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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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While the officer isn't exactly participating in a new crime, they do enable it pretty straightforwardly.

I don't understand why this logic wouldn't apply to any interaction between police and civilians. E.g., you can't participate in resisting arrest if you're not being arrested, therefore police should not arrest people. You can't participate in obstruction of justice if you aren't asked to provide your license and registration, so we shouldn't allow officers to require that either. This is the path of sovereign citizen madness.

We do, however, require that police don't randomly go arresting people. We do, however, require that police have better reasons for asking for license and registration than just randomly coming across someone in the street. The law regulates, and public order and fairness demand, that police pursue their trade with at least some degree of narrowness to avoid excessively harming or inconveniencing otherwise law-abiding people. This is a tradeoff, and one that should swing more decisively on behalf of the average citizen and their right to life in these circumstances. I thought this was somewhat self-explanatory. Obviously I'm not saying that police can never enforce anything for fear of bad things happening.

What makes this type of scenario more urgent to address is how swiftly the pendulum swings. The very fact that some people are radically changing their views based on a difficult-to-judge assessment of 1-2 feet in one direction or the other is a warning sign that this situation might need better guardrails. We obviously cannot prevent all difficult borderline scenarios, but to me it seems that fairness and justice is not being best served by current laws and policies.

I recognize that some people on here take the view that if a cop arrests you, you must comply. I whole-heartedly agree! Some people then go one to say that it follows that somehow it doesn't matter if or in what manner or how often cops arrest people. I very strongly disagree. Conservatism and its emphasis on individual choices does not necessarily mandate that "systemic" issues be ignored as context in all cases. Clearly some liberals believe that severe systemic issues mandate ignoring individual choices, and I equally despise that viewpoint. Reasonable people may disagree on the balance and weighting of factors, but to claim that no balance exists at all is madness no matter which direction you are on. That's especially true with the issues of policing!

So yeah, in this case, no backsliding into sovcit stuff implied. I'm just saying that there's a minimal gain from an officer standing in front of cars as a matter of course compared to the potential for escalatory behavior, that feels similar to entrapment.

(edited for additional clarity adding a paragraph before seeing reply, sorry, bad habit)

Sure, and I suppose I would be fine with a policy that officers may not randomly stand in front of vehicles and play chicken with them. But contingent on there being a lawful vehicle stop, I don't follow the logic that it is entrapment to raise the severity of fleeing the stop unlawfully.

I do think there's a difference between a cop stepping in front of an already moving vehicle (this should be banned by departmental policy for officer safety if for no other reason) and a vehicle moving into a cop.

And conveniently as a general rule you can replace "cop" with "person" and the result and rules are the same.

In this case the vehicle was "in motion" more generally (reversing first) and so I feel like more latitude is wise to extend.

Generally in life I've observed that cars have a pretty strong "bubble effect" when you're driving, where psychologically you feel separated from the world. Ever tried even something simple like staring at someone through the window? They get abnormally bothered, because mentally they aren't fully "in public" in that moment until the wall is broken. Until then you feel somewhat inviolate. Assessing the situation ought to take that at least partially into account. I mean, look how resistant people are even in normal, fully and obviously justified, clearly signaled stops to getting out of the car!

In some sense it feels wrong to take that into account because it's at least somewhat psychological, but that doesn't really make it less real an effect.

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