Ah yes. The “I shouldn’t pay taxes but I should be able to drive in public roads, get police and fire service, Medicare, and social security checks” crowd.
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Mumble, mumble… officer’s uniform… mumble, mumble… tag on car… mumble, mumble… fringe on the flag…
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She’s lucky she’s not black.
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Mod note: While one can argue that without knowing this officer, one cannot be sure that they would have treated a POC differently than this white woman, one cannot argue that POC are not more commonly recipients of arrests or violent action taken on the part of police at traffic stops. That particular topic has been discussed repeatedly on Boing Boing.
Given that fact, suggesting that race doesn’t play a role in the broader discussion is wishful thinking at best, willful blindness at worst.
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Nobody deserves a warning. A warning is basically the cop saying you deserve a ticket but you won’t get one.
It was a little unclear. I inferred that she had gotten a warning about this six months ago. Others are saying she told the cop that she noticed the problem six months ago. If she got a warning six months ago, she should have fixed it end of story. If she knew about it six months ago, it’s her own fault for telling the cop that. If a cop asks you if you know your headlight or taillight is out, the only way to answer that is “no”. Because, again, cops give warnings if you’ve technically broken the law but they’ve decided to have mercy on you. If your headlight goes out on your way home from work, they might not give you a ticket. If your headlight went out months ago and you don’t care, there’s no reason for them to go easy on you.
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Yes, sometimes I do.
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Of course it has been said many times, but if she were black, she’d be dead. WE need to re-think how OUR police “protect & serve” us. Watch this video to see how this citizen was “protected and served” by LE. More training is needed. The police are becoming the enemy of the average citizen.
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Honestly, as a fat middle aged cis straight white male, I honestly have never had that thought. Until recently, I could say that as an almost compulsive rules follower, I very rarely have had cause to, but recently we have begun seeing seemingly random “checking ID’s and registrations” stops in my neck of the South, and so I have had more interactions with cops than at any time prior. Still annoying in my life, but well understand that those caught driving while brown find them far more dangerous than my own pasty self.
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I feel I may have replied to the post a tad too quick. Seems like the topic’s been brought up already.
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Three things.
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Your straw man of our commentary ignores the ethical propriety of the cop’s behavior. But since you raised the issue, however disingenuously, I’ll address my opinion on it. The propriety depends on three things. The morality of the law. The proper response to a scofflaw breaking it. And the conduct of the officer in enforcing it. Laws proscribing tickets for unsafe vehicles are moral laws. When someone refuses to obey a moral law and flees the scene, arrest is also moral. I do believe the arrest was poorly handled. The correct response would be to call backup and block or disable the vehicle until the suspect exited and cooperated with the arrest, unless attempting to flee on foot. A one-on-one scuffle to subdue the suspect is more dangerous for both the suspect and the arresting officer.
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Your assumptions notwithstanding, my initial comment contained no opinion on the propriety of the actions of either the arresting officer or the suspect. It was clearly a remark about the blatantly true fact that a non-white suspect doing any of the things the white suspect did in this situation would amount to gravely risking their life. The white suspect believed she could get away with them and that she could break multiple laws with impunity. While she was wrong to assume total immunity from the Rule of Law, she was correct that her life was not in danger. The reason for this assumption is the simple fact that the color of her skin put her at far less risk than a non-white suspect breaking any, all or none of laws she broke. That’s not up for debate; it’s a statistical fact.
- Don’t, sarcastically or otherwise, call me or my comments woke unless your intent is to level facile insults at me. It’s a moronic and superfluous term referring to collectivist moral consensus for which no intelligent freethinking individual capable of and willing to exercise their own moral reasoning has any need.
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I’m not defending her. I blanket agree with you about everything, except anyone saying she received a warning from the cops six months ago. That’s not in the video. It’s not a fact that anyone here knows and I found it weird that people kept repeating it as a fact.
None of this excuses her actions at all, and I’m not mentioning it to excuse her. No one has to convince me how wrong she was.
Everything she did in the video screamed entitlement (and that’s true without inventing things we don’t know about outside of the video.)
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I worry that I’m triggering frustration or anger, which is unnecessary since I think we probably agree on the most important points here. So rather than try to clarify or expand on my own thoughts, let me reflect what I think you’re saying, for the sake of better communication:
The video shows an example of how white supremacy operates in two ways: One, the woman seems to feel that if she disagrees with the police or the law, she shouldn’t be subject to it. This feeling is especially common in white people because society has taught them that they are entitled to consideration and respect while others are not - often described as white privilege. Two, had she been black, the police officer would certainly have been more harsh in his approach, and might even have murdered her. In that event, the officer would also have been much more likely to avoid accountability for any violence he committed. The difference between how this scenario played out and how it would have played out if she were black underscores the racist nature of the criminal justice system, which is structured to direct the bulk of its violence toward people of color and other marginalized people.
