tvc184

The perpetual victim.

People can hold anyone to any standard they see fit. Opinions and legalities are two completely different issues. And I started to respond to AAW and his statement that the media is using the athlete to make the story seem more important. I started to say, "you mean like they do with the cops?".

​The sheriff might be somewhat culpable. I have no clue what their procedures are or where it has been determined that someone did not follow procedures. If so then get it out in the open. You mention an argument that almost always comes up. It is not against the law to argue/smoke/be disrespectful/etc. That has to be the biggest grasping at straws of all the arguments. It is true that she might not have broken a law by using profanity (actually it can be against the law but the USSC has said that not if only the officer is offended) or being argumentative but I do not recall the officer arresting her for using profanity or for arguing. Had the officer said "You are under arrest for being disrespectful"... Houston we have a problem!

​Yeah, I guess we can disagree. I fail to see where "can you put the cigarette out" and "step out of your car" are out of line.

​More like arrogant.

​Does it really matter why an officer lawfully stops a person? Does it make you feel better if it had been speeding or rolling through a stop sign without coming to a complete stop? Had she not killed herself and had gone to trial for assaulting the trooper, she might have been convicted of a 2nd degree felony and up to 20 years in prison. The lane change is a tiny crime. Assaulting an officer or resisting arrest because you don't like the officer's authority is not. I am never sure why there is that need to challenge authority that sides almost completely with law enforcement. Unless the officer does nothing unlawful, the person has to comply or face legal consequences. I guess some people are the ones that disrupted class or generally want to throw temper tantrums just because.

​That is debatable and I would side with a court ruling on the side of the officer for safety. When the officer can lawfully and at his discretion give/make 1. a warning, 2. a citation or 3. an arrest and when an officer can lawfully and at his discretion 1. leave you in a vehicle or 2. order you out of a vehicle, why would anyone want to challenge an officer?

​Grasping at straws and nothing left.

​When it seems fairly obvious that the argument is not going to go your way (facts), you divert attention to something that does not matter.

​ ​There simply is nothing to try again. The question is legally too easy. Did the officer witness a violation of the law?

​Assuming you mean this as a serious question, you then are an example of what I have talked about in several threads and a short time ago, in the Sam Dubose thread. He needs no constitutional right (except perhaps free speech). The word "rights" is thrown out so often that I have serious doubts if very many people even have a clue what they are and I am serious. What the officer has is no "rights" but "authority". This are not against the law unless some government authority has written down something that says it is against the law. It can be statutory such as a state legislature passing a law or it can come down from a court of competent jurisdiction, not making law per se but ruling that an action violated someone's constitutional rights. The better question is, if an officer tells you to put out your cigarette, what right has he violated of yours? An officer under both statute and case law has fairly extensive authority for safety. In fact if you want to see as close as you can routinely get from the US Supreme Court in close to a unanimous ruling, read many of the cases of officer's authority over people (over their constitutional rights) for safety purposes. You might find several 9-0, 8-1 and 7-2 votes in favor of officers. That is not true on searches and detentions but when it comes to safety, the highest court comes down heaving in favor of the police and people complying with orders. The entire argument of the cigarette is a moot point because while it is a smoke screen from people trying to defend Bland, it has no bearing. She was not arrested for smoking. I can tell you to recite the alphabet, sing me a song, discuss your favorite music or anything else and there is no right violated. That would happen if I tried to arrest you for those things. What the officer does have the authority to do under TX law and US Supreme Court rulings is to stop her for violating the law (Terry v. Ohio), order her out of the vehicle without any further cause needed (Pennsylvania v. Mimms) and make an arrest even for the simply charge of not signaling lane change (Atwater v. Lago Vista). It seems that people often overlook those points as it ends most discussions. This is the most simple this case can be put. The officer saw a criminal charge in his presence and stopped the person. The officer told the woman to put out her cigarette and she refused. The officer then orders her out of the vehicle by law and intends to arrest her. After being ordered out and refusing (a crime in itself in TX). The officer tries to get her to comply and she continues to refuse. He then tries to use force to get her out of the car and she resists. In fact TX law says that resisting arrest is a crime even if the arrest turns out to be illegal to begin with. The reason as mentioned previously, the place to fight that is in court, not convening your own person court of opinion on the side of the roadway. Arrests are not voluntarily by law. You might go without resistance but the arrest is not done with a person's consent. The officers tells you that you are under arrest, not asks you if you mind consenting. Case closed. The officer might have been rude, he might have been angry and he might have broken his company rules. None of that is illegal. It will fall on mostly deaf ears but I will make a suggestion that if an officer orders a person to do something while being detained, the best course of action is to comply.

