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Regardless of the merits of his claims:
I see this behavior (on bodycam videos) from my clients all the time, and it's always counterproductive. Even if someone is 100% in the right, there is no situation made better by being argumentative and belligerent with the cops. Once cops have shown up, the situation has gone to shit, and being a dickhead doesn't improve things. Passive resistance, petulance, argumentativeness, active resistance, outright assault on the cops... not going to help. It sucks, but being polite and pulling the "yes, sir, no sir" card generally keeps things from getting worse.
It's especially baffling from clients who claim they are in fear of the cops killing them at any second due to their race. What, the cop is going to decide to not kill you because you're so obnoxious? Very logical. It's reinforced every time I see bodycams of bored, time-killing cops doing a traffic stop during daylight where they're trying to give a speeding ticket (and do the usual cop thing of sniffing around for something else). Instead of giving a name, getting a ticket, and going on about their lives, that's the time clients decide the smart thing to do is refuse to give a name (or give an incredibly fake name and DOB), refuse to hand over a driver's license, and get belligerent, thus turning a speeding ticket into PC for arrest and a search of the car.
What's baffling? The cops are trying to make them eat shit (that is, to yield in a monkey dominance game) with all the 'yes sir' and 'no sir' stuff, and in the moment they would rather take the risk of greater consequences than do so "voluntarily". Probably especially culturally relevant to blacks, though I suspect all but the most beaten-down milquetoast PMCs dislike showing their belly that way. Law-n-order conservatives claim to think it's fine, but I think mostly they don't envision themselves on the wrong side of that.
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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