This is what I see as the main things you’re expressing, and I agree with all those points very strongly. But if my reflection is inaccurate, feel free to correct me.
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(Assuming you meant prescribing) I think we could agree that “it’s immoral to operate an unsafe vehicle”, because of the implicit risk it exposes others to. I’m not sure traffic tickets specifically are a particularly moral way of handling the problem of unsafe vehicles, but I guess why not. It’s certainly not the worst approach.
I don’t think this follows. Running a red light (a far more dangerous and immoral act) is very frequently handled by simply mailing a ticket to the offender, no arrest or even detention involved. I haven’t heard this practice described as “immoral” or “less moral than arresting the offenders”. Point being, it is not necessarily moral to arrest someone just because they broke a “moral law”.
Agreed!
I don’t feel so confident in assuming her reasoning process, but definitely I think her socialization as a white person in a white supremacist society played a role, even if it was unconscious. Probably some other factors played a role too though, since we’ve heard from a lot of white people living in white supremacy who have made very clear that they would not use her approach. Other factors which might also have an impact could be lack of education, personal history, or poverty.
Yeah, that was kinda sarcastic, haha. Sorry about that.
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“fix-it” tickets are often waived if the defendant shows proof that the problem was fixed. That might not extend to the 2nd time around, but it might.
Modern tail lights are no joke. It’s not always that easy, and if the vehicle is over a year old, there is plastic degradation, and, long story short, your attempt to replace a $2 bulb becomes replacement of a $250 housing. Don’t ask how I know this…
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Yes, absolutely, every time I’m in the presence of a cop I’m on high alert for risks to the life and limb of myself and those around me. There are enough bad cops protected by the shield of qualified immunity and by their union, prosecutors and “good cops” who circle wagons around the bad that every cop is Schrödinger’s bad cop. White people see bad cops being predators far less often because they’re far less often the target, but the encroachment of fascism and police militarization in a carceral state is a danger to everyone even while it’s much more dangerous for some than others. The rise of the ubiquity of digital video cameras has shined a light on the quotidian danger to marginalized Americans and it’s a revelation to most privileged Americans, who react to that revelation in various ways. I also recognize that my risk is statistically far less than a marginalized member of society.
Precisely. This particular cop in this particular situation did a poor job of deescalating the situation - a stark reflection on the poor and aggressive training of all American law enforcement officers - but otherwise acted far better than the majority of cops that make the evening news. We have no way to know if he personally would have treated a non-white suspect differently. What we do know beyond a shadow of a mathematical doubt is that a non-white suspect faces a far higher risk to life and limb in any given police encounter and therefore cannot take their survival for granted the way this entitled person of privilege did.
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Yes, my mistake.
In general I consider it moral. My utopia in which we definitely don’t live in would legally empower and encourage courts to adjust financial penalties based on income, but I suspect filling the tank of that pickup truck alone is nearly the cost of the $80 ticket, so in this case it’s moot to me and off-topic at any rate.
I think she so assumed it because of her conditioning to feel entitled that it failed to even so much as occur to her that she couldn’t get away with breaking multiple laws. Conscious rationalization during the encounter would be a surprise to me as well. After the fact rationalizations seem more likely; or perhaps she’ll admit her mistakes and learn from them.
While education can increase a person’s wisdom under difficult circumstances, I’ve known many educated idiots and many extremely wise intelligent uneducated or under-educated people. Personal history I won’t speculate on as I have no evidence to back up any speculation. I doubt she is too poor to pay an $80 fine at some point down the line when the court would have demanded payment (provided they upheld it or she skipped her court date).
Apology accepted.
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All sorts of people fight back against cops all the time. This has been and always will be true. This resistance does not usually take forms preferred by activists, and so is often invisible to them, but it is ubiquitous.
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the title on reddit claims " $80 to felony in 3…2…1…" but the video is 3 minutes 22 seconds. more FAKE NEWS from the LIBERAL MEDIA!11!!
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First, I think it should be noted that in parole, officers are encountering more than their fair share of repeat offenders. I’ll give them that. But it tends to cultivate a very persecutory attitude (vs favoring rehabilitation) that serves our mostly privatized prison system.
There is a common attitude in house (POs rotate in and out of the same workspace as dispatch, so we heard the talk) that believes people who break the law have something wrong with them, and rehabilitation isn’t possible on the whole. There seems to be no recognition that perhaps the system is broken (racism, wrathful wealth inequality, education, broken windows policing, etc), and contributing to higher crime rates.
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