Someone there commented that if this cop had heard his father was having a heart attack he would surely turn on his lights and sirens and blaze a path to the hospital.
There are also many arguing that the officer was in the right in this case. Technically that may be correct but I feel a police officer needs to be more than a mindless drone forcing everyone by all means at his disposal to follow the law. Good judgement is required for the position and his lazy assumption that everyone is lying shows very poor judgement.
They had the dashboard video on H&C tonight.
Of course he would, some people are more equal than others.
To some cops, there are only two sorts of people: cops or suspects / perpetrators.
Common sense has flown out the window.
I used to spend a lot of time at church Bingo (where my friends worked for extra money). They usually had an off-duty cop outside for security, and I got to know some of them. I once had a long discussion with one with respect to drunk drivers. He lamented the fact that a lot of officers (especially the younger ones, in his opinion) had forgotten that part of being a cop was helping people. His policy was that when he found someone driving drunk, he would rather drive the person home than just arrest him if he had a choice. Perhaps this might seem extreme to some since this doesn’t negatively reinforce the behavior, but the point was that you can be a cop and show some compassion at the same time.
I saw it. This is one mean cop on a power trip. We will read about him again and again, I am sure.
Comment:
I suppose anyone can argue the office was in the right, just ask Jessie and Al.
However, the video that I saw several times doesn’t justify the entire arrest procedure.
Police officers are held to a higher standard than the public, or so I am told that.
This guy may have been correct according to others but the video still made my blood pressure go up.
Whether a person is a prick as this officer presented himself to be certainly seems evident from the video.
Some policemen strap on a badge and gun and immediately take on the aura of a Marshall Dillon, dishing out justice as they see fit.
I’m with the cop...she shouldn’t have driven off like an idiot.
Cops are over-trained. The job has become about procedure - not about people.
She took off,then disobeys a lawful order after being stopped again and then starts to drive away while he's reaching in to put the car in park. Could have killed or injured him.
BTW, ambulances have no legal right to speed, even if they have someone dying in the back.
Tell Dad to call an ambulance next time, much better odds all around.
If that’s excessive force I’ll eat my hat.
Why did he only get 5 days of suspension? He should have been fired immediately.
Not clear why the woman’s father was driving himself to the hospital while having a heart attack. I can’t really blame the officer for being skeptical, and going 63 in a 35 zone is posing a serious risk to other motorists and pedestrians. It’s nice she cared so much about her father, but there’s really not much she could have done to speed his arrival at the hospital, and it’s not worth risking running down some kid crossing the street or causing a serious vehicle collision to get to the hospital a few minutes earlier.
My son is a deputy and he tells how appalled he was the first few times he saw himself on tapes from the camcorder in his car! He said he had no idea how curt he came across or how impolite he was when looking at it from a third-party perspective.
Doing 63 mph in a 35 mph zone is wrong, period. There are exceptions and one of them is when the person exceeding the speed limit, or otherwise disregard traffic laws, is responding to an emergency and using lights and siren to warn other drivers.
I will await a few more facts to become public, before I firmly express a considered opinion on this matter.
Most cops are a-holes. Their job is to screw people for money. And guess what? The judges only get paid if they support the cops (”court fees”).
When the time comes to ‘protect’, the stinkin cops either hide, or the blast the hell out of the neighborhood. No judgment.
a-holes on power trips.
Three issues here, the speed and two stops.
As unreasonably low as many posted speed limits are, 63 in a 35 in itself doesn’t mean much of anything. The commuter artery through my neighborhood is posted 35 but has wide lanes, wide shoulders, good visibility, few lights and no stops, and traffic flows at 50 to 55 mph nearly all the time. 63mph would be pushing it, but not recklessly so - using honest terminology, it would be called 63 in a 50. Without knowing anything about the traffic conditions on the specific street this woman was pulled over on, concluding she was such a serious menace to the public as to forfeit accomodation from the officer making the stop is an unreasonable assumption.
But regardless of how irresponsibly she was driving, it would have taken all of 10 or 15 minutes for the officer to escort her into the hospital himself to check up on her story and write up the ticket afterwards. Or if she were telling the truth, to tell her “please slow down and have a good night ma’am.” You know, the decent thing to do - which the officer didn’t.
At this point it became a lose-lose all around. You can’t expect someone to sit quietly in their car wondering if a critically ill family member made it to the hospital right around the corner while a cop on a power trip takes his time with paperwork. The officer can’t let a suspect take control of the encounter. The public watching the video can’t approve of seeing a 200lb young man yank a tiny, hysterical, non-violent woman out of her car and then slam her against it while cuffing her.
I don’t think the force was terrifically excessive in dealing with a suspect who had attemped to leave the scene. You can’t let that slide. I don’t agree with suspending the officer for that. But letting an employee treat the public - your employers - like truant schoolchildren by not giving this woman speeding for the hospital right next door reasonable consideration in the first place is poison.
Doing the right thing in this kind of spot earns law enforcement a person’s respect for life. Doing what he did instead is why even here - a boringly law-abiding conservative forum that should support the cops 100% - most posters have no respect for law enforcement.
He should be off the force for good for that.
There are some that use common sense. In an emergency, I’ve always put on my emergency flashers while driving to where I’m going and haven’t had a problem. When my first daughter was born, we lived about 15 miles from the hospital. My wife said it was time, I loaded her in my 300ZX Nissan and drove 100mph to the hospital. As I came to the city limits I slowed to 85 in a 45 zone and a police cruiser was going the opposite direction. I never let up as he turned around and followed me, never turning on his blues. Pulled into the hospital, jumped out and helped my very visibly pregnant wife from the car as the police cruiser slowly drove past watching to see the reason for my haste. Satisfied he drove on.