Hawww, thanks.
As for input on this thread, this very much reminds me of those two girls who tried to kill themselves by running headlong into traffic and the news cameras (or police footage) got it all on film. “Asking for it” just suits my train of thought.
Now, how to fit “go ahead, taste me” into an everyday situation…
The phrase “eat me” could easily be followed by “go ahead, taste me”. Almost every day has an opportunity for you to say it.
So I was rolling balls this weekend and my eyes kept going in different directions
Well, that depends. If their resistance is violent, perhaps. If the resistance isn’t violent (or even, if I recall, threatening), and takes the form of saying “I’m not doing that,” before agreeing to do it, after all. If “resistance” is being reluctant to sign a ticket, then no, it’s not really dangerous at all. If they’re simply let off after they sign it, reluctantly, what will happen next time? They might do it again, and hurt a police officer’s feelings? Meanwhile, the precedent set is that, after refusing at first, one may still choose to comply when one has calmed down. The current precedent is that, if one so much as says “No” to a police officer, one may as well make a break for it and endanger more lives, because one is being arrested regardless. If people are made desperate, they will act in a desperate manner. If people are given a way out that minimizes the harm to everyone involved, there is no reason for them not to take it.
The problem is that it shouldn’t be. They should have some level of judgment and of compassion. Enforcing the law equally is, yes. She should get a speeding ticket the same as anyone else who broke the speed limit. She refused to sign and pay this ticket. If this is how things ended, arresting her was fair and equal treatment, and tasing would, at worst, be an error in judgment on the safest way to stop her. However, that is not how things ended, at all; she agreed to sign the ticket. The Police Officer would not let her do this, and proceeded to arrest her. This means she will now have a court date and possibly jail or prison time. This is a waste of my money that achieved nothing other than ruining the remainder of a rather mean old woman’s life because she didn’t immediately agree to do just as the police officer said. No-one was harmed, she agreed to sign the ticket and thus stopped resisting.
There are times when there is really no reason to enforce the law, as nothing is gained from doing so, and resources are thus wasted even if harm is not done. For instance suicide is illegal, but if they had handcuffed my largely headless grandfather after he killed himself with a shotgun, drug him down to the police station, assigned him a public defendant,and held a trial, and given him a prison sentence, parole, and community service, it wouldn’t be “enforcing the law equally to all,” it would be a stupid, pointless waste of the state’s time and money. This isn’t so extreme or blatant an example, but I still don’t see anything gained from her arrest, or any meaningful negativity in the precedent set. In fact, I think people are more likely react rationally to the law if the law acted rationally to begin with.
I agree. If I, a strapping young, male martial artist had said “I’m not going to sign then,” then, later, “Okay, given the options, I guess I’ll sign it,” still arresting me would have been equally pointless, and tasing me when I was calmly walking back to my car (keep in mind that, at this point, I had tried to comply with his request and he would not let me) would have been pretty brutal and senseless.
I actually agree with Arac, to a degree. Judging from the video, she was a cranky old bitch and the officer did indeed overreact.
However, this must be weighed against the fact that, once she decided she’d rather go to jail than sign a ticket she shouldn’t then be offered the chance to turn around and go “No actually, this is stupid.” By that stage it is too late, you’ve made your stupid choice and you have to live with it.
I still think the officer was stupid, though, so I don’t think she should have to face the maximum punishment and certainly shouldn’t have to serve jail-time.
Cavelcade: its not about what punishment she deserves. Its about whether or not the guy was right to tase her considering the circumstances. Its about the pros and cons of arresting vs not arresting. If arresting, physical confrontation or no physical confrontation.
Here, the woman chose to not sign the ticket and be arrested. Then she changed her mind. She wanted to have her cake and to eat it too.
See, I don’t see why it has to be, or even should be that way. A system like that takes irrational people, who make stupid, thoughtless decisions, and instead of trying to get them to calm down and think, so nobody is further endangered by their decisions, reinforces their panic and anger and causes them to act more irrationally, and thus more dangerously.
It’s like trying to talk a hysterical guy down from a ledge by telling you’ll have him arrested for disturbing the peace when he comes down.
Actually, she wanted to have her cake, then realized she would be far better off eating it. Note that, with a cake, this works perfectly well. Your analogy is as faulty as your argument. In fact, they’re faulty for the exact same reason. This is not a coincidence.
How do you even compare a bitchy old lady that refuses to sign a ticket, resists arrest, and then tries to sign the ticket just because she didn’t think the cop would follow through with what he told her he’d have to do to someone in a situation where there’s a chance of them killing themselves?
And she asked for both things to happen. “Arrest me. Dare you. Tase me. Dare you.”
But at that point she’d already began to resist arrest. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
In the exact way I said I was comparing them, being that in either circumstance, the dogmatic, thoughtless enforcement of the law is more likely to lead to injury or death than not doing so?
I’m, uh, pretty sure she wasn’t legitimately asking for those things to happen. This means that, as has been discussed, she is a “bitchy old lady.” I’d like to think that the people given guns and charged with protecting me are slightly more mature and rational than bitchy old ladies, and don’t arrest/tase them on a dare, or, as I put it, out of a childish and misplaced sense of pride.
Yeah. I know that. I’ve specifically been saying that is not the way it should be, and that system endangers more people, wastes tax money, and doesn’t really achieve anything other than setting some “scary precedent” no one has, as of yet, actually been able to defend as scary in the least.
edit: Never mind. I shouldn’t read shit when I first wake up in the morning. Totally misread that. Whoops.
Was gonna happen dare or no dare.
Won’t argue that.
I didn’t mean that the dares were a causation, just that they were not a remotely valid excuse.
It’s setting up the precedent that, if you do something wrong, just pay the damn fine immediately. There’s no reason to get in a huff about it. And if you don’t want to pay the fine, well that’s fine, you can go to jail. Seriously, just take the ticket.
