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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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