Should African Americans resist arrest or cooperate fully with police?
According to this article, a young African American, Jason Goolsby age 18, was outside a bank waiting for the ATM and a white woman felt threatened and called 911. A few minutes later police show up in a very rushed and threatening manner. The young man flees and a couple of blocks later is tackled and handcuffed. No arrest was made and the young man was released. (video)
This incident has caused a lot of controversy on social media.
My question is, it seems like if anyone runs from the police, regardless of race/color or what they are wearing, the police are going to chase them and tackle them if they do not stop fleeing.
So should African Americans resist arrest in any way or should they cooperate fully and cooperate peacefully? I am not going to deny for a second profiling happens. Read the article, it is a perfect example of profiling. How should these situations be handled when the police are harassing/profiling someone?
Clarification: I am white and my Brother in Law in a deputy sheriff. I tend to like/trust police officers but being white, that is a lot easier for me to do than being a member of a group that gets profiled. I am not even going to pretend to understand the frustration of being a victim of continued police profiling and harassment.
The worst thing you can do wrt the police, IMHO, is to run away. That is going to trigger a chase response every time, and the odds of you being hurt or killed go up quite a bit. Same goes with resisting arrest. The best place to fight the police if you feel you are being unfairly arrested, detained, stopped or whatever is in the court with a lawyer to back you up and the protection of the court system. You still might not get a fair shake I suppose, but at least you are unlikely to be hurt or killed.
I tell my kids who, in fairness don’t look very hispanic (my wife is white) to always be polite and respectful and cooperate fully with the police if they are ever stopped or detained or whatever. It buys you nothing to resist arrest, try and run away or whatever, except the very real possibility you will be hurt or even killed.
JMHO of course…YMMV and I’m sure there will be many 'dopers along soon to say how they would resist the police and fight or run away and that this is the smart thing to do.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes…our errors always cost us more.”
EVERYONE needs to learn how to handle themselves in an unfortunate and even unjustified encounter with the police. The way that you present yourself to them makes a huge difference in the way that you are going to be treated. The rules are fairly simple: speak in the most calm voice you can, keep your hands where the officer(s) can see them (i.e., don’t get the sudden urge to dig in your pockets), comply with all reasonable orders and certainly do not take off on the run. The police in the U.S. aren’t in the business of just letting people get away even if the original reason for the stop was trivial to complete bullshit. Once you run, they may escalate things to completely unpredictable levels. If you assault an officer in the process, that can be a felony on its own regardless of what started it.
I know black people get profiled by the police more than other groups in general but it can happen to anyone. I had an unfortunate encounter with some overly aggressive officers in a parking lot in Jackson, MS once. The main reason was that I was disheveled from days on the road and I had Massachusetts license plates and someone called it in as possible drug trafficking. The encounter didn’t start off that well on my part but I quickly backed down as soon as I realized how serious they were. I even let them search my car (not sure if I should have done that but I had nothing to hide). They eventually just let me go after about an hour and lots of really weird questions.
Anyone also has the right to remain silent, ask if you are under arrest or free to go and/or ask for a lawyer but those tips are a little advanced for most of the people that get caught up on the tragic side of these situations. It is the simple rules in the first paragraph that will save everyone the most grief.
For their own safety, cooperate. Sometimes, even cooperating isn’t enough to keep them safe, but it’s probably the best chance, most of the time.
Though I’ve occasionally mused about some alternative options as means of non-violent protests against the larger issue of police mistreatment – for example, what if all African Americans (and others, if they choose), were to (as a form of protest) immediately spread eagle on the ground for any interaction with police in which it’s feasible? They could still answer questions, and would pose no threat at all, but such a public display of overt and calculated fearfulness might serve as an acceptable form of protest that wouldn’t actually significantly disrupt any police business, while being visible and public enough to make an impact. Maybe, anyway – just throwing this out there.
Why blame the cops? Someone called 911 AND THE POLICE RESPONDED. It’s interesting that Goolsby says they lingered for 20 seconds in front of the ATM. The 911 call would have taken longer than 20 seconds. How long did it actually take for Goolsby, and his friends, to arrive in front of the bank, ponder whether to withdraw money (isn’t that the reason he went there?), hold the door for the woman with the stroller, see police cars heading for the bank, and then decide to run away? 40 seconds? 4 minutes? 14 minutes?
*Jason Goolsby stood outside a bank on Pennsylvania Avenue SE on Monday evening pondering whether to withdraw money from the ATM. The teen said a woman pushing a baby stroller approached, and he held the vestibule door open for her.
