Your list of reasons for the officer to suspect something more than a normal traffic stop puts this in perspective for me (and I hope alot of others on FR).
Just one or two of those stupid things you listed that the guy did wouldn’t amount to much by themselves but the sheer number of them all together make for some valid reasons for the officer to be on guard.
Having said that, I disagree with the ones on FR who say the driver deserved to be tazed simply because of his attitude.
His actions (and that of his wife) are the important thing to consider here, and based on those it becomes much more imperative for a lone officer to be on guard in a strange situation like that.
I think you're right. And since I made a list of the things the driver did to escalate the situation, it's fair to say that the cop could've handled things more professionally. FR is full of people flying off the handle and screaming "power-drunk psycho-cop". No, I think he's a rookie who didn't know how to handle the traffic stop properly.
Whenever I've been stopped, the officer always said to me real business-like, "The reason I pulled you over is...." If a person starts arguing the ticket right off the bat, the way to handle it is to tell him, "We'll get to that in a minute. First off, I need your license/registration, then I'm going to step back to my car for a few minutes. When I come back, we can talk about this more." Instead, the officer sidles up to the guy's car and says, "You were going kinda fast." He should not have engaged the driver's and wife's arguing at that point, because now they're controlling the situation.
When pulling the guy out of the car, he should've said something more professional than, "Why don't you hop on out of there?" While the guy was out of the car and started acting up, the cop would've done better to explain to him that he's arrestable for not signing the ticket and disorderly conduct and said, "Look, just be cool. Let's keep this on the level of a traffic ticket instead of an arrest. If you really disagree with the ticket, traffic court is the place to argue it."
The cop could've said and done more things to diffuse the situation. ("If you be cool and listen for a minute, XYZ will happen. If you don't calm down, XYZ can happen.") Even if it didn't work, it would cover him later.
Most of the posters here have a fetish for screaming about power-drunk psycho-cops. I've seen cops that fit this category, this one doesn't qualify. His main problem is that he lost control of the situation because he engaged in extraneous conversation that he shouldn't have and he should've done better at explaining consequences ("you're arrestable if you don't sign", "get your hands away from your pockets", "stay cool or you can be arrested for disorderly conduct", etc). That's hard to do when you have a rambler who won't shut up long enough to take a breath (and for all his talk after-the-fact about being scared for his wife and kid, he sure did everything he could to escalate the situation), but the cop showed a pretty poor effort. That's a rookie being allowed to solo too soon or a veteran who's getting apathetic or burned-out. If the cop were half as psycho as people on this thread are screaming about, he would've thrown the guy to the ground when he got up after being cuffed and the guy's wife would've hit the ground hard when she came out of the car.
Both parties screwed up, so people shouldn't make this to be more than what it is. I consider the use of SWAT teams to serve routine warrants, DUI and license checkpoints in direct violation of the 4th amendment, cops pulling over people at random, cops wrongfully confiscating legally carried firearms and refusing to give them back, and harassment of citizens legally carrying firearms to be much bigger issues. Funny how those threads get 10 hits and this one gets 400.