Replies

“I watch a lot of those youtube videos of cops acting badly with citizens”

I guess there aren’t many videos of the thousands of contacts between police and citizens that happen daily where the results are posiive for you to watch.

Not thousands, but yes I do. But a lot less interesting.

I guess there aren’t many videos of the thousands of contacts between police and citizens that happen daily where the results are posiive for you to watch.

I should add that I understand where the cops are coming from, even if they are acting badly. But cameras will change the interactions, I suspect.

I’ve learned about three important phrases:
reasonable suspicion
Probable cause
Am I being detained?

And this important fact: A stop can only take as long as is reasonable to handle the reason you were stopped. e.g. if the cop stops you for speeding or a broken tail light, he’s got about 20 minutes to wrap things up. If it takes longer and you do not consent to a search, etc., but they do because of a dog “hit” and you have ten pounds of fentanyl in your trunk, the evidence is not admissable in court.

When the cops get into trouble is when they come across someone that knows the law. In such cases, the cops need to learn to check their ego and let the person move on.

The one video that angered me the most was when a driver was doing 65 in a 70 and the cop pulled him over because he was going five under, and then asked him if he was OK. Once the guy said he was fine and can he be on his way, the stop should have ended. Period. But the cop kept prying and prying and prying and, finally, gave the guy a written “warning”. For what? Who knows.

But I think there will be fewer and fewer videos like that as more and more people sue.

Another thing I realized as I watched these videos is that being a cop is like any other job. If you want promotions and raises, you perform well. Often that means sniffing out more bad guys. So it becomes pretty clear in these videos that the cops don’t want to just let a guy go when they had a feeling he was holding, etc. I think that is why so many of the bogus stops are of people in beaters that almost certainly have some marijuana or crack or meth in the car. In fact, in one video they were caught red handed planting meth in the car because there was nothing even though the person was a “known user” in the past. So they fudged, probably figuring the person usually had it in the car.

Cameras and education of the population are going to end a lot of that.