him out of his car, so obviously they weren’t concerned about weapons.
It wasn’t the window tint. It was a power trip.
I’m impressed with the class that Tyreek is displaying. He acknowledges he could have responded better at the traffic stop. Still feels the officer overreacted and used too much force.
The bodycam video clearly shows an officer handling the detainment very poorly.
The officer who stopped him asked him to lower his window. An officer needs to see a driver’s license, proof of insurance, a registration, etc, and it can’t be done through a closed window. In other words, Hill refused to obey police instructions and got belligerent. All this was captured on an officer’s body cam. I’m trying to figure out exactly when resisting arrest and/or civil disobedience became a “right”. Can anyone help me out with this?
It’s the officer’s impatience that bothered me.
Barking orders without giving someone time to comply is a mistake.
Modern training is intended to De-escalate. Rather than immediately using force.
This is pretty accurate. An officer needs to see what is going on inside a vehicle that he has stopped at all times for a variety of reasons, particularly safety. Tyreek was being a prick for absolutely no reason. Just comply with the officer’s requests and you would be on your way in 5 minutes with (maybe) a ticket. That being said, the officer did really escalate the situation unnecessarily in my opinion. Very quick to pull him out and force him to the ground. All around stupid actions by everyone involved that could have been easily avoided.
Did you not notice the officer holding those exact things in his hand when he freaked out about the window?
I’m trying to figure out when closing my car window became resisting arrest, and when being annoying became civil disobedience.
Yes, he wasn’t under arrest at the time, so by definition he couldn’t have been “resisting arrest”.
And he wasn’t cited for resisting arrest anyways.
He got two tickets, reckless driving and not wearing a seatbelt.
NBC reports careless driving instead of speeding.
Do we have any idea whether or not he was driving without a seat belt?
Because my viewing of the video tells me that I can’t rule out that he unbuckled it once pulled over, and then grabbed his driver’s license.
Anybody know anything different, or see it differently?
That sounds like a good argument to make to get that charge dropped.
Gah, so they “estimated” he was doing 60 and it turns out they can’t show that either?
Some people need to learn that adding extraneous details can come back to bite you.
Looks like you’re right. The Civil Rights Lawyer YouTube channel covers a lot of cases, and he’s already addressed this one. The video is 26 minutes long, but he talks slowly, so you can play it at 1.5-2X normal speed and still understand what’s being said. He spends the first 15 minutes reviewing footage and pointing out just the important specific facts of what happened, and then after that starts getting into case law.
Short version: there’s a lot the cops did wrong here, including detaining Hill for a good twenty minutes before even beginning to take care of the reason for the stop (writing citations for his traffic violation). That by itself is an unreasonable seizure. And then of course the use of force, and handcuffs, neither of which (as you pointed out) was justified by reasonable suspicion.
If you drive past a cop at a high rate of speed, what should the cop do if they can’t clock you, ignore it?
I was annoyed by this earlier, too, but as Pavelb1 pointed out, Florida law isn’t resisting arrest, just resisting the officers commands.
My guess is because a “visual estimation” is about the easiest thing to get thrown out of court, so they defaulted to not “having regard for blah blah traffic and all other attendant circumstances.”
It’s a hard call to make, given the windows were so tinted the police were terrified for their safety. Neither circumstance would surprise me.
Not describe it with a specific number, especially given they didn’t ticket Hill for speeding?