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The police in this case have that "when I say jump you say how high" mentality. Which isn't totally unreasonable but also you don't need to shove a guy onto the ground because he's moderately uncooperative/bitchy. Like at one point they ask him to sit down, he says hold on, and a cop shoves him down, and this is after he's been handcuffed. It's not some super shocking police brutality but just kinda unnecessary.
Would your mentality be different?
I've posted about this before. Watch police bodycam videos. The speed at which ho-hum traffic stops turns into "SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED!" is frightening. One of the things cops are doing is assessing how compliant you're being. If you're being compliant, they can make some assumptions about the next 15 - 30 seconds. If you're not, they're operating on the assumption of "this could go bad right now."
It's interesting how this "moderate" lack of compliance often precedes attempted lethal violence. The number of criminals saying, "I'm going to reach for my gun and shoot you after the count of 10" keeps declining every year.
"but just kinda unnecessary."
Funny how "unnecessary" a lot of actions become when the conditions for death are present. Again, your average patrol cop is dealing with so many unknowns where the penalty for misjudging them tends towards loss of your own life, your partners life, maiming, or endangering other bystanders. Offending the sensitives of a single individual as a rough hedge against those other outcomes seems like a pretty obvious tradeoff, no?
For everyone who thinks that police are predisposed to tyrannical behavior and/or are drunk on power, I would offer that their job description is "interact with highly emotionally activated individuals on a daily basis, often with a very real threat of violence."
Boo hoo. If they can't handle it, they should find another job. Compensating by treating everyone they stop like a potentially-perfidous enemy surrendering is not compatible with liberty.
Everyone stopped by them is interacting with highly emotionally activated individuals with a real threat of violence, and it isn't even their job.
This is exactly why we have a national shortage of police officers. That lack of cops hits the most vulnerable communities the hardest.
Literally all you have to do is be polite and compliant. If you're male, go out of your way to demonstrate the compliance so your perceived threat level decreases. If this is offensive to your righteous moral code, I question how you are able to function in society at all. Everyday is filled with tiny sleights between strangers. If you become hypersensitive to them, that's on you.
You can't possible be making this equivalency in good faith. Your honest contention is that cops are running around 10 our of 10 jacked up and angry and use their weapons (or threat of them) in every encounter?
I don't think we have a national shortage of police officers because cops aren't allowed to treat anyone they stop like surrendered enemy soldiers. Because in fact the cops ARE allowed to do that.
No, my contention is that they are highly emotionally activated individuals with (that is, posing) a real threat of violence to everyone they stop.
Perhaps technically. However this seems to be changing with public scrutiny, and officers are more exposed than ever to having their actions in high pressure situations being put under the microscope of thousands of armchair experts
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Fully agreed. Their job is to protect and serve and that includes the people they suspect of crimes. They aren't dictators, and people going about their business are allowed to be rude and uncooperative within the boundaries of the law. It is not their job to be nice and compliant to the cops. It is the cops job to manage those interactions while understanding the authority they are exercising is not their own but is gifted to them, and that putting themselves at risk on behalf of the people is their job and that those people not acting maximally deferential is not an excuse to exercise that authority.
It is not. A policeman's job is to enforce the law, which they can be selective with.
'Protect and serve' is just good PR.
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Is refusing a lawful order by a police officer not the opposite of this? Seems an oxymoron
Well that's the rub isn't it? What orders are lawful? And which SHOULD be lawful. If an officer lacks probable cause for a traffic stop for example, then none of his orders may be lawful at all. If the orders are "not reasonably designed" to meet the officers lawful goal, then they may not be lawful. If their goal is unlawful then their orders too are unlawful.
An officer does not have the authority to make their orders lawful, that can only be determined by the laws of the location, and many officers are simply incorrect. Like the one who arrested a nurse who would not hand over a vial of a suspects blood without a warrant. He insisted he was giving her a lawful order and arrested her for failing to obey, yet he was not. In the case of Sandra Bland, the officer ordered her to put her cigarette out, and arrested her when she did not. Had she not killed herself in jail we might have an answer as to whether that is an unlawful order, even though it was nothing to do with the reason for the stop.
