While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this case.
What this is, is an ultra-common case of yet another cop "escalating everything always" because there is no downside for them to do so. They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force.
She should have never have been ordered to get out of the car, so this was a false arrest.
Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people. There should be no incentive for arrest in a situation like this, no power struggle, but instead they should be proud and rewarded for having deescalated any non-violent situation. Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back.
In this case, the woman was irritated because she was being penalised for a really, really minor infraction. And then she was defensive because persisting with the cigarette request and the demand to leave the car seemed unfair. And then she was rude because he was abusing his authority and he was too embarrassed to acquiesce to a member of the public (giving him the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't because she was a woman and a black woman). The police should accept in the first, explain in the second and then deescalate in the third stage of a case like this.
"Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people."
They are trained in de-escalation techniques. The issue is that in so many of these videos, it's not the person they've stopped or arrested, but the police themselves being the ones _actively_ escalating a situation until a use of force is near inevitable.
Of course. Obviously their training is not enough (or not on-going), their culture is poor, or the wrong sorts of people are being recruited.
I can appreciate that police would develop a strong us-vs-them reaction when dealing with organised crime for example, but there's little excuse for extending that a woman pulled over for not indicating when changing lanes. That was a real opportunity to give her a reminder, not warn or ticket her, and rebuild a really fractured relationship that people can have with their police.
> Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back.
But that's not about de-escalation training. That's about focus on duties. You poke a toe over the wrong line and you're going to get aggressively yelled at, or shoved.
I think it goes without saying that there's a line. And also that they're still famously robotic.
The police should react appropriately when faced with violence or an especially difficult customer, but their focus on duties should be to minimise fiery situations where they can.
In Belgium it is a criminal offence to 'insult' a police officer, they call it "Smaad aan de politie" in Dutch/Flemish. I know because I got a verbalisation once and I didn't need to say a lot to get it. Thankfully I didn't need to go to court and got a criminal record that way.
I once lived next to a guy who drank a lot and who assaulted his older daughter when he drank too much. We had thin wales so we heard the scuffles and the cries. We always called the police but they didn't do anything about the situation. To be honest Belgian justice is a joke, in a lot of cases involving violence they never prosecute anybody.
After I while I got really fed-up after the x number of times the police came and did really nothing than telling the guy to be quit.. . I made - not saying that I was correct - remark that being a police officer in Belgium must really been the most pointless job you could do. Drive your bike without a light and you get fined, hitting your children and you get a free pass. That - and that alone - was enough to get verbalised.
Same in NL, but people go around it by making it an opinion instead of a direct insult, then it becomes freedom of speech. As in, instead of saying "You're a dick", you go "I think you're a dick". Subtle, but apparently enough.
I have heard plenty of people insult police officers in public and even spit at them in the Netherlands without them doing anything. I learnt in school it is illegal to do so, I have never seen any of them do anything about it in real life. Even without the subtleties; quite the opposite.
Police officers have constantly crown prosecutors (or their assistants) on the line and these are the people who really call the shots on whom to arrest and how to proceed whenever something's getting serious. Going by the description, dad/daughter affair should have definitely been referred to Tribunal de la Jeunesse and I bet it was. Belgian prisons are also overcrowded and justice system understaffed so that prosecuting small one-time offenses is definitely not a priority.
Towards the end of the video, the officer in fact alleged she had kicked him. It's not clear to me when that happened. Possibly her foot scraped his leg in the initial scuffle to pull her out of the car. Alternatively, it may have happened in the portion that is off video. Either way, the female police officer noted evidence of the scuff, presumably on his uniform. Incidental things like these seem to be taken as evidence of "assault" all too often.
I was surprised by this, like other sibling commenters. I was under the impression that common assault is only enacted when the victim is threateningly contacted or injured, or has reasonable fear of that being about to happen. Maybe threatening language might play a part in that.
Having a quick Google, the articles I've come across seem to indicate that swearing at police has in the past been interpreted as illegal, but nothing has mentioned it being classed as assault.
There's section 5 of the public order act which is about saying / doing things "likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress" to the public, which has been interpreted as including police officers. I don't know anything about having to say things twice or it being classed as assault.
There was a 2011 ruling in England where the judge said that officers were so regularly on the receiving end of the "rather commonplace" expletive that it was unlikely to cause them "harassment, alarm or distress".
The Met continues to arrest people for swearing at police as they rejected the ruling. I know that Police Scotland continue to arrest people for swearing at police but I'm not sure how/if it has affected forces in England and Wales. At the time it was reported that the precedent could likely quash any future charges in similar circumstances.
There's 2011 advice provided to the Met which says that courts are unlikely to convict because officers are assumed to be robust: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15816761
It's probably a bad idea to direct insults at officers (because no-one likes being called a fucking facist wanker) and results will vary by location.
I'm not sure, but I think that after the first time the officer should say "don't use that language at me" and therefore probably tells the citizen that they are causing harassment and distress. Then if they continue to do it, after the warning, it becomes an offence. So perhaps it should be "continues to use offensive language after a warning about the language has been given".
It's illegal in Germany as well ("Beamtenbeleidigung" literally insult of a civil servant). The fines are pretty mild but it's a funny law (imo). The line isn't exactly clear. Some things qualify as insults, others don't.
Iirc "Clown" qualifies but "Bulle" (somewhat similar to the US use of pig=cop) doesn't because it is considered common use now.
The rulings usually seem arbitrary.
[The same laws apply for insulting non officers btw.]
