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In what way is being respectful towards the police showing your belly? This is low trust society talk. Yes, cops are humans and there will be some fraction of interactions where the cop is in the wrong or abusive. It's still preferable to default to an attitude of helpful cooperation - in what sense should I be on the side of the individual contributing to societal blight rather than an organization that is at least notionally opposed to it? Framing these interactions as a "monkey dominance game" and advocating for an oppositional attitude leads to worse outcomes.
Yes, but there's a difference between cooperation and utter submission. Some cops will be dissatisfied with the former and demand the latter, even when there's no logical cause for it. ("Come this way." "Very well, but you're making a mistake and you're going to regr-" "YES SIR." "Excuse me?" "Say YES SIR and DO AS I SAY. I don't want to hear another word or you're gonna get it.")
Far fewer cops than the media suppose are inclined to random acts of murder, but many like to lord over their power at a petty, schoolyard-bully level, without any practical necessity. I find it very plausible that lots of escalations of this kind are the fault of the cop for trying to "act tough" when measured, reasonable conversation was on the table before they started barking demands.
When ever was "you're going to regret it" a useful thing to say to anyone? They don't believe they're going to regret it, that's why they're doing what they're doing. Save it for when you do make them regret it.
This goes right along with "don't you know who I am" as the kind of phrase I only hear petty assholes on TV say.
I'm not saying it's a useful thing to say, but it's a harmless thing to say. So long as they're cooperating, let people be sulky when they're arrested, it shouldn't be cause for escalation - if only because this could be an innocent person who's getting ineffectually crabby, and there's nothing wrong about being ineffectually crabby at a wrongful arrest.
I mean, sure, police officers shouldn't beat you up just because you're being crabby and passive-aggressive. But I just don't see what you stand to gain by being crabby and passive-aggressive in the first place. Best-case scenario, the police officer ignores your griping; worst-case scenario, he interprets it as you resisting arrest and beats you up. Has it ever happened that a police officer has announced his decision to arrest someone, the would-be arrestee made a passive-aggressive comment, and the police officer immediately saw the error of his ways and decided to let the person off with a warning instead? Consider the payoff matrix.
Yes, certainly those are all good rational reasons not to act this way. But I think it's only to be expected that random people, upon being wrongfully arrested, will behave irrationally. It's a pretty upsetting, out-of-distribution crisis to suddenly have foisted upon oneself without warning. Even a normally-rational person might lash out in a counterproductive way - and most people aren't very rational to begin with.
This being basic human psychology, police guidelines should account for this. Cops should be taught to ignore meaningless non-physical threats and irritations of that kind. If the guy isn't trying to make a run for it or otherwise physically resist arrest, let him talk, remain stone-faced, carry on with procedure. Demanding one-on-one submission should not be the way.
I'm sure plenty of cops do ignore "meaningless" non-physical threats of this nature, and end up with bullets in the sternum for their trouble. In Europe, if a person gets pulled over by the police and is informed that they're being placed under arrest, if the arrestee rolls their eyes and says "you're going to regret this", the likelihood that the person in question has a handgun in their glovebox is somewhere around zero. This simply isn't true of the US, in which there are more guns than people and four police officers get shot every five days.
When a police officer pulls you over, he has no idea whether you're a normal level-headed individual or a short-tempered belligerent asshole, and is making a series of judgement calls on a second-to-second basis. There's no way a statement like "you're going to regret this" doesn't push a cop into thinking you're more likely to be the latter, not the former.
Sure, in an ideal world you could bitch and grumble without giving the officer arresting you legitimate cause to worry if he's about to find himself in a life-or-death situation. But we don't live in an ideal world, and that isn't the fault of the cop arresting you: it's not as if he personally ratified the second amendment.
There's also the point, while the officer is making a series of split-second judgement calls about whether you're about to ruin his day, he's updating his priors using the posterior evidence of how you interact with him. The priors here are your demographic markers: a comment like "you're going to regret this" will be taken very differently if spoken by an Asian woman in Prada driving a Beamer vs. a black man in a tracksuit driving a beat-up Volvo. Is it "fair" that wealthy white people can bitch and moan while getting arrested without having handguns trained on them, while poor black people can't? Maybe not - but again, it's not the fault of the cop arresting you that certain demographics are overwhelmingly more likely to assault or murder police officers than others. (Hell, black American women are more likely to murder people than Asian-American men, and possibly white American men too.) Cops may not be explicitly trained to let people's passive-aggressive comments slide depending on their melanin content, but a cop in a sufficiently diverse American city will quickly find himself becoming a race realist (and class realist, to a lesser extent) as a matter of practical necessity.
