I took Mark’s comment to be more about the general likelihood of abuse of authority over a civilian versus a fellow cop, not these specific cops who may well be the few good apples in the rotting orchard.
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It serves to show that sometimes the system works and that it actually can if we get rid of the systemic corruption within it. Whether you feel that’s a good thing to show is up to you. I do.
That’s one of the reasons that I’m loathe to drink heavily. I invariably retain enough perspective to know when my higher cognitive functions are impaired, and I greatly dislike reverting to dumb behavior, so I just shut up. I also don’t like sitting around like a statue while others converse, but that’s preferable to being inarticulate. Getting drunk sucks. Being around drunk people is slightly less obnoxious, but not by much.
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Where you live I assume.
Shooting people in the back, stealing from arrest sites and from arrestees, colluding to cover up crimes, and a much longer list of very serious things, all on videotape.
Next question.
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This video should be part of police training.
This is not this guy’s first time having cops catch him DUI but apparently it’s the first time they arrested him:
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Cops here in San Francisco are always saying they won’t use tasers except as alternatives to shooting someone, but they end up being a compliance tool for anything the cops don’t like.
It’s disturbing that nobody seems to blink an eye at this dramatic escalation of force against a passive resistor. He’s actually doing exactly what the students that Pike pepper sprayed were doing.
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Did you notice at 0:12 how he flashed his badge? He really expected “professional courtesy,” which means get away with anything. This makes me wonder how many times he got away with it?
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Its pretty hard to argue that DUI isn’t dangerous, especially when you expand your cited statistics to include non fatal accidents. But the conclusion I’d take from your argument isn’t that DUI isn’t that dangerous, but that speeding and distracted driving are more dangerous than we give them credit for, and if its true that sober speeders cause more accidents than drunk people driving the speed limit (which by the way your statistics don’t prove) then we should increase the penalty for speeding.
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do the statistics account for changes before and after madd and other alcohol/driving awareness campaigns? perhaps if there were no checkpoints, if there were no advertisements, it would be out of control. one could even – it seems – argue that these things are working extremely well.
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Try watching some British public information films. We’ve had anti-speeding and anti-distracted driving campaigns for years now.
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I agree that tasing, in general, seems to be used way too much. But, the analogy to the sprayed students has some serious shortcomings:
- The students were demonstrating to make a political point, whereas Filipiak was driving drunk.
- The students were not a hazard to the public, but Filipiak was a big danger to the public.
- The students did not ask to be excused from the law in a coverup, they were there pointedly to declare something in the status quo unjust and unconscionable, and visibility was precisely what they wanted; whereas Filipiak very much wanted to not be discovered, and upon being discovered he tried to induce other law enforcers into breaking their charters to serve the public good.
- The students were actually sprayed, whereas tasing didn't actually happen in this case (although it was threatened).
If the arresting officer had in fact been willing to tase Filipiak (and I don’t think we know the anwer to that), it is noteworthy that he didn’t simply do so without prior warning.
As to whether tasing would have been alright in this situation, I don’t have a strong opinion. Filipiak was apparently difficult to simply dislodge using elbow grease (and god knows the patience and respect shown him by the officer wasn’t motivating him out)… so the question arises: given that they had to get him out (and I do agree with that premise), precisely what were their options? They can’t get more and more officers into the limited space of the car’s open door. Should they have hired a professional negotiator? Used a soap and water cannon? Jaws of life?
I hate tasers and officers that abuse them, and I distrust officers in general. But I might be ok with how this went down…
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OTOH, when doing this sort of analysis, you need to beware of the base rate fallacy.
Let’s say you do a study that says 70% of fatal collisions involve speeding vehicles. Okay, speeding is bad; crack down on speed.
Then let’s say that you do a study that reveals that 80% of drivers habitually exceed speed limits pretty much all of the time. Maybe there’s another one that suggests that the minority of law-abiding drivers do not have lower collision rates, possibly due to relatively lower average driver skill amongst this cohort.
It’s complicated. Lower speed limits encourage inattention, which is itself a major risk factor. Bored and frustrated drivers may be more aggressive, another risk factor. Improvements in vehicle or road design safety may be countered by related increases in driver risk tolerance. Etc.
Does anyone know why this video was released? Are all incidents like this public record and easily accessible? Or did the department release it to show what they thought was exemplary behavior? (And I agree that it was exemplary behavior on the part of the arresting officer).
Well, unless the public is served by seeing people on very bad days…
Did that show “Cops” serve the public good. I tend to think not so much.
For me this video was just embarrassing.
So, at what number of successful police actions do they stop serving the public and just become invasions of privacy?
Authority figures have a reduced expectation of privacy. Power is balanced by public scrutiny.
I don’t think the off-duty cop in the video is necessarily a bad person or even a bad cop. And in fact, based just on his multiple stops for DUI, I’d much prefer he get into a program for alcoholics addiction than lose his job. As far as I’m concerned, what he did, while far from okay, was much less callous than cops who show up on the nightly news for shooting unarmed kids.
This video was a credit to the police whose cam it came from, and not particularly damning of the cop who got arrested.
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What exactly is the danger to the public from a guy who refuses to get out of his stationary car? Would he not have to leave to harm the public?
No doubt he was a danger before he stopped but blocking his car is sufficient to protect the public.
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Even if the police took his key, there’s no reason to think he doesn’t have a spare. Sure the police could block his car, but are they supposed to stay there for the 8 hours or so it’ll take for him to sleep it off?
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All the dead black people. Are you joking? Please tell me you’re joking. You can’t possibly be that stupid.
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The drunk driving lieutenant was driving in public. He had no reasonable expectation of privacy if he had his windows open and was talking with someone. Thems the breaks.
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I didn’t indicate that the video shouldn’t exist. I question how many more of these we need to see?