Simply put a police officer's authority has limits, and many things they may tell you to do may not actually be lawful orders.
https://goldsteinmehta.com/blog/pa-superior-court-ordering-driver-to-roll-window-down-is-a-stop
Here, because the police did not have probable cause, their order to roll down the window was held to be unlawful. And since that led to them discovering the driver was drunk, all that evidence was attained unlawfully and thus thrown out. In order to get past that, police tried to claim it was merely a consensual encounter, where the citizen can terminate it at any point, and thus he consented to rolling the window down, but this was held not to be the case. Here had the driver refused to roll down the window, he would have been refusing an unlawful order, and thus not committing a crime. Of course he couldn't know that until afterwards.
Now that is an entirely different question as to whether it is smart to be as minimally cooperative as the law requires you to be. Almost certainly it is not given the power disparities involved. It's unlikely the cops would have been willing to walk away had the driver refused in the above case after all.
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Cops aren't even in the 10 most dangerous jobs and most on duty deaths are car accidents.
Their odds of being killed by guns are lower than the average citizen. At 1 in 11,800
Regular citizen odds are 1 in 8,000
Cops need to chill out. The math says so.
You don't see commercial tree trimmers freaking out on people all the time and mag dumping when an acorn hits their own vehicle's roof. https://abcnews.go.com/US/deputy-fires-weapon-after-mistaking-acorn-for-gunshot/story?id=107229338
FLMAO
Comparing the homicide rates of police and "average citizen" is flawed. The “average citizen” is not the same thing as the “average law-abiding citizen”. The cohort used to calculate the risk of death due to homicide for the "average citizen" includes violent criminals who make up the vast majority of homicide victims. This group is excluded from joining the police force creating a sampling bias that distorts the comparison you’re making.
Additionally, you're conflating the risk level after implementing mitigation strategies with the inherent danger of the job. Police engage in work with high-severity hazards of varying likelihood. They employ risk mitigation strategies that reduce the potential severity (e.g., wearing ballistic vests) and the potential likelihood (e.g., situational awareness training).
The effectiveness of these risk mitigation strategies likely contributes to the lower fatality rates among police officers, masking the inherent dangers of the job. So claiming police officers have a low risk of being killed, so they don't need to employ such strict mitigation techniques, is flawed. It's akin to arguing that because few firefighters die on the job nowadays, entering burning buildings isn't actually dangerous and firefighters overly cautious.
The comparison to commercial tree trimmers is also flawed, as the nature and unpredictability of threats faced by police officers are fundamentally different. Unlike tree trimmers, who face primarily environmental hazards, police officers confront unpredictable, potentially hostile human actors. This introduces a level of situational volatility and stress that is not comparable to most other professions, including high-risk manual labor jobs.
I hear what you're saying and some of those are valid points. I would add that when comparing to other dangerous jobs, they all take mitigation and safety equipment into account as well. They don't just count tree trimmers killed without a helmet. Criminals, just like cops, are also citizens, their lives do count towards statistical death rates and can be included in national averages. A counter point is that not all cops work in places like south side chicago, yet most act like they do. I certainly understand that it can be a stressful job when no one is ever really happy to see you and you're dealing with a lot of the worst people on their worst day, I've had good and bad encounters with cops, 99% of the time while driving; I'm always polite, there really was no excuse for the bad encounters and it certainly soured me on the whole profession from a young age.
To quote the late great Warren Zevon. -"The Sheriff's got his problems too, he will surely take them out on you"
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This is extremely disingenuous example of lying with statistics. Sure that’s true of cops OVERALL. Cops don’t work the same environments, the same cities and the same suburbs. The places where all these altercations happen are usually highly violent and high crime locales where officers do indeed have higher fatality rates. This stat also ignores injuries - oh sure you merely got shot through the spine and paralyzed but you didn’t die, so chill out!
I compared apples to apples. I didn't count all the citizens that only got paralyzed or injured as well. Some citizens live in higher crime areas where they are more likely to be killed by violence. I fail to see your point here.
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Cops have lower odds of getting shot than the average citizen but how do those odds stack up to the communities they come from? Young men in the places that drive that average up don’t have the clean records to be cops.
People come from different places with different odds. That doesn't change that fact that being a cop is safer than being an average person overall.
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My odds of getting a needle stick injury are objectively pretty low. My odds of getting HIV (or something else) from a stick are even lower than that.
You'd better believe I shit myself just a bit whenever I handle a needle in the process of making sure those odd don't become real.
Yep, us civilians better be a lot more on edge than cops based on those stats. Considering on average a non-cop has a 50% higher chance of being murdered.
The point is that I have to deal with a low likelihood event on a day to day basis, which I have the training to avoid, but it lives rent free in my head altering my decisions, and it doesn't happen in part because it's more likely for me than the general public and because I use that worry and training to avoid it.
