Hmmmmmm, running while Hispanic, yeah…that’s a thing…
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I must be a genius or something because I can easily imagine reasons why an innocent person—even a non athlete—might be running. Or are cops just really stupid?
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It’s bad enough that her response to a teenager running is to pull a gun, but then when people go “WTF are you doing, you maniac?!” her reaction is to quintuple down and start screaming about how she’ll murder him. In a world where cops are properly screened and trained this person would not be allowed within the same city as a police station.
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Yes…
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If I pull a gun on someone for anything other than clear self defense, I suspect (IANAL) that I would be charged regardless of my “intent” especially if I was blatantly threatening to murder them. I smell a big load of bullshit in this explanation.
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Dammit all to hell, now the dog is hiding under the bed after my rant upon reading this story.
(It’s okay boy, I am not mad at you, it is the fascists and their henchmen cops. We can go for a run…errrrrrrrr… I mean a walk after dinner. I’ll wear white people clothes so it will be okay.)
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Hey guess what, an off-duty cop is called a “civilian”, and if someone pulls a gun on a kid and threatens to shoot them, they should remain off-duty permanently.
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Yes, all those liberals in Wyoming are sure to call for his resignation. /s
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It is reasonable to assume Fremont County Attorney Patrick LeBrun will not hold that position for long
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Pulling a gun on someone is an intentional act. So is making a murder threat. In the situation you describe, you’d be committing a crime with both acts. As opposed to saying in a kidding way to someone you know, ‘I could kill you for that!,’ where there is no real threat implied because that wasn’t your intent, and none perceived by the ‘victim.’ Sorry you’re having such a hard time with this concept, but it’s not a scam to get people off from their bad acts, but a long-standing, important distinction in law. In this case, a bad prosecutor made the wrong call, but for many, many crimes if you can’t show intent, you don’t carry the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. IAAL.
FUCK JERRY.
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An ON-duty cop is also called a civilian, unless they’re a gendarme or, I suppose, Military Police.
(The USA does have gendarmes - the Coast Guard.)
This distinction is a very, very important one to make, because police who think they’re soldiers (with extremely relaxed Rules of Engagement…) are at the core of this whole damn problem.
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I had the same initial read
Qualified immunity is a two-part test: first, whether qualified immunity is “generally” (or “categorically,” depending on the case) available to the type of officer at issue, and second, whether the officer is entitled to it in the “particular” case, i.e., the facts in front of the court. Question #2 is the one where you need the exact same conduct (or really, really, really close to the exact same conduct) previously ruled unconstitutional in order for qualified immunity not to apply: if there isn’t controlling precedent on these “particular” facts, then the officer gets qualified immunity.
Question #1 is a different animal. There’s a very, very obvious case where qualified immunity is “generally” available to an officer: an on-duty officer acting within the scope of his employment. Question #1 doesn’t get litigated too often because the prohibitive majority of Q.I. cases involve on-duty police officers accused of misconduct. But unlike Question #2, where the concern is what a particular officer facing a particular set of facts can reasonably be expected to know, Question #1 is an abstract question about the proper allocation of rights and remedies among participants in society. (Sounds gobbledegooky, but the point is that it’s a structural question, not a facts-on-the-ground question.) And the further you get from that very, very obvious case of an on-duty officer within the scope of his employment, the harder it is to pass Question #1.
So, for example, an officer who is off-duty, but is driving to work to start his shift: that person is probably “generally” entitled to qualified immunity, because we don’t want a police officer to be deterred from stopping a crime in progress simply because it’s 7:59 instead of 8:00.
But what about an officer who is off-duty and providing private security to a nightclub and roughs up a patron who’s being kicked out, but who has committed no crime? In the Ninth Circuit (i.e., the west coast), that officer is not entitled to qualified immunity, because his actions have nothing to do with the government. He’s a private employee acting within the scope of his duties to a private employer. He’s not someone enforcing the law. (It could be a different story if the officer sees the patron fighting and actually moves in to make an arrest.)
And what about here, an officer who’s on vacation? It seems to me the key isn’t that she was on vacation, but that she was on vacation in Wyoming, a place where everyone agrees she has no authority to actually enforce any laws. In the private security scenario, the officer is generally working in the jurisdiction where he’s employed. That means an LAPD officer working security at a club in Hollywood has authority granted by the state of California to make an arrest at the club, because LAPD officers are allowed to enforce the law in Los Angeles. Maybe Q.I. would protect him if he made an arrest while moonlighting as a bouncer. But here, our vacationing officer can make no such claim. She’s a whole state away, not one town over, and everyone agrees she wasn’t on duty at all.
So I think we probably shouldn’t get to Question #2 (and the “exact match” problem) at all, because the officer should be denied Q.I. on Question #1.
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The concept that this woman pulled a gun on a kid running for his school bus and threatened to murder him, and you feel this was justified by her “lack of bad intent?” Yeah, I guess I am having a hard time with that concept.
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One of the arguments I’ve been using here in Chicago, where police chases have a tendency to harm and even kill bystanders as well as of course suspects (who may or may not be actual criminals), is that we no longer have a death penalty in this state, so sentencing a suspect to death without arrest or trial is quite literally superseding the law.
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Well they are all civilians in that they aren’t in the military. But that’s not actually how it works. They are a protected class and extend rights and privileges the pleebs can only dream about. Due to reciprocity they can act to enforce the law if they have “reasonable cause” to, even out of their jurisdiction.
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