This is still reflective of lousy cop culture. How the hell does a minor civil infraction warrant an arrest, and of course once that’s on the table the yanking and tasing is on the table. Just mail her whatever punishment she’s due.
Like serving a warrant with no-knock swat raids, this just needlessly creates confrontation and escalates the situation to violence. Let her drive off. You know who she is, you know where she lives. Send her the fine and whatever additional fine for driving off/not signing the ticket. Just underscores that, as we see many times in these stories, to cops the real crime is disrespect and disobedience. OBEY.
I was once pulled over for this very reason and answered “yes”. The caveat? I had just picked up the replacement light from Autozone and intended to replace the light in the morning. Officer asked to see the replacement light and once he had he let me go.
Some people would not imagine that the law says that if you refuse to sign a ticket that the officer can arrest you on the spot (but it does). They believe that the officer is abusing his power and lying to them and that by signing, they somehow admit guilt.
However, the cops deal with these stops every day and they have a knowledge advantage over the average person. So when someone thinks that they have a right and the officer strongly disputes that, people don’t know how to process it… partly because officers sometime lie and sometimes don’t know the law themselves. So the drivers think that if they forcefully push back and assert their rights, the officers will stand down and stop with the overreach.
A similar case with a city councilman who believed that the officer did not have the right to arrest him for refusing to sign a piece of paper:
Another case- 1 of the 4 people out of 50,000 in Omaha that year who refused to sign their tickets.
He says that in the past he refused and the officers just threw the tickets at him and said “see you in court”
And a white guy who thinks he knows the law: refuses to sign for about 5 seconds and then signs… but the officer decides to have a little fun with him by arresting him:
And this one goes down just like the one in this thread: Woman disagrees with ticket. Doesn’t think that she has to provide information. Officer decides to arrest her. She heavily resists and then flees the scene to avoid the arrest. Is apprehended again and physically extracted from the vehicle. No tasering, but probably would have been if officer didn’t have backup.
The common theme that I see in these is citizens who falsely believe that a law would not exist in America that is so strange. And it makes sense. The officers have their plate, have their home address, and have body cam video of them. Why couldn’t they just mail them the ticket and the notice to appear in court? Most people would cooperate with police even if the officers were going beyond the law and abusing their power. These people are the opposite end of the personality spectrum. They will stand up for their rights… or in these cases what they imagine their rights to be.
These kinda civil penalties are fucking bullshit and disproportionately punish the poor, this cop, like all cops, is a bastard, and this lady is a fucking idiot who will most likely never realize just how privileged she is…
He could have told her that refusing to sign the ticket would mean that she would be arrested. Instead, he jumped straight to arresting her when she refused. She even said that she’d sign the damn thing when she realized he was serious about it. He could have de-escalated right then and let her sign it and go. The only reason he didn’t let her do that was his own pride and wanting to punish her for not respecting his authoritay.
Tasing an old woman (or anyone, really), regardless of how much she’s running her mouth, should not be something that cops are doing unless they need to, and in this case he didn’t need to.
And they rarely do. It’s been lost to the sands of time that tasers were originally sold to the public as an alternative to using deadly force. Read a dozen random articles where a taser was used and deadly force would almost never be justified. It’s become a tool for enforcing compliance and punishing disrespect, which would not have flown when they first came up. It was a bait and switch, which civil libertarians warned about all along. Never should have been allowed.
I’ve had the opposite experience. I had the replacement light on the seat next to me and the officer wrote the ticket anyway.
I took it to court and the judge let the ticket stand because the receipt was timestamped before the citation. She said she could have dismissed it if I’d replaced the light in response to the ticket, but the fact that I’d already bought the replacement proved that I knew I was driving with the burnt-out headlight.
At least I’m of a color, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc. that mean I’m not likely to die in such an encounter.
I’ve been pulled over twice for burned-out taillights. Both times I got warnings, although the first came with a strong suggestion that I go to the garage about a mile up the street to get it fixed (which I did, considering somehow all three of the rear lights had burned out, and I really had no clue. I don’t know whether or not the cop followed me to make sure I did, but he could have.)
I consider myself very lucky not to have gotten a ticket for either time. The second time especially, because without thinking I’d told the cop that I knew the one light seemed to eat bulbs and I usually carried spares but I was out of them. He could have written me up then, and I would have accepted it. But I was thinking-out-loud that I’d have to get a new bulb at my local auto parts store first thing in the morning (it was night) and he let me go.
It might have been partly pity, as in the first case I was driving to the hospital and the second time I was driving home from the hospital. (Dad was in the hospital a lot in his last couple of years.) Plus, I tend to be respectful out of reflex-- yes sir, no sir– and they seem to like that. But I don’t doubt that being a middle-aged, fairly harmless-looking white woman may have had something to do with it… which isn’t fair, and isn’t right. I’m well aware that without my privilege, it could have been so much worse.
Your lawyer sucked. If that receipt was from mere minutes/hours before the citation you could absolutely make the case that you were driving home to get the tools to replace the light.
If it was from a few days before the ticket then yeah, you probably screwed yourself with it.
