Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/security-camera-shows-detroit.html
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Can you say civil rights lawsuit?
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After watching the crash but not knowing which one the cop was, I stopped the video to make an objective determination of who I thought the asshole who caused the crash was.
You can’t see a stop sign but I assumed one was there, since there’s one on “this side”, and that car clearly coasts right through the interesection.
But god damn is that other car going way too fast. And seemingly makes no attempt to slow down at all or avoid the collision.
So I wouldn’t have been surprised had the cop emerged from either vehicle to arrest the other person.
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Two assholes don’t make a good cop.
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Yeah, without knowing in advance who the cop was, and without being able to see where any stop signs were on those two roads, my first thought was that the accident was the fault of the red car which approached the crossroads at high speed and T-boned the other vehicle. If I’d seen it without this article mentioning the stop sign, I’d have thought it was perfectly reasonable to arrest him, because that looked super reckless.
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Yep. That little red car was going way too fast. The cop didn’t just roll the stop sign, he ran it. But the little car was probably liable to charges of reckless driving because of its speed.
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If they did then we’d have an overabundance of good cops
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The SUV-type vehicle knocks over a fire hydrant thingy, and I do see a bit of wet, but not the glorious spray of cascading water that movies and TV have led me to expect in such circumstances. 
Out of curiousity, what would the speed limit applying to the red car be in a neighbourhood setting like this?
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It might be my soft Scandinavian nerves. But does a traffic accident, even if reckless, really warrant a gun-point arrest? It seems super scary and weird to me.
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Yes, you can.
Based solely on the video, can you tell me:
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What is the speed limit on that road?
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How fast was each car travelling?
Based solely on the video, I can tell you two things with certainty:
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There’s a stop sign.
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The officer runs it.
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Correct. The primary takeaway is the cop would not have been hit if he’d followed the law, regardless of the other variables. Then the arrogance of trying to frame the victim for his own (cop’s) mistake.
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You can not determine how fast is too fast by watching the video.
The intersection clearly has stop signs running through the main road for the side streets. The center road is very clearly a main road. The speed limit could be 25 it could be 50 for all we know. Just because we see residential homes it does not mean it may not be a fast moving through way.
The cop had a stop sign. He did not stop. Period end of story. He’s at fault.
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Really shows the indoctrination, er, um training these police go through. The “do no harm” motto is replaced with “does no wrong”
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How many does it take?
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Recently I’ve had pedestrians or bicyclists yell at me for driving too fast, in each case I looked down at my speedometer and saw I was under the legal limit. The perception of speed is tricky; in both cases the cyclist and pedestrian were themselves breaking the law (the pedestrian was crossing in a weird place, the cyclist was running a red light)-- I think they were just startled and blamed me for their own carelessness.
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You’re thinking of the Hippocratic oath doctors take.
The common oath police take is “On my honor, I will never betray my badge, my integrity, my character or the public trust. I will always have the courage to hold myself and others accountable for our actions. I will always uphold the Constitution, my community, and the agency I serve.”
Doesn’t quite square with the video though.
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At the end of the clip check the speed of the last car going in the same direction as the red car. Looks like the area has a s
We have more information than just the video to refer to. The FOX2 reporting tells us this was at “the corner of Livernois and Cadet Street.”
Pulling that up on Google Maps, it’s trivial to check the actual speed limits.
And indeed, about half a block back in the direction Mr. Martinez was coming from, there’s a 25 MPH sign.
I’m not about to bother right now, but it’s also not at all difficult to compute speed from video footage, given some real-world distance measurement as a reference.
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Was the red car moving too quickly? Maybe. It doesn’t matter though, because the officer had the last opportunity to avoid a collision. By stopping at the stop sign and looking. This stuff happens all the time in the neighborhood where I work. I don’t know what they’re doing in their cruisers, but they’re distracted AF. Rolling stop signs, cutting people off, swerving across the double yellow. Hey, you know, it’s almost like there’s this culture where they’re right no matter what, and their authority cannot be questioned. Hmm.
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If you think that speed is anywhere close to appropriate for that street in a residential area when watching that video…I don’t know. I’m pretty sure you don’t have kids. The cop was absolutely wrong to run the stop sign. It’s a much less serious accident at lower speeds.
It’s Livernois, which has a speed limit which is a bit high in my opinion, but:
“Tandy said that an similar demonstration project on three blocks of Livernois closer to 6 Mile Road showed that motorists were driving as fast as 75 mph on the avenue, which has posted speed limits of 30 mph.” EDIT: My mistake, after checking with street view, Livernois has a 25 mph speed limit in those blocks .
Based on my experience (lots of jurys deciding on fault in auto cases) I’m sure both would be found at fault, with most of the blame going onto the asshole that was blasting through a residential area in excess of 50 mph. He would have been cited for reckless driving, among other things, in any jurisdiction.
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