Maybe he was, but simply obeying orders hasn’t been a valid defence since 1946.
aside: there are an awful lot of “probably’s” in your last post. There is no particular reason you should give the police the exclusive benefit of the doubt.
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My probablys are justified. I don’t know what their police procedures are, and I don’t know their “book”. I’m being honest about flagging my opinion.
Nuremberg Trials, really? You’re equating murdering millions of people with (probable) police procedures to keep all parties safe for the nine minutes for backup to arrive?
I notice that you didn’t come up with a method to safely de-escalation the situation before backup arrived.
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Why is it ‘procedure’ to hold a gun on someone for 9 minutes awaiting backup, when someone reaches somewhere a cop does not expect?
'Whoa - stop right there" (draws gun)
“Step out of the vehicle” (one at a time?)
“Step away from vehicle” (or put hands on hood and stay there)
Look under seat.
All over in a minute or so.
… and the answer will be that a single cop cannot monitor/control two civilians who may have umpteen concealed weapons up their sleeves/in their socks/etc.
Needs more cop training (and fewer guns). I have no doubt it could be done in some manner as outlined above, but it is EASIER to point a gun and imply a threat to shoot someone if they breathe out of turn while cop waits for “backup”.
In USA, resorting to use of gun is always easier than anything approaching common sense or civilised behaviour. Sigh.
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I don’t think it would work, ‘people like that’ (sorry) often are naturally inclined toward numb-skullness and have then be trained to be even numb-skuller. When you preach your ‘psychobabble’ to him, his brain will simply switch to comforting gentle white noise.
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Unfortunately for them, that works both ways. If there is no legitimate police business happening there, why not assume that they are an imposter, impersonating a police officer? (If that sounds absurd, I have had PDs straight up disavow that somebody was a cop when I demanded to file a complaint). If the guys in the car or a bystander killed or even just subdued this cop, the cop would have no real defense. “I feared for my life - we recorded this fool jamming a pistol in my face.” Checkmate, and game over.
I just don’t get why he didn’t back off to his patrol car. Whatever the reason he drew his weapon – I’ll accept for argument that it was legitimate at the time – he’s got two pretty compliant folks at that stage and “I’m going to go back to my vehicle to call this in, hand me the keys in the mean time” would have done a lot to cool things down.
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That’s exactly how you can make a twitchy officer “fear for his life.”
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Why pull it out in the first place? Even if these guys did have a weapon under there, that is not in itself illegal. Even pulling somebody over who has a weapon on their lap should not need to be a problem. It’s hypocrisy, from some guy who I am 99% sure spends hours every day leisurely talking with their peers - people who are openly and readily armed as he is.
It is always foolish to assume that people have ill intent towards you personally based only upon the pretext that they are armed, or worse - could possibly be armed.
For example, I have had cops thoroughly shake me down and still be skeptical that I wasn’t armed somehow, which gets rather silly. After being asked several times “Do you really not have anything on you that could be used as a weapon?”, I explained to them: “I don’t bother carrying a weapon, because if somebody bothers me enough, I simply take theirs. Or use anything that happens to be there. Once in my hands, anything becomes a deadly weapon. I could kill somebody with a fucking paperclip if I decided it was necessary.” They did not seem to like that I was not intimidated by them, but short of killing me out of empty spite there was not really anything they could do. Nor should they!
Cops are first responders, and I think part of that philosophy is that they respond to problems, not create them. They can respond to a deadly situation with deadly force, but they are not entitled to start up being violent with anyone. It is not a meat processing facility, they can conduct themselves with polite deference like anybody else.
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o_0 dude following procedure isn’t just “following orders”. If more cops actually FOLLOWED procedure we would have less cops doing bad things.
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Does no body watch COPS any more? Or any cop shows? Or talk to a cop?
Look, if the suspension is “there is a weapon”, going back to the car and allowing them to possibly retrieve said weapon is a bad idea. Him standing right there seeing nothing has changed, means when the back up comes they go off the assumption that no one is currently armed. Go back to the car and now you have to wonder - “Did they retrieve a weapon while I wasn’t looking.” Now you have even JUMPIER cops.
Look, I am not saying every police procedure is perfect, but the basic, standard ones are made to keep both cops and citizens alive at the end of the day. The problem we have with police brutality and unnecessarily shootings is from cops going off script.
Assuming he had a legit reason to draw, everything after was done by the book and no one got hurt, which is much more preferable than several other recent examples.
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cops are attacked during routine traffic stops
Number of cop killers last year: 135
Number of killer cops last year: 1,162
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That’s deaths, not attacks. Wearing a bullet proof vest makes survival more likely.
Anyway. I am acknowledging that cop deaths are still pretty rare. I am acknowledging too many people are killed by cops that are unnecessary. I even acknowledge race and the hand tattoos might have been the reason the cop felt threatened in the first place.
But between those two extremes, there are criminals who are killed by cops and those actions are 100% warranted. Police face other dangers on the job.
I didn’t realize being neither anti-cop nor pro-cop was such a controversial position. You want me to tag you every time I condemn police action?
That razor cuts in both directions. Even so, killer cops are an order of magnitude more productive, from a population that is three orders of magnitude smaller.
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We should appreciate the officer’s safe handling of his weapon and compliance with procedure.
But why is it in this country that the working L.E. professional with training is allowed to escalate the situation whenever he fells threatened, and the lay citizen must either stay cool and de-escalate–or die?
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Because he didn’t have one, just a motorcycle? (And even a patrol car is poor defense against bullets.)
Precisely.
If you’re brown or black, police “feel threatened” and may execute you at any moment.
But if you’re white, police don’t feel threatened, even if you act like this:
https://boingboing.net/2017/07/27/police-officer-calmly-handles.html
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The full video shot by the driver:
Edit: Never mind. The original BB entry has the full video. I went straight to the WaPo story which didn’t.
Apparently there was a bodycam, so perhaps the police will release that video as well, from the point that the car passed a police motorcycle doing 85 mph in a 65 zone, through several minutes of trying to find the paperwork that all drivers are required to have available, up to whatever made the cop to draw his gun.
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Because your country is full of guns.
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Check; gonna strap the drivers’ license to a potato launcher/transdermal/CueCat.
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If the guy reached under his seat for something, I bet you would have seen a reaction. And there were people in that thread who were like, “Maybe he was calm because he realized he was in the wrong…”
Here is the thing, it is possible part of this is bullshit. But the calling for back up calmly and not hurting anyone or yelling at anyone is not that part.
Reason he was pulled over - possibly bullshit
Reason he felt the need to draw - possibly bullshit
Handling the situation after the draw - professional manner and by procedure.
If you look back at the various most notorious cases of cops killing people, I believe all if not most of them stem from them NOT following procedure. i.e. using an illegal choke hold. We can still freely question his initial motives, but like I said in my first post, if more cops handled situations like this, think there would be less police shootings.
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