The 18-year-old, who was with two friends, lingered about 20 seconds outside the Citibank near Eastern Market on Capitol Hill before leaving. Moments later, Goolsby said, he saw D.C. police cars racing toward him.
…Goolsby didn’t know that he and his friends had been suspected of casing the ATM for a possible robbery. A caller to 911 reported suspicious youths loitering at the bank’s entrance and according to a transcript of her call made available Wednesday, said, “we just left but we felt like if we had taken money out we might’ve gotten robbed.”*
As a political gesture it makes sense but the more practical thing is to stay calm and quiet and explain yourself… and get the badge numbers if necessary and file a complaint. I did that once, a police officer threw me out of the subway because I was taking pictures (scared of terrorism) and I filed a report and he was reprimanded… but, the whole process took well over 6 months… the officer was really really rude and I was smart enough to stay calm. I mean - really - rude. Maybe he was having a bad day, IDK, but I filed the complaint and the complaint won. Now he has a complaint on his record…
Never fight with the police. They’ve got badges, guns, tasers and backup. I’ve had one encounter with a psychotic cop. It was frightening, but I can’t imagine how much worse it would have gone if I’d ran or fought or even argued with him. And I’m white.
I don’t think that is accurate because this isn’t solely a cops versus blacks problem. It can and does happen to all marginalized groups including white trash, hispanics, arabs, teenage males of any type and can happen to anyone at all especially if they happen to not have the appropriate look at the time for the setting they are in. I am not disputing that blacks getting profiled frequently but lots of other groups do too. Unless you are a fit, white person that drives a nice car and always dresses up before leaving the house, it could happen to you too and even that isn’t a sure bet (white people driving through bad neighborhoods in nice cars often get profiled as well because it is assumed they are there to buy drugs or prostitutes).
I don’t think it is a practical strategy to try to eliminate profiling altogether because it is a useful strategy in many law enforcement situations and it is built into human psychology. The thing that individuals do have control over is how they behave when they are stopped or confronted by the police. That isn’t the time to prove what a tough and defiant person you think you are because they can’t let you fight them and leave peacefully no matter what or who started it.
I hope this does not sound patronizing, I am concerned about that sometimes because I don’t want people to think bad of me and I don’t trivialize anything or be patronizing in any way. By trivialize, I don’t want to appear to be an “expert” on something I have no first hand experience with (being profiled).
In 2002 or maybe 2003, I volunteered to teach art at an after school program in a high income neighborhood in Brooklyn. Most of the kids were white and went to public school or private school. Some of the kids were black and came from the adjoining neighborhood which had a separate public school (I think) from the ones the white kids went to. (The program was at a church, not at a school).
Anyway, the young black kids, even in 3rd 4th and 5th grade seemed to me to already have a degree of suspicion of white people and teachers or authority figures. Not to a great degree, but to a small degree. They lived, I think, in government housing but I have no way of knowing for sure. I hope my comments are not coming off sounding the wrong way. The two neighborhoods were situated side by side but you could tell a big difference in how the kids were treated and thus reacted according to what neighborhood they lived in. And this was before they even got to middle school.
This a matter of police training and police behavior. The first thing to do is better training for officers. The second thing to do is deal with racist/xenophobic cops. Point number 2 is probably a little harder to address…
But, Shagnasty, what do you mean by “profiling”. I do not think skin color or nationality is - ever - acceptable reason for suspicion. Well, let me clarify, wearing gang colors or a Hell’s Angel’s cut is acceptable for profiling. But baggy pants and a hoody? Never.
I think police have to be trained to look at body language and cadence of speech, etc, but even that is very difficult because the police by the nature of the situation, make people nervous. And then we have the culture gap between races and/or levels of income. And then we have that being a police officer is a very very hard job. And then… we have the very legitimate frustration of being profiled and harassed on a frequent basis. This is why clothes or group can not be used to profile.
I know you are not trying to say anything bad, I know people here quite often overreact to your comments, but, I encourage you to rethink your position.
In general, in a world where everything looks good on paper, people should never run from the cops. But then again, I’m a White guy sneaking up on 50. If I were a Black guy, more so a Black kid, I’d probably be singing a different tune. Never run? Always run? Nah, both of those options are clearly unreasonable. But keep the options open in case it’s the racist bully cop who shows up.
Yeah, I just watched Rambo 1st Blood again too just last week. I still think that whole melee was somewhat justified on Stallone’s part. Those cops fucked with the wrong Vietnam vet.
