So one thing led to another and a Minnesota policeman ended up shooting a guy and let him bleed out.
The woman and the infant in the car were then detained, the mother was handcuffed and both taken to the police station for questioning. This seems to have taken twelve hours.
First off, given the use of cuffs, the long detention and the taking to the police station, this had to be more than a Terry stop, right? This had to be an arrest.
What would be the probable crime this police department could have used to gin up an arrest?
Supposedly the officer pulled him over because of a broken tail light on his car so this was not a Terry stop. The officer then claims the suspect went for his gun so the officer shot him.
A routine traffic stop is a Terry Stop, as I understand it. What excuse could the police have used for arresting the driver, being as you can’t be arrested for a tail light?
Still, the issue moved from a broken tail light to, as the officer tells it, the man attempting to shoot the police officer. Since the woman was there she can be reasonably supposed to have some part in it all (e.g. if the man was willing to shoot a police officer why did he want to go there…drugs, warrants…something else?).
That is my opinion of it too but I am pretty sure the officer will say he felt the suspect was reaching for his gun and that the officer felt his safety was under imminent threat so he shot the man. That was then the operational assumption the police proceeded on with taking the woman to jail and so on.
There has been some confusion as to who was in what seat in the car. The woman was the passenger in the right-front seat, and the man was the driver. The phone was apparently set to selfie mode or something, so it was recording mirror-image video; note that the steering wheel is in front of the man.
The victim was shot apparently because the cop thought that he (the victim) was about to draw a gun.
The question the OP is asking is this: why was the woman, who was not operating the vehicle and had not been charged with any crime, taken away in cuffs and questioned for twelve hours at the police station?
I don’t think anybody in this thread is claiming that the man was attempting to shoot the officer. (although the officer himself apparently believed he was about to be shot when he fired pre-emptively).
Fair enough, but since we’re imagining what the officer thought it would be better to imagine that he thought the man was *reaching *for a gun. Attempting to shoot would imply the gun was free.
The woman’s story is the driver told the officer he had a gun in the car but was reaching for his wallet. The officer then assumed he was going for the gun for some reason.
Cynics will say her crime was being there to witness a police officer get overexcited and kill an innocent person. I imagine the official stance is along the line of what Whack-a-Mole posited in post #5.
Unless and until we get evidence of what was said and what happened prior to the shooting we can’t really know which might apply.
You can be detained without being arrested. The need for detention must outweigh the intrusiveness. If you are not free to go then it becomes a de facto arrest and all the protections given to those arrested apply regardless of if it is called an arrest or if you are ultimately charged. There is no bright line as to the reasonableness of the length of detention.
I don’t know if they arrested her. Putting people in handcuffs does not always mean an arrest. Sometimes it is done for safety.
A Terry Stop is a temporary detention after forming a reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime. So all motor vehicle stops are Terry Stops. All Terry Stops are not motor vehicle stops.
I have not seen one word about what happened while she was detained so I have no idea about the reasonableness.
Although there is no bright line, no court in the land would hold that handcuffed transport to another location for hours is a stop and not an arrest. Unless she consented to be cuffed and to go in for questioning, it was undoubtedly an arrest.
Since this touches on a hot button topic for many people around here, this is just a friendly mod reminder that this thread is in GQ, so let’s stick to the facts.
There is no problem in GQ with stating that the woman claims the man was reaching for his wallet, and the police officer claims he was reaching for his gun. Since the video does not show what actually happened, saying that you believe it was one or the other or some third explanation is probably outside of the scope of GQ and is better suited to a thread in a different forum.
Similarly, the topics of gun control, police brutality, racial issues, and political issues are similarly outside of the scope of GQ.
The OP asked a factual question. Let’s not stray too far from that.
To elaborate, while there are stops involving handcuffs, or stops lasting hours, or stops involving transport to another location that have been found not to be arrests, the combination of all of these factors has always been held to be an arrest.
See, e.g., Dunaway v. New York, 99 S. Ct. 2248, 2256-57 (1979):
IIRC from the news, she as handcuffed and detained (taken to and kept at the police station) for 12 hours. I suspect we will learn that this small-town police force is not big on procedures and the finer points of the law - so typically before this maybe when they messed up like this, they have simply let the person go with no explanation - as appears to be the case here. I suspect also that the department is about to get an expensive immersion lesson in the finer points of the law and what the term “pro bono” means.