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Football player Tyreek Hill was arrested the other day during a traffic stop. Because he refused to keep his tinted windows rolled down for the officers, they commanded him to get out of the vehicle. Because he refused to get out of the vehicle, the officers forced him to the ground for a detainment. In Florida, officers have the right to command you to keep the window low enough for (1) communication and (2) officer safety. This appears to be a universally agreed upon fact before this event, as for instance in a video by a criminal defense attorney specifically about a Floridian just two weeks ago, and in legal advice proffered online just a month ago.
Let us assume that the officers knew who Tyrell Hill was, which isn’t a given because of the arresting officer’s thick Latino accent. They would have every reason to treat him with precaution because of his domestic violence and assault record, meaning that a concern for officer safety is legitimate despite the subject’s fame. And really, even thinking about a subject’s level of fame before enacting a law or police procedure should make us recoil. We don’t want to do that, right? We should treat everyone the same. The typical talking heads, of course, are calling this police brutality.
I am interested in how this scene would be treated if the subject were of a different appearance and nature. Tyreek, a 1%er super-wealthy person of privilege, is extremely rude to a working class minority police officer. Let’s imagine some white CEO stammering to the minority police officer, “don’t knock on my window… I’m going to be late… don’t tell me what to do!”, while ignoring the officer’s requests. We would all agree that this behavior is unacceptable. We would rightfully delight in his retribution, being placed on the ground in subservience to the Law. The comments would read like, “white man realizes the law applies to him”. But Tyreek, a (former) criminal, has a social privilege that would never be afforded to a white CEO: he is a star athlete and the public implicitly expects less of him because of his genetic nature. I can understand the public behaving like the public, but it’s annoying to see media figures excusing the behavior, too.
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."
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.
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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