Posted on 07/07/2007 3:40:24 PM PDT by TornadoAlley3
'He really abused me,' resident says after arrest by Orem police officer
OREM - Two days after Independence Day, 70-year-old Betty Perry experienced an ordeal she said shouldn't be happening in America.
The retired military and U.S. government employee answered the door at her home Friday morning to talk with a police officer about her bone-dry lawn and ended up getting arrested and suffering a bloody nose. "What have I done?" she asked. "I'm old now. I can't believe this."
The Orem police officer, as yet unnamed by city officials, cited Perry for violating a city ordinance with her "sadly neglected and dying landscape," which resembles dry hay.
When Perry refused to give her name and tried to walk inside to call her son, the officer tried to arrest her, police say. According to a police news release, while she was struggling, she tripped and fell on her doorstop, cutting open the bridge of her nose. But Perry maintains the officer split her nose when he hit her with the set of handcuffs he was trying to restrain her with.
"As far as I'm concerned, he really abused me - he brutally abused me," Perry said. "For what?" The officer called for backup, because he was driving a truck, and the now-handcuffed Perry was taken to a holding facility in Orem. She was not given water or allowed to wash her hands or call her son, she said.
"After being booked, supervisors became aware of the circumstances and immediately released the woman and returned her to her home on the basis that there were other options available to handle this situation besides making an arrest and holding the woman in jail," Orem police Lt. Doug Edwards wrote in the news release.
(Excerpt) Read more at sltrib.com ...
That is not at all clear to me.
I'm not overly surprised by that.
If you consider it a matter of "common sense" that old folks are no threat, I hope that you're not a cop; and if you are, I hope you're never proven wrong.
Here you go my friend.
"But she was let go when police realised there were "other ways" of finding out her identity without taking her to jail, a police spokesman said." Even the officers own department is obviously embarrassed by this incident. Of course no doubt you'll dispute this too.
You see if you'd read the article, you'd know the local police department already had previous contact with the woman. In addition, it should be clear to any police officer that obtaining the name of a home owner is not a difficult task.
As I said earlier, there seems there was no common sense discretion used in this incident.
Unfortunately, it's incidents like this that really make those in law enforcement look bad.
If you do so then I guess you would not have arrested the cop in Ohio that killed his squeeze and his unborn child.
You gotta be kidding me. This lady was in her own house and was probably scared to death when she left to call her son. She was not under arrest. It is not mandatory in this country to talk to police when you're not under arrest, nor when you ARE under arrest.
Also, given that he was "in a truck" and immediately "called for backup," I wonder if the guy was even on duty. Or was he off duty, driving down the street, and took it upon himself to go roust somebody over their yard? If that was the case, quadruple the woman's justification for being scared out of her mind.
Just curious, 10-13, are you a policeman?
MM (in TX)
So you think that a cop has a right to come to your house, demand to know your name, accuse you of breaking a city code and then bloody your nose and handcuff you, haul you off to jail and not even apologize? Funny how the roof looks to have been recently replaced, the dormer looks new, the grass is cut down but dry and the ugliest thing is the sheet of plywood leaning against the side wall.
A nice place. What hath bad cops wrought? Idiots that blame everything on the people that try to do the right things!
Both had choices, yet both made the wrong ones.
Bullshit!
to protect and serve.
***************
From what I see in the photo someone posted, there's very little on her property that could burn. It's virtually barren of any kind of vegetation.
This kind of "hyper-regulation" is beginning to concern me.
I hear you. She said she loved the view of the mountains. Having absolutely no hills around here I thing of trees and stuff.
Was she obligated to talk with the officer?
The Officer chose to arrest her, perhaps for Obstruction, due to her unwillingness to cooperate. This was more thasn just "talking to an Officer", it was an invest into a violation of an ordinance. Pulling the "I'm old" card does not forgive non-compliance.
The issue is not wheher she was in violation of the ordinance. She may well have been. The question people keep avoiding is whether or not she was obligated to talk to a police officer who came to her door without a warrant to discuss a civil infraction. What say you?
From the picture I’d say this fellow is an over caloried shaven headed cop, not steroids.
Here in MA we don’t usually have much of a problem with wild fires, thank goodness. It is my impression that you folks in Texas have some fairly extreme weather. My brother in law lives in Corpus Christi, where the weather is relatively benign. Other than that, I’ve little experience with Texas weather. I do recall back in the early 80’s some really dreadful heat in which quite a few people died, mostly the elderly.
Generally, cities adopt state laws as “city ordinances” and also make their own laws which are also called “city ordinances”. Some are classified as criminal and some as civil with varying penalties. It’s quite possible that the city in question has an ordinance making it a criminal matter to refuse to ID yourself to LE when you are in violation of any other city ordinance.
Hows about he can’t transport prisoners cuz he’s got a truck so he needed a car?
Got anymore hyperbole for us to help clarify this situation?
Spin it anyway you like, but this guy violated this woman's rights in a huge way. He should be fired and NEVER given any position of state authority again. She should be compensated.
Also, in our society, age does indeed play a role in how people are treated in a given situation. If she had a gun? Totally different. Does a cop grab a 70-year-old woman up and slap handcuffs on her because she walked away from him while he was harassing her over not watering her grass? NO.
Policemen like this--and colleagues who defend his actions--do immeasurable harm to the vast majority of police who are good people doing their job with common sense day in and day out. When something like this happens, the absolute worst thing that could happen is for fellow police to circle the wagons and defend it. It's one more perceived brick in the blue wall, and rest assured that blue wall is a horrible negative in the minds of the public.
MM (in TX)
I stated that I don’t know the laws wherever this was, but I think the cop broke the law by not being in an official car. Or, do they have cop trucks in Orem Utah? Where I live, street cops and deputies cannot arrest people unless they have an official transport.
This cop appeared to be a bully. Do you know what handcuffs could do to people that age, especially if they weren’t warranted? How about sores that sometimes never heal.
Besides, my other half is a retired deputy, my son is a detective, and both of them think this cop used excessive force. Evidently, so did his boss. I read in another article about the same thing.
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