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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.
I'm not sure how this got in my feed, but I've seen a lot of videos on X of police radically escalating situations beyond what's necessary. It often includes legal commentary on citizen rights and self-defense. Things like a police PITing a pregant woman and flipping her car for not pulling over fast enough during a stop. Police harassing a guy working on his car in a auto-shop late at night because its "suspicious". Cops bodyslamming a dad who's taking his autistic son for a walk at 6am and not carrying his ID. Surely there is a sampling bias here, but I do get the general sense that this closer to the norm than not.
I'm not sure exactly why people on right in the USA are till on the "thin blue line" team. Perhaps its because the median cop is more conservative. Perhaps its being more comfortable with authority and generally being more conscientious - leading to less altercations. Either way, I think theyre in for a rude awakening in the coming years. This doesn't strike me a stable equilibrium. The state pays the police. There is a chain of command. The state has a lot of tools. They can make the job miserable so the right leaning cops leave. They can implement vaccine requirements. Look at the UK police system for an example of where I think we're going. It seems like a total historical accident that this hasent happened already. The UK practically has political commissars enforcing western liberalism on anyone who sticks their head up. I have no doubt that TPTB want that for the USA. The only reason it hasnt happened already is that theyre dealing with thousands of individual police departments as opposed to like 10.
No, it’s not even remotely close to the norm. Please expose yourself to more information. Please watch the massive corpus of police bodycam videos available all over YouTube, which will show you the exact opposite of the impression you are forming based on an extremely biased sample.
But isn't the sample on Youtube also biased? Presumably no-one is watching 8 hours of body cam footage where nothing happens on either side? Its going to be biased towards something interesting, or exciting or violent happening.
Which is why number of videos showing x isn't a good measure of how many times x actually happens?
The sample on YouTube includes channels dedicated to showcasing videos that make cops look bad, other channels that are dedicated to making cops look good and/or arrestees look bad, and channels dedicated to just documenting reality with as little commentary/slant as possible. You’re correct that obviously videos of a completely incident-free traffic stop are unlikely to make it to YouTube, but in this case the scenario that Nybbler is discussing would fall under the category of “interesting/notable interaction” and therefore we can certainly glean information about its likelihood by comparing the corpus of available video to the claim at hand. There are in fact huge amounts of videos of people rolling up their windows on police, with various outcomes, and we can draw conclusions from them.
Sure, not arguing he was right necessarily, just that everything that we see is going to have an "interesting" bias, so we can't tell from that what the chances of something going wrong are overall. They are going to look much more exciting than they are overall.
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