Edit: Upper limit is technically one year in prison or a corresponding monetary fine (value depends on your income as is standard in Germany)
There is no such thing as a "Beamtenbeleidigung" in Germany, though it is a quite common myth. People in office enjoy no special rights in that regard. There is a difference, though, in the law process. Insults as a criminal offense need a personal demand for a penalty to warrant persecution by the state. For people in office, this can be replaced by a substitution demand by the state, supposedly to warrant respect for office in general.
Then, there isn't a catalogue for insults and their penalty. That's because criminal law in Germany is driven by the idea that the thing to be penalised is the individual guilt, rather than an objective action. This has a lot of consequences, one of them being that your action is weighted by what you wanted when doing the potentially criminal action, i.e. the intent.
> They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force.
Maybe they do it for more mundane reasons: because they are bored of nothing happening and just decide to check a car to break monotony. Maybe they are having a bad day and something that would not have bothered them any other day is pissing them off.
The problem is that comparatively to other first world countries, the US society is quite violent. You put a small army of armed regular human being on the street in a country with a small to medium expectation of violence and stupidity will have dearer consequences.
Without blacks murdering other blacks in gang violence the numbers are roughly the same as other developed countries, as this article reluctantly admits at the end.
Where by "roughly the same" you mean "twice as high", and by "black" you mean "black and hispanic", and, of course, the demography that creates those statistics and confounds simple comparisons like that is left entirely out of your one-liner.
>While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this case.
It isn't illegal to be rude, but the cop also doesn't have to let you off if you are being an asshole. She broke the law and he was going to be nice and let her off with a warning. Instead she was combative and he decided not to.
He asked her nicely to put out the cigarette and she essentially told him to fuck off she can do what she wants. Nobody has to sit there as inhale your shitty smoke.
Cops can order you out of your car for no reason once you got pulled over. It is definitely not false arrest. And I think the cop had totally reasonable grounds to make her get out.
Would you sit there and get shittalked while someones blowing smoke in your face because she has an authority/anger problem.
Being a dick to a police office who can still use his discretion to let you off is a really dumb move.
I might not sit there and get shit-talked to, but it is a police officer's job to deal with troublesome people in a manner that is safe, calm, professional, and respectful to all those involved. Your implicit acceptance of the "play nice to cops" game ignores the possibility of systemic biases present in "the game".
I always find it ironic that, for example, the NYPD's slogan is "Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect"... I have no doubt that the majority of interactions between citizenry and police are filled with all three, but it's the sore thumbs like the OP that are truly glaring.
I'm not talking about "playing nice" I'm talking about not acting like an asshole. It's stupid to act like an asshole to someone you want to give you a break/benefit of the doubt.
The cop isn't disrespectful until she refuses his order several times and he was to force her out of the car. At which point she cusses him out for several minutes straight.
It would be great if we had saints who could stand being yelled at like that without yelling back, but I sure couldn't.
The cop is disrespectful immediately. She's got a valid gripe (getting out of the way of the police officer means she gets pulled over), and he doesn't like that he's being called out on his shenanigans (threatening a ticket for failure to signal when pressured by aggressive driving).
See how that works? It's a he-said, she-said. It's great that there's one side that's obligated to act professionally and respectfully; it's a pity that that obligation seems to have fallen by the wayside. (Or, perhaps it never existed for certain segments of the population.)
What video are you watching? The first interaction is completely civil.
The second time he asks if she is okay and she goes on a tirade. He says "ok" and then asks politely if she can put her cigarrate out. He literally says "Do you mind" and "please."
And her resonance is "I'm in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette." And he says to get out of the car. She refuses and says she doesn't have to.
>"threatening a ticket for failure to signal when pressured by aggressive driving"
He's like 5-6 car lengths behind her. Watch the video.
8:42: You ok? (An apparently conscientious and concerned question from the police. Good, but too bad he doesn't stay like this.)
8:53: (Irritated, but civil response, by the accused, detailing why the cop is being a dickhead.)
9:15: (Cop doesn't like that he's being called out on dickhead moves and the tenor of the conversation changes. Cop proceeds to use his higher standing to escalate the situation instead of deescalating.)
You're missing the change in the cop's mindset right before the "asking about the cigarette." If the cop actually felt confident about why he pulled her over, he would have been able to handle how she responded. Instead, he felt threatened by the questioning of his motives. Why didn't he articulate the full reason and purpose for the stop right then and there? He decided to continuing escalating, and that is primarily on him. He could have slapped the ticket into her face and walked away.
Also, he wasn't bothered by the cigarette until he perceived an affront to his authority. That's childish playground behavior, not an attitude befit a public servant.
5-6 car lengths on a wide open road is an instigation. If a non-police officer driver does this, you wonder to yourself, "why is this guy up my ass?" This isn't some densely packed freeway, and he's 5-6 car lengths behind her. Why do that?
Probably because he ran her plates and got a driving record and warrant check. That's why it takes so long between the first time a cop comes to your window and giving you the ticket.
As for why he didn't say so right away the second time, probably because she was making faces or otherwise indicating that she was mad. And that is when he starts asking more questions.
I bet the minute she refused to put out her cig, he was going to give her a real ticket.
So, she's making faces and is angry, and that's your greenlight/"difference maker" for the cop to give her a ticket? Wow. This is exactly the "playing nice" game that I've described in a cousin thread.
If the cigarette is such an issue, why didn't he ask her that before she rebuked his grounds for the ticket? He's power tripping the whole time after she hints that she's not pleased, and you're greenlighting his power trip because she wasn't a bootlicker.
This is victim blaming at its finest... she's rightfully angry, and you're saying we can't blame the cop for not keeping his cool?
What this is, is an ultra-common case of yet another cop "escalating everything always" because there is no downside for them to do so. They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force.
She should have never have been ordered to get out of the car, so this was a false arrest.