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Cops are not taught to ignore "meaningless non-physical threats and irritations" because this concept as you've articulated it is nonsense. Cops have no reliable way to determine which guy whos getting verbally aggressive is going to escalate the situation to physical aggression. Sure there is some spectrum running from young black male to old asian lady where the threat level goes from high to low, but its still just probabilities not certainties. Verbal aggression commonly precedes physical aggression.
Anyways, its these bad apples that put the cops into the position where now they treat every traffic stop like they are pulling over Al Capone's hitman. Its not too much to ask fellow citizens (imo) to stop shitting in the commons and just take their speeding ticket and cross examine the officer in front of a judge in court.
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And I think most cops react to 'Imma sue the shit out of you, lemme get your badge number, you're agunna regret this' with karen'sign the ticket this is not an admission of guilt etc etc'. But cops are human, some of them react badly.
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You can pack it up in as much high-sounding talk as you want, it's still showing your belly and your monkey brain knows it. If you're in the situation, YOU will know it.
If the monkey brain had its way I'd still be in a cave subsisting on meager, non-artificially-cultivated fruit. Are you trying to explain the thinking of the underclass or endorse it?
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It's really not, and I say this having had plenty of interactions with law enforcement - even one where I was questioned as a suspect. To use simpler words: the police and I are on the same team. I'm not being dominated by showing a baseline of respect and cooperation, that's just how you interact with teammates. The police are not perfect, neither are doctors; the fact that some doctors cause errors or are power tripping dickheads doesn't mean that I shouldn't be on the hospital's side if I'm in a car accident.
Anti-social people who bicker with the police over their attempts to enforce the law are not on my team. It is easy to see that worlds where I side with the anti-social against the police are worlds that are generally criminal. I do not like crime. I do not want to live in these worlds.
No, you are not. The police certainly don't think so.
But of course we are. A given officer in a given interaction may or may not think so - it's rational for them to be suspicious - but we absolutely are.
It's very simple. I do not like crime. I do not like low level anti-social behavior. I want the rules to be enforced. The police are the social / political organization responsible for preventing and responding to crime. We are on the same team.
The only way you get to be on the same team as the police is to be a cop, or close family of a cop. Or sometimes, a member of a few of the other related professions such as EMTs. Other than that, the cops view you as outgroup, probably a criminal, and definitely someone to fuck with. If they're questioning you they they think you're guilty, and if you don't answer their questions in a way that confirms that they think you're getting away with something. You may be the enemy of what you think is their real enemy (criminals), but you are not their friend, and they are not even your ally.
Perhaps you misunderstand what I mean about being on the same team. I do not mean that I expect that the police will give me a Junior Detective sticker, maybe let me turn on the lights and sirens or cuff a perp. I do not mean or expect that they would treat me any differently than anyone else they’re interacting with.
I mean that we have the same desired end state. They want to catch criminals and deter crime. I want criminals caught and crime deterred. Thus, I act respectfully towards them because they are engaged in a project worthy of respect and worlds where police are treated respectfully are - on the whole - superior to the alternative. It’s instrumentally useful to be polite, sure, but it’s also the correct action and has nothing to do with dominance games or submission.
You should see yourself on the police’s team too, even considering the reality that there are many substandard police interactions.
You have some goals in common. Probably not others. That doesn't make you on the same team. They'd be happy to throw you in jail in service of that end state, or just because they felt like throwing someone in jail that day and your number came up.
Never. I mentioned above I was once arrested for mouthing off to a cop. If I had been convicted, I'd be dead today; a middle class guy has no way of living with a felony conviction. That's enough to remind me I'll never be on their team.
(The cop, though fired for unrelated reasons from the particular job he was doing when he arrested me, went on to have a long and illustrious career ending up as the chief, then went into semi-retirement as a school resource officer until he was arrested and convicted for child porn and let off with a 364-day sentence because judges apparently ARE on the same team as bad cops, and that sentence let him keep his pension)
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Driving a commercial vehicle with proper registration and wearing a blue-collar uniform also gets you out of stuff.
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Yes, and? I didn't like dealing with a cop the last time I was stopped for speeding, but since I have an appropriate level of impulse control and time preference, I was able to balance that feeling against how much I would dislike an involuntary trip to the jail. I got a warning, life went on.
AND, it is an act of injustice for society to demand such.
Demanding such meaning talking like a normal person?
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You said their behavior was baffling. It's not baffling; eating shit sucks. They merely have a far stronger aversion to yielding in monkey dominance games, and likely a lower level of impulse control and a higher time preference.
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