​A. Sure. Politicians, doctors, lawyers, judges, clergymen and everyone from every walk of life abuse their authority. Is there a point or are you simply stating the obvious? B. Yep. I would go as far to say that all cops (and like above, almost everyone else) need more training. The state mandates a minimum of 20 additional hours of training per year for officers. In my career I would have to have just over an additional 600 hours. My total training hours to date is about 3,000 or 500% more than state mandate. Many officers are in that same category and pass the same information on to those that have not had so many. In fact I teach a few times a year at the police academy on just such additional training, specializing in arrest, search and seizure. C. See (A.) D. This one alone would end about 99% of all confrontations. Chris Rock even does that great video on it and if he had $1 for every time it has been shown on youtube, he could start out a broke person on government assistance and be a millionaire. It is funny but like most comedy, the funniest stuff is true. You can youtube any number of current black citizens that keep saying the same thing and on many occasions offer no excuse for police officers. They simply say, quit fighting, quit running, quit arguing and if you feel that the officers violated some rights or laws, fight it in another venue, namely court.

​But they slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night..........

​Ignorance of the law is sometimes way out there and blogs, word of mouth and other social media does not help. I have heard and read so many times, "the cannot lawfully" blah blah blah. IT VIOLATES YOUR RIGHTS". Even on television news shows I hear even lawyers sometimes saying that probable cause is required for a valid detention. That is simply not true as it only requires reasonable suspicion. The standard, although very old, was made in case law from the US Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio almost 50 years ago. Then I hear that an officer cannot get you out of a car without a good cause or at least reasonable suspicion. Better read up on Pensylvania v. Mimms also from the USSC back in 1977 or almost 40 years ago. But we can't get passengers out without a good cause right? Oops, better read Wilson v. Maryland from 1997. We need a warrant for a car if we wish to search it without consent, right? We have to go way back to 1925 in Carroll v. United States where the USSC said that with probable cause, an officer can search a vehicle without a warrant. That has been reaffirmed by them several times since. What about arresting people on minor traffic charges for which jail cannot even be sentenced by a judge? You only have to go back to 2001 when the USSC in a Texas case said "oh well", don't break the law. If an officer says to you while you are walking down the road, "Do you might speaking with me for a minute", if you stop then you are unlawfully being detained unless he had reasonable suspicion. Well, wrong again. It might be a cop trick but if it is put in the form of a question and it isn't done with some other show of force (yelling, pulling a gun, etc.) then it is a stop with your consent and the officer does not have to explain the law to you like he does under Miranda for a full custodial arrest. I could go on but the ignorance and what gets people often butt hurt if believing that their rights have been violated when the truth is that what happened might be completely lawful... even if the officer is butt hurt and that is why he acted like he did. Know your rights and uphold your rights..... actually knowing them might end a lot of the problem but I suspect that knowledge will not be known very soon as it is readily available by googling any topic and has been for many years but many people seem to not case. Many defense attorneys have their own websites and give almost the same answers that I have given above.

​And does any of that violate the law or her rights?