Looking at your stats you have a 1 in 50 chance in a given year, so I can see your worry. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493147/
The risk isn't the stick which is relatively rare but not unheard of, it's going on to end up with an infection. From your article:
"However, after a needlestick injury developing HIV is not common at all. In fact, from 1981 to 2010, there have only been 143 possible cases of HIV that were reported among healthcare professionals. Of these only 57 of the exposed workers seroconverted to HIV. Percutaneous needlestick injury was the known cause in 84% of these cases. Other infections acquired from exposure were 9% by the mucocutaneous route and 4% by both routes."
Those numbers are a bit more in line, and involve a similar anxious thought process of "okay how carefully do I follow the occupational health guidelines after this stick."
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My father was in the Coast Guard. During training, he almost failed out because of a fatal mistake in one "shoot/no shoot exercise scenario". It was a routine check of yacht, where instead of complying with his request, an old grandmother went about her business getting food out of a picnic basket. Now, my father's not the sort to shoot an unarmed old lady just for not complying immediately - after all, perhaps she's just getting a sandwich or a drink to offer the nice young man? - so when she pulled a gun out of the picnic basket and shot him... well, exercise failed.
So your father almost failed out of the Coast Guard for not pretending to not believe in stereotypes.
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Well, nobody is forced to be a police officer and interact with "highly emotionally activated individuals" on a daily basis. I'm still in favour of giving police at most the right to violent self-defence that the normal person gets (except perhaps no duty to retreat), and perhaps even less on account of having special privileges and hence responsibility. If any existing police are unhappy with these terms, they should be fired and replaced with new hires who are; in the event that there is then actually some difficulty filling police positions (which would surprise me) we could discuss next steps.
Surprise!
Follow the logical outcomes. If we tell police officers "If you don't like it, you can quit" some amount of them will. People (despite what they post on social media) want police. That means we have to re-fill those police positions that have quit. Who takes the job? We've already self-selected out the median reasonable person, right?
You see where I'm going. This becomes a doom loop down. Throw in the fact that being a cop doesn't exactly pay great and you're getting people who aren't really meant for the job taking the job. The primary issue I see it cops today is pretty plain - many are obese.
If you create a working environment that is extreme, you get extreme (in one direction on the other) candidates filling those roles. In some cases, this is preferred - you want high performers or the deeply committed. In policing, I would argue you want something like "the modal reasonable person" as a cop.
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Sounds like a great idea, with a few caveats:
A part of me can't believe we're redoing the whole police brutality debate, before the dust really settled after the last one.
I've been in Europe for the past three years or so, where US-style police brutality is not really an issue, but otherwise I'd almost accept these terms except "you don't get to move out of a small jurisdiction" would be a huge imposition completely orthogonally to any sociopolitical experiments performed there. Do I get to have the rule follow me to whatever small jurisdiction I move to instead?
Also, do you actually expect some negative consequences for people other than members of the police from such a policy (which ones?), or is your presumable opposition just based on its consequences for police themselves? To be clear, I'm not actually in favour of anything that looks like police abolition - on the contrary, I am pretty sympathetic towards sending them to round up petty thieves and ethnic gangs, disparate impact be damned. I just think that policing is in the class of necessary occupations engaging in which invariably induces moral corruption and decay, and whose practitioners therefore should be shunned and restricted in their rights vis-a-vis regular people, rather like medieval executioners or burakumin (but without heredity or compulsion because we are past such medieval injustices). I don't think the European middle ages suffered from a shortage of executioners, at any rate.
Sorry, I missed this originally. I expect both, or rather one leading to the other. Once it becomes established that cops can get into trouble for overstepping their "no better than a civilian" line, they'll just avoid hazards and do the bare minimum required to do their job. Once that becomes apparent, the criminals will start becoming more bold, and if you defend yourself against them the cops will go after you, because you're the easier target.
I don't disagree, but I think they need rights beyond those of a civilian to be able to do their job.
Like I said: cool idea, as long as you try it out away from me, and are forced to live with it's consequences.
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Because it put food on the table, and starvation was always an option for some people back then. There is a reason why western countries increasingly have recruitment problems for the less pleasant jobs. The only people being willing to be police officers under your scheme would be immigrants I'd wager. I don't know a single person who I could imagine willingly signing up to this.
