Threatening the officer in any way is totally the wrong thing to do because the law states that, if the police officer can show he is in fear of his life, he can pretty much do what he wants. He could probably kill him and you and get a pass. In fact, they tried to float that in the Floyd incident, but the crowd was well behaved. They couldn’t make that work.
I can’t think of any circumstances that would justify a police officer choking a detained suspect to death. If George Floyd had just killed an entire classroom full of children, he still should have been taken into custody and stood trial. Nobody should get murdered by the police, no matter what their crime is.
The police can be justified in using force to take a suspect into custody or to stop somebody from committing a crime. In extreme cases, that can go all the way to the level of killing somebody. But that is no justification for what happened to Floyd. He had been arrested and detained. There was no further need to choke him and no justification for doing so. Derek Chauvin stopped being a cop and became a criminal when he choked George Floyd to death.
eta: If you are in a situation where what’s happening isn’t as clear, you should still act as a witness and record events. If it turns out the police are acting properly, you’ve done no harm by recording their actions.
How do you know it’s a murder when it’s happening?
Sure. But how do you, as a bystander, evaluate the situation and decide when you “ought” to physically attack the police? I don’t think @Dewey_Finn was defending Derek Chauvin, but rather stating that the lines between “appropriate use of force”, “inappropriate but non-life threatening use of force”, “appropriate deadly force,” and “inappropriate deadly force” are not always simple to draw in the moment from the perspective of an observer who is deciding whether or not to physically attack the police officer.
As I’ve said, I don’t recommend physically interfering with the police.
Filming isn’t doing nothing. Each person has to decide how much of a hero they want to be, but filming and communicating to the officers that you intend to bring them to justice is something. In the case of George Floyd, the bystanders didn’t save George Floyd, but they might have saved others from a similar fate in the future by helping bring the officers to justice.
I expect all of those witnesses on the sidewalk are psychologically scarred for life. But the alternative was what?
Chauvin’s got a knee on Floyd’s neck. You’re standing on the sidewalk with all the other bystanders. There are three other officers on the scene who are armed with chemicals, bullets, and batons, and they have nothing better to do than paint the street with your blood if you dare to step a foot off of that sidewalk. Do you really believe you have a chance of even laying a finger on Chauvin?
Moreover, when do you intervene? At what point are you sure enough about this being a murder-in-progress that you are willing to risk your own life, limb, and freedom just to be able to console yourself with “well, at least I tried” (because, per the previous paragraph, you won’t succeed)?
Talk me through what you would have done.
The justification to use force depends on what the officer is doing; they don’t have cart blanch to just rape pillage and murder while in uniform (though obviously some seem to believe they do). There seems to be a general fear among people that if you touch a cop you will be executed on the spot or automatically thrown in jail for life. It’s this fear that allows and encourages evil people in uniform to do what they do.
If I were to go into a neighborhood where I was obviously an outsider, grab one of their own, and start torturing them in the middle of the street, I’d expect their companions to come up to me and start stomping my head in to make me stop. That’s normal human behavior. Why we try to repress that instinct when the outsideer wears a blue shirt is beyond me.
I imagine myself as the victim getting slowly killed and watching the crowd around me. I think I’d want at least one of those people filming my execution to do something more. Run up, kick the guy in the back of the head, then run away. Are his companions all going to leave him to chase you down? If I were one of the filmers, I just can’t hep but think that I’d be haunted for the rest of my life just standing there and casually filming a crime saying to myself “better you than me”. What would I say to the family when they ask “why didn’t anybody DO anything?”
I think the fear is that the cop will include you in his violent response if you interfere with the violence he is already committing. And that afterwards he will offer some fabricated excuse to justify his actions. And that his fellow officers will back up his story out of a sense of solidarity. And that a lot of the public will choose to believe the police version of events if you and the other victims of the violence are members of a group people are worried about.
I don’t feel any of the above are unrealistic fears.
Sure- and that’s what I’m saying. Go confront the cops, up close and personal. Get in their face. Push a little bit. Maybe a lot. It’s worth getting your ass seriously kicked over, instead of letting someone else get murdered.
Don’t just stand there idly and film. Yeah, it’s evidence, but are you going to say you did everything you could, in the case that it goes south? When someone’s saying “I can’t breathe” repeatedly, even if you don’t know it’s a murder, you have a moral obligation to do your best to stop that, if only so that person gets a chance to be tried. It’s not the cops’ position to be judge, jury and executioner, and nor do they get absolute carte blanche in how they handle things either- slowly murdering someone by suffocation is not acceptable.
I stand by my belief that recording the incident is more likely to save the victim than attempting to physically intervene is.
If he’s already comfortable with casually murdering a proned-out, handcuffed Floyd, why do you imagine he’ll apply only reasonable force when he turns his attentions toward you? Why do you think you would not also end up proned out with a blue-clad knee on your neck?
Especially if nobody is getting it on video.
I had the automatic assumption of police rightness handily whipped out of me in the 80s.
Oh no. There is no way that works out well for you. Handcuffs, a beating, jail, bail, court- time, many days off work, no, do not offer violence to a police officer.
Film it, yell, and call 911, and tell the operator what is happening.
Stay a good distance.
Floyd did have a long history of minor crimes, he had been convicted of eight crimes,including drug possession, theft, and trespass. OTOH there is evidence he was trying to turn his life around.
If that asshole Chauvin had not actually killed Floyd, likely there would have been little repercussions.
The key word is “potentially”. If the perp/victim does not die, then of course the PD will argue that the officers activities were legal and reasonable.
See, if no death occurs, then it would be hard to prove you were saving a life.
No, never assault a police officer.
What a video of the police encounter might do is to show the officers were lying about the events. I think that’s been the case for some of the recent police deaths, such as that of Walter Scott.
It is all well and good to say you would assault the officer, it is quite a bit different to actually do it.
If you are alone, it seems a stretch to think that you could do something to stop a group of armed cops. If there is one squad car surrounded by 1000 protesters, things are different.