​A car coming up behind you "causes" the law violation? I assume then that if I am in the right lane of a highway and move to the left lane to pass, that car "caused" me to possibly violate the law if I didn't lawfully use my turn signal? I can also assume then that if you are on one of those winding hill two lane highways in east Texas and you are going 15 mph under the speed limit and to pass you I finally get a break between hills but have to speed to do it and I get caught by DPS coming the other way, it is okay because you "caused" me to violate the law. Any other excuse that you can think of to turn a lawful traffic stop and arrest into something illegal because someone else caused it?

Every state has its own laws and what may be illegal in one state may be legal in another. Also in that caregory of state laws is rules of evidence, jurisdiction, definitions of a lawful arrest, who can be an officer, under what circumstances (if any) a citizen can make an arrest, etc. I can only tell TX law but here a university police officer is just like any other police officer. In fact most police officers in TX have the same authorities in most cases but there are some differences. They have their own police department and chief. There is no reason to follow a city police department's policy since universities sometimes have their own department. I am sure that OH has similar laws but that would be a guess. If they are like TX then a cop is a cop.

So it is clear as day because some officers in prior incidents may be guilty? Got it. Let me use that the next time I arrest or testify against someone. "Well your Honor, I arrested a guy last year in similar circumstances and the guy last year lied ". GUILTY!! ...... by association and prejudice without regard for facts.

Are you citing Ohio law?

I wonder if the media will run wild for weeks and there will be literally millions a social media posts blaming all dispatchers as evil and uncaring......

Not really but only using my phone. The last officer killed in the line of duty in PA was a game warden. He reached into a car similar to that video and was grabbed and drug away and then run over. I have no problem with using deadly force in such a situation. Whether reaching for someone in a car is smart or not is not even part of the mix. It is lawful and from that standpoint, all that matters. I did not see the offense report on what the officer's claims were. If he said something like he was drug for 40 feet then it appears as though he was falsifying information. If he said only something like he was being dragged then he might have been telling the truth or at least from his perspective. In Graham v. Connor the SCOTUS said that you need to look through the eyes of the officer that had to make a "split second" decision. When you go through that much of an adrenaline dump and that much stress, the time factor in your mind is out of whack. We had an officer involved shooting and I was about three blocks away when it happened. One of the officers said that he thought that he had fired two rounds. I think we found seven of his shell casings at the scene. Did he lie on what was a justified shooting or was he is mine filled with so much adrenaline and the fight or flight impulse that he only remembers pulling the trigger? The officer in this video was completely calm. He was at no time abusive and did not do anything even like the trooper in the Sandra Bland case. Was he really looking to murder someone that day? From my experience the driver and the video was being very evasive and an experienced officer would perceive that almost immediately. At that point they are in a heightened state of alert expecting a possible deadly force encounter because they do not know why the guy is being evasive. It looked like the officer tried to reach in but the guy sped away and you could hear the engine rev up as he sped away. In a very short time frame the officer fired a single shot. Did he believe that he was in danger in that one second? Was he actually in danger? Did he reach in and start to get pulled away? I have no clue but I can easily see something less than murder all the way to exoneration. Now if the officer made up a bunch of stuff then he is probably done. I think that if you could have read the officer's mind two seconds before the shot being fired, you might find that he had no idea that he was about to shoot. In the only round that I have ever fired on duty, I had no clue that I was going to pull the trigger until the moment it happened.

I can see a not guilty or at the most some kind of manslaughter.

Yet again you play the "yall" game. Judge everyone by a single or a few but do not want to be judged by the same standard. I have seen so many people video me and other officers that I probably can't count them all. I have stopped other officers that have tried to keep people from filming by moving them far away. Most officers that I work with now know that they can be videoed at any time and simply accept it. As a supervisor I am the first one to get complaints and many times the first thing that the officer says is look at my video.

Or not happening more and maybe less but with the 24 hour news cycle, political agendas and social media........

It is all media driven. Unfortunately many people watch unending news coverage of some incident and are led to believe that we are in the midst of an epidemic. The sad part is that this sometimes bogus, overhyped and outright fabricated coverage actually convinces some people or validates their opinion.