This completely misconstrues the situation.
The police officer led the woman out of her car and told her to stand back from the road. Instead, she walked close enough to touch him and said, “Give me the [bleeped] ticket and I’ll sign it.” She was near the road, so he ordered her to back away. She walked closer to the road and tried to grab the ticket. He pulled it away and shoved her away from the road and oncoming traffic. After that, the woman tried repeatedly to push by him and get back in her car.
Your claim that she agreed to sign the ticket and the officer “would not let her” skips the critical step, where she tries to push by the officer and drive away. That is why she was arrested.
To not arrest someone who shoves an officer and tries even halfheartedly to escape detention is horrible precedent. It encourages people to take out their frustrations physically on police officers, putting them in danger. It allows every would-be escapee to argue, “I was not really trying to get away. I was just annoyed.” This makes a mess of what would be simple prosecution for a simple crime, and gives every defendant a potential way out. All he needs to do is win over two of twelve jurors.
You seem to want a “grandma exception,” where the officer does not arrest someone who is not strong enough to endanger him. But this is poorly thought-out. First, even a weakling could catch an officer off-guard, shoving him into oncoming traffic. Second, it is not always clear how strong an arrestee is at first glimpse, and it is practically ridiculous to require officers to make that judgment before an arrest. Third, there is no principled reason why the weak should have the right to push policemen with impunity, while ordinary people would be arrested. Fourth, officers should not have to endure being pushed, even by someone who is weak enough to pose no threat. Their jobs are unpleasant enough as it is, even without giving the old and decrepit the right to shove officers.
The law as written creates an incentive to treat officers politely, or at the very least, to not shove by them.
Now, a prosecutor will take this case in the next couple months. He will almost certainly offer the woman a plea bargain for a misdemeanor equivalent to resisting arrest, which is a felony. She will get off without jail time, especially at her age, and a fine of a couple hundred dollars. She may be put on probation, have restrictions put on her driver’s license, or the like.
That’s another reason officers don’t let arrestees go. Technically, they don’t have the authority to do so unless the prosecutor has granted it. This is because prosecutors have discretion over how best to deter crime in the area. Officers would make all kinds of biased and unsystematic decisions about whom to let go.
In contrast, prosecutors see hundreds of cases every year. Their job is to think systematically about whom to prosecute, and to do so in a fair and unbiased way. If officers selectively let people go – even if they are grandmas – the police are undermining the prosecutors’ attempts to get a sense of local crime and optimize deterrence. This is a real problem. If the police are already letting many arrestees go, then to achieve the same deterrence, prosecutors have to punish defendants accused of the same crime more to make up for it. That is unfair to the defendants whom (for all kinds of biased and personal reasons) the officers decided to arrest.
So the best policy is to follow policy, and to arrest people who commit crimes. The “grandma exception” is something for a prosecutor to consider, not a police officer.
Which sets the precedent that if you do get in a huff about it, you may as well get violent about it, since you’re already going to jail for just being in the huff. See: Exactly what happened here.
This is hardly an unbiased account; you leave out the fact that, she was not allowed to sign the ticket and was going to be arrested regardless of her intent to do so. This is before she shoves him, and is the central element of my argument. Had she been allowed to sign the ticket and go, the shoving most likely never would have happened.
Firstly, my argument was not that she should not have been arrested, in the end. It was that, at the point where she offered to sign the ticket, the officer should have agreed to let her sign it and end the entire thing then and there. Instead of shoving her away from the traffic lane, telling her to move back to her car and he’ll let her sign it, pay the fine, and nobody has to go to jail. Instead, he doesn’t do this. He keeps the ticket away, essentially telling her that there is no way she is not going to jail. Furthermore, he shoves her, a violent (if well-intentioned) action, which will probably not help in calming down an irate woman. Now, he has both stopped a mutually beneficial solution from occurring, and further provoked an already irrational person with physical contact. This, of course, doesn’t make her actions justified, it does, however, remove any sense of justice from his actions, leaving only idiocy and failure, which are the central conceits of this tale.
My point is not that she shouldn’t be arrested because he didn’t get hurt. My point was that, before she became in any way physically violent, and before she tried to flee, a little diplomacy could have prevented her from becoming physically violent and trying to flee, and thus prevented him from tasing her, generally ending the whole thing on a much better note.
You seem to want an easy strawman, seeing as I already stated that if it were me in the same position, I would want the law to follow the same course I recommend with the “grandma.” It doesn’t matter if the person involved could injure the officer, it is if they try to that matters. The only actions this woman took to even possible endanger the officer were taken after he failed to take my prescribed course in the situation, meaning they may not be used to judge my prescribed course. I am not arguing she should not be arrested despite the course of actions she took, I am arguing that she would not have taken that course of action if she hadn’t already been told she was being arrested and there was nothing she could do. He had no reason not to let her sign the ticket after all and go free other than actions she took after he already made that decision.
No, not really. From my understanding, she was definitely going to be arrested before she shoved by him, so, honestly, her violent behavior held no bearing on her arrest, only the crime for which she is tried. As you said, she’ll probably plea it down, so, no, it really doesn’t give that incentive at all. Not arresting her if she hadn’t shoved by him would have, though. Which is what I’m saying should be done.
Now you’re hypothesising about the actions of someone you don’t even know and have no knowledge of apart from what we’ve seen in this video. This is a futile argument. I could equally argue that she was actually going back to her car to get a gun to teach him a lesson, getting him off his guard by pretending to agree. From her irrational behaviour, I am as likely to be correct as you are with your ‘rational individual’ guesswork, which is, as you can see, a minuscule probability.
Also, if you get violent about it you’re going to get a worse sentence. That’s not the precedent set at all.