Gotcha. Cite or get out. It is true.
Moderator Note
You have been bringing race into too many discussions about law enforcement in GQ. It’s having the effect of derailing too many conversations. If you want to post on this subject in GD or some other more appropriate forum, please do so, but do not post about it again in GQ unless the thread already involves race and law enforcement as a topic.
Are my other criticisms, such as (1) despite protections such as the Bill of Rights, America locks up more people as a percentage of population than anyone else. This means that either, due to magic, there are far more criminals in America than anywhere else, or it means those protections are quite weak. (2). The right to an attorney must not mean much for a similar reason. If you aren’t wealthy enough for a competent one, you’re probably going to get shafted. (3). And then I mentioned racial/gender/etc bias. What I meant to say was that maybe a small percentage of people, who are the right everything - the right race, gender, look good in court, look sympathetic, look honest - get a fair shake. Everyone else gets the shaft.
I wasn’t making this about race. I’m sorry if you came to that conclusion.
Go on, admit it, you’ve tried, right?
In fact, racial bias is the least of the problems. My main issue is this :
Look, we supposedly live in a land of freedom. We supposedly are protected by a bill of rights. Supposedly, in order to be punished for an alleged crime, the state has to actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Supposedly we live in a land of opportunity, so no one need commit a crime at all. Supposedly, criminal law requires the state also prove beyond a reasonable doubt intent, so you can’t be punished if you didn’t mean to do it. Supposedly, if you are arrested, a competent attorney to protect you will be appointed if you can’t afford one.
On the other side of the coin, somehow, despite all I just said, more people are languishing in prisons than even dictatorships. The USA is literally dead last, worldwide, in that you have the highest probability of serving prison time in the USA than anywhere else. Oh, supposedly you have to have been guilty of a crime - we all sleep in our beds feeling safe knowing *we *didn’t do anything major - but then the question is, why do the police here find so many more criminals?
Are there more actual criminals, or are all those “supposedly” statements I made above lies? This is general questions, so I guess to be absolutely factually correct, I can’t say with certainty, but I suspect they are mostly lies and that most of those rights have little meaning in actual courtrooms and in actual encounters with the police. From, say, the appeals court rulings I have read of people that, in my opinion based on the evidence, clear reasonable doubt exists for, I suspect that yeah, those rights don’t actually mean much at all. The judges will allow the scantiest of evidence and they allow prosecutors to make up theories without actual facts to back them up, relying on random people off the street to sort it all out.
That’s just plain silly. If you’re going to order, order up a steak.
First of all, it is not a “crime” for a police officer to give me an order that he has no authority to do. So that is outside the issue.
Police internal affairs investigation have a very poor record of finding in favor of a citizen who complains of an officer overstepping his authority. In fact, the first thing a recruit learns at the police academy is how to “take control” of a situation and intimidate civilians to cower, whether or not the police have lawful authority to do so.
The police do not want the general public to be aware of their rights when confronted by the police. Most law enforcement agencies have public information officers, but good luck getting one of them to explain to the public what their rights are in a police confrontation. (The ACLU does that.) The police do not want the public to feel confident in their understanding of the limitations on the police.
As pkbites succinctly pointed out,
*“All in all it’s a control position for me and I’m not giving it up if I don’t have to.” *
I was talking about controlling the situation to assure the safety of myself and the individual(s) I’ve pulled over. Whenever something bad happens, like officers getting attacked, many times when interviewed later the suspects say something along the lines that they felt “the officer wasn’t in control of the situation” and that made them appear vulnerable. Or when something else bad happens it invariable comes out that “police lost control of the situation.”
The way you’ve misused the quote is basically a lie on your part via misrepresentation.
There’s a matrix of decision making here where sometimes law and practicality have to play give and take.
Under common law, you have the right to resist–including violently, unlawful police actions by agents of the government. We have jurisprudence on this back to the 18th century. Under modern legal codes, often informed by practicality, this common law right has largely been abrogated instead for a system in which you do not have the legal right to violently resist an unlawful order or activity or an agent of the State. Instead your redress is to bring suit after the fact. Most such codes only make exceptions for scenarios in which genuine self-defense concerns exist to justify your violent resistance (i.e. a scenario where a cop is trying to harm/kill you illegally.)
Various Supreme Court cases and local laws state that the police have the right to make you exit your vehicle and even submit to a cursory level of search of your person in a legal police stop. Legal meaning they must meet a a justification burden to show it’s a legal stop. But because of the laws I mentioned above and modern jurisprudence you don’t have the right to bust open a cop’s head if he’s stopped you without justification. Many cases have seen evidence thrown out obtained from a stop that lacked appropriate reasonable suspicion. To place you under arrest they’re supposed to have probable cause (a higher level of proof than reasonable suspicion.)