And yet people still willingly sign up for the military, which is far more dangerous than policing ever could become. Do you know any people who did? I reckon that there are actually many for whom the idea of being authorised to engage in violence has enough of a draw that they would be willing to take considerable risks and encumbrances for it, but they might be underrepresented in the sort of circles rat-adjacent debate addicts like us are overrepresented in.
Actually the military is the poster boy for this problem in most prosperous western countries to my knowledge. Btw yes, I know some people who signed up, though most of them a generation above mine. They constantly have to lower requirements because the only people nowadays willing to sign up would have been considered unfit for service in the past.
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I've been in Europe my entire life, and it not being an issue has nothing to do with limiting the police to civilian self-defense rights.
Absolutely not, the rule is meant to limit the damage your ideas would do, and this would let you spread it throughout the world.
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Yeah. The real and constant threat of firearms in US Policing means the dynamic is fundamentally different to most other nations.
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Why not? Why is it the responsibility of the officers to be calm and gentle, and not the responsibility of the man who has just committed a serious criminal infraction (speeding is obviously a major cause of auto accidents in this country) and then refused to comply?
As someone who watches probably about a dozen police bodycam videos per day, it’s extremely easy to notice patterns in the kinds of things that immediately cause traffic stops (and police interactions more broadly) to go south. The percentage of videos where police are unnecessarily rough and aggressive with individuals who are respectful and compliant is close to zero; it’s abnormal and concerning when someone is this immediately resistant to police’s simple commands, and it causes the officers to be wary about what such a person is capable of.
I don’t feel remotely sorry for some rich entitled man-baby who thinks the law doesn’t apply to him and that police are beneath him because he can run fast. I don’t even care about Hill’s laundry list of prior criminal acts, since there’s no evidence they played any part in the way this traffic stop went down; his own actions and attitude in that moment were quite sufficient on their own.
Because if they can't, they have the option of pursuing a different career.
Who said anything about “they can’t”? What I asked is why should they? You’re assuming that the default state is police being calm and gentle, and that a deviation from this represents a failure by police. But why shouldn’t the default expectation be that uncooperative assholes get treated roughly by police?
When Officer Alice interacts with ordinary citizen Bob, Alice could have opted out of the situation by pursuing a different career. Unless there is a similar way for Bob to opt out of the interaction, imposing on Alice a requirement, which not everyone is capable of fulfilling, is fairer than imposing the same requirement on Bob, as the former case allows those who cannot fulfil said requirement to exist in some other societal role, while the latter does not allow them to exist at all.
Admittedly this argument is dependent on the proposition that There Is No Such Thing As A Human Being Who Is Unworthy Of Life; however, societies which reject this axiom tend to feature piles of skulls.
???????
The way is for Bob not to commit an infraction which necessitates the involvement of the police in the first place. Bob is not part of a randomized undifferentiated mass; he is part of a much smaller subset of the population - people who have been pulled over under suspicion of a crime. Obviously I am not saying that nobody ever gets pulled over despite not actually being guilty of the suspected offense. However, generally speaking the person getting pulled over has done something wrong to merit the interaction in the first place.
"Generally speaking" isn't good enough. In this example, Bob didn't do anything wrong.
Denying that individual human beings matter, rather than the 'general' state of the community, is another path lined with skulls.
At no point in your post did you specify that Bob had not done anything wrong. Why is Officer Alice interacting with him in the first place? If it’s not to detain him for questioning and/or citation related to a criminal matter, then there won’t be any lawful commands for her to give him, and thus nothing for him to disobey/fail to comply with. Your hypothetical inherently implies that Bob has at the very least been suspected of doing something wrong.
Alice suspects Bob has done something wrong. Bob hasn't. If the onus is placed on Alice, she can avoid it by pursuing a different career. If it is placed on Bob, and Bob is not capable of stifling his indignation, is there some way for Bob to avoid being attacked in your proposed system?
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Replace this Tyreek with the most shrill and annoying Karen you can imagine. She's also immediately resistant to police's simple commands, but would she get the same treatment as a 192lb very muscular (very) black dude? I doubt that.
That's already covered by the "shrill Karens are less capable than 192lb men" clause, no matter what absurd statements came out of the bird-watcher or Citibike situations.
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Something like this?
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From my libertarian days I remember some amount of police brutality stories involving white women, so I wouldn't bet on it if I was you.
But even if you're right, I'm not sure this is wrong.
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Are you the PD or one of our shadow state attorneys?
Just a man with access to YouTube.
But why
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