So you may find yourself in a position where a police officer has stopped you without appropriate legal suspicion that you’ve broken the law, and he orders you out of the car and pats you down. If he finds drugs or something on your person or in plain view, or there is evidence you’re drunk or etc–the case against you will fall apart since the stop wasn’t legal. But where we’ve come down as a society is you still have to physically be compliant during this process–your legal redress is after the fact, not during. It may seem “wrong” from an old school legal perspective, but in the real world the alternative is legally sanctioned brawls between police and citizens. I think that would cause greater harm than the current system.
DUI checkpoints and border patrol stops are totally different animals. Most people I’ve ever read on the issue think DUI checkpoints don’t pass constitutional muster, but conservative politicians and judges (all the way up to the Supreme Court level) have basically said “these are important safety tools so we’re not going to stop them.”
The legal consensus I’ve read on the border stops that occur places other than the border is they are largely outside the bounds of the law when they detain you–when operating legally they are taking advantage of the fact that a cop always has the right to ask you a question or so briefly–same as any other person can flag you down and ask questions. That’s why many times “refusals” happen at these stops, people put up a piece of paper explaining they are refusing to comply and would like to drive on. Lots of border patrol agents let these people drive on because they know the law is not on their side to effect an actual detention/stop. But in all the cases I’m familiar with where border patrol has stopped someone and pulled them from their car, no legal consequences for the officer of the U.S. Border Patrol have ever occurred.
I’m as conservative as they come but check points creep me out as fascist police state stuff. I’m glad we don’t do them here.
The border patrol check points I saw in New Mexico and Texas were nowhere near the border. Made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Like WTF?
I’ve been lured into a youtube rabbithole like the one the OP described, so I have seen at least a couple of videos where the officer told the person to stop filming , and received the reply, “You don’t have the right to tell me to do that.”
I agree that we don’t want the anarchy that results from everybody deciding for themselves if an officer has legal grounds for whatever order he has just given. But there should be some way to ask the officer why the order he has just given is legal without committing the crime of Refusing a Legal Order.
From the post he quoted:
Now, you may feel that is bad advice, or is only good advice under certain circumstances, but it is the advice he was given, and I think his paraphrase was fair.
I would argue that stopping filming does endanger you. Turning the camera off means the officer has the ability to assault you, threaten you, and even kill you, and probably (virtually certainly) will get away with it. It is worthy of disobedience. Getting out a car or submitting to arrest for bullshit sucks, but it is not something the courts cannot undo. But don’t stop the camera rolling - the moment the record stops is when the officer’s story becomes the only one anyone will listen to. A police officer murdered a man just a few months ago, and unfortunately, the camera didn’t catch the actual murder, just the audio, so his bullshit story is the one that stuck. (I believe it’s a murder because there’s just a handful of seconds between the officer using a taser and shooting the unarmed punk dead. I don’t believe the shooting is justifiable, as the officer should have expected the punk to act oddly after being tased)
A neighbor of mine told me just this morning about an incident in her past. There was a disturbance in her front yard, involving I think some relatives of hers. The police ordered her to stay inside her house, and said he would arrest her if she came outside. She stepped one foot out the door, and was arrested for disturbing the peace. At the hearing, the cop said he ordered her to stay inside for her own safety.
If that were the case, what the cop did was tantamount to placing her under protective custody, and the cop should have at least enough training or common sense to tell her that, rather than treat her like a criminal at the outset. Most unfortunate confrontations with the police arise from such misunderstandings, and could be avoided if the police training emphasised communication skills.
If a cop tells you to get out of the car, it would make more sense to explain why, rather than to say “Don’t make me draw my weapon” and call for backup.
So was she convicted? What did the judge say?
I think that the race conclusion was on your comment about skin color. I, too, am shocked, shocked I tell you, that anybody can conclude that race was being referenced, when skin color was brought up.
I think it’s naive to think it’s a communication problem. It’s much deeper than that. It’s a fundamental difference in opinion about the purpose of a police force. Intimidating law-abiding citizens should be on the unacceptable list.
The lady you described at most should have been taken in and let go with a stern warning about how a police officer won’t tell you to stay inside for no reason. Arresting her for “disturbing the peace” isn’t about communication, even if better communication might have kept her indoors.
What we need is to make sure that anything a police officer says can be trusted. This means having police accountability out the wazoo, so we know we can trust them in this situation. There need to be harsh punishment for abusing this authority. And that means extensive monitoring.
When police officers can very well lie to you about what you are required to do, it becomes hard for people to trust them. You tell me I have to get out of the car, I’m more likely to think about how you said I had to let you search my vehicle, when I didn’t. (I can’t get that invalidated after the fact, BTW. Because I let them do it.)
Outside of undercover operations and other such circumstances, what people want in their law enforcement officers is a level of integrity that means we can trust them. Lying police officers should seem to the public to be an oxymoron. And that seems to be a low priority to most police officers.
I honestly do not see a way to get the toothpaste back in the tube.
nm
This American Life did a segment on border patrol checkpoints last year. You can read the transcript there, but the gist is that you have to stop, and you have to pull over to a secondary lane if asked, but otherwise you can ignore everything else they say.
Note that this only applies to border patrol checkpoints, not DUI or other random police stops.