August 20th, 2014
An honest question for super trooper Sunil Dutta, who says that if citizens would like to avoid being shot (or tasered or pepper sprayed or beaten) by their law enforcement agents, they simply must not “challenge me.” Here’s his relevant advice to citizens:
[I]f you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.
It sounds so easy! We’ll leave aside the First Amendment, which clearly says that you have the right to free speech unless the speech hurts the feelings of agents of the state, in which case the police are free to strike you with a baton. (It’s in one of those penumbras and emanations, I’m pretty sure.) Yes, let’s leave that for the moment and focus on compliance. “Just do what I tell you.” It’s simple!
But what if–just to pick an example at random–you’re a woman and the cop asks you to show him your boobs? You’re supposed to show them, right? Otherwise it’s totes okey-dokey for the officer who wants to see your boobs to tase you, right? Or does it turn out that Officer Dutta’s simple rules aren’t that simple and that there are some actions with which citizens should not be forced to comply?
One other thing: Officer Dutta talks about how hard life is as a police officer, and all of the nasty things he has to deal with:
Working the street, I can’t even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority.
Which, of course, is terrible. We should treat all people with respect–from cops to homeless people to strangers on a train. We’re all God’s children. But it’s worth noting that citizens often have to deal with police cursing at them and screaming at them and acting with aggressive menace, too. Remember this encounter where Philadelphia police tried to arrest a man legally carrying a gun? Go listen to the audio and see how the man being detained addresses the police and how the police speak to him. And remember, in any encounter between police and the citizenry, only one side is being paid to act like a grownup.
Exit Question: How about colonoscopies? Should citizens be forced to submit to a colonoscopy because one of Officer Dutta’s colleagues says so? To refuse a colonscopy is to challenge his authority, after all. It’s so confusing.
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My most recent run-in with law enforcement ended with my wife telling the cop to “f*ck off!”- I called the cops when a student from the high school adjacent to my home pulled a knife on me (on my property). The kid took off when I called the cops, proceeded to smash 2 cars while fleeing the scene. The cop told me “that is what you get when you live next to a high school” and that I should not have called the police. Mind you, the high school is one of the premier schools in the wealthiest county in the entire US (Loudoun, Va), not the kind of place you would expect a student to pull a knife. But hey, when I moved there, I understood that kids pull knives, so I shouldn’t have called the cops.
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Mr. Versluys — if that *is* his realname — is right. Just as feminism helped destroy ritual male deference to women, who are weaker; just as meritocratic competitive parenting has led to martial law for unsupervised 9-year-olds playing at the local park, under no actual threat from anything except their own child selves; so is the aggrieved/diffident cop our society’s own creation. Instead of according them special consideration for a traditional, circumscribed role we call them racists and complain about “profiling” when they either do it too much or not enough. We encourage the pop-secular notion that they’re fungible (unionized!) drones loyal to a paycheck instead of the temporal instruments of the public trust. And oh-so-ironically, we still seem to have a lot of violent, corrupt, immature hotheads in the force, looking for an opportunity to prey on the helpless… In fact we’re fortunate any of them aren’t thugs by this point, considering how their caste has been denigrated by the Ivy League apple polisherati
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Just so. See, The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis.
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Anyway, what’s Robert Putnam got to say on it? How about Gladwell, any brainstorms from that quarter
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Maybe I’m missing something, but in that audio from Philadelphia, the cops come across a lot better than the guy who kept needlessly goading cops while carrying a gun.
James Q. Wilson & George Kelling’s famous “broken windows” article is full of insights, but perhaps the most important one is that cops engage in “order maintenance” more than in “law enforcement.” And for good reason!
Yes, there are plenty of bad cops, but society isn’t improved by people going out of their way to goad cops with guns.
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Who would make up “Versluys”? To what end? Did I make up my last name with the crappy letters I had after losing a Scrabble match?
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Hello JVL,
I’m a huge fan and I happen to be a cop of 14 years. I found most of Mr. Dutta’s Washington Post article pretty reasonable. The only exception would be what also seems to have rubbed you the wrong way: I generally don’t like any fellow cop pointing out we routinely take verbal abuse, physical attacks, etc. I think most people know that at some level, and it cannot help but come across as self-pity. We (cops) knowingly sign up for all that when we take the job,
Specifically, we sign up to take it from the 2% criminal element of society that occupies the majority of our duty time.
This is where I hope I can clear up some confusion. Cops make, often times, dozens of independent enforcement contacts in a normal eight or ten hour shift. As months on the job turn into years, one of your only real mechanisms for keeping yourself safe (and effectively keeping your community safe) is reading the aggression level of any and every person with whom you have contact. Some 80-year old men hate cops and carry knives, and some 22-year old men with sleeve tattoos answer every question “yes sir” and “no sir” in the politest of tones.
It is reasonable and normal for a cop to get little white lies like “I didn’t know the speed limit” or “only two beers” from good, law-abiding citizens. Like Mr. Dutta said, it’s stressful to be stopped by a cop and no one likes getting in trouble.
What is not reasonable and normal is hostility and physical resistance. Well, those things are normal, just not from the law-abiding, gainfully-employed, pick-your-hyphenated-way-of-saying-good, citizen. When a person “bows up,” as we call it in the south, on a cop, you’re instanting signaling to him/her that you’re a 2%-er. 1 time out of 20, it ends up being an amateur legal scholar who would prefer to litigate the constitutionality of their detainment on the sidewalk rather than in court. But 19 times out of 20, it’s the guy who has been having his criminal lifestyle interdicted by cops since he was a teenager.
Nothing good ever comes from roadside litigation. By wagging fingers at examples of loser cops abusing their office for sexual or monetary gain, you only serve to expand the myth that abuses of police power are commonplace. They are not. Think 800,000 cops times 10-15 contacts per shift versus what you can Google. Incidentally, no one ever seems to post the follow-up stories where district judges (rightfully) hammer these rogue cops twice as hard as they would a common criminal committing the same crime.
But enough griping… I’m starting to sound like Mr. Dutta. Unlike most European countries, you have a real constitution and a real recourse for suffering violation of your 4th-amendment rights. Also unlike most European countries, street cops can expect to be violently attacked several times over the course of a 20-year career. Blame George III or the rapper Ice-T, but fighting the police is as American as apple pie.
U.S. police departments pay out 5-figure and 6-figure settlements all the time for people who successfully sue when an officer oversteps his bounds. That’s the way it should be handled: after the fact, and in the court system. I also love to see crooked cops go down. There’s no place in a free society for sexual or economic gain under color of law. But you aren’t going to do any good for anybody loudly contending your officer doesn’t have any real public safety/order grounds for kicking you out of a riot-zone Mcdonald’s. Record all you want, but shut up and do what you’re told. Our hands are plenty full with real bad guys.
So to expand on Mr. Dutta’s advice: wear the cuffs, ride to jail, keep your mouth shut, and if it was all a giant screw-job, cash your giant settlement check later. Would I get thrown on the ground, cuffed, stuffed, and booked into jail by a rogue cop in exchange for a $100,000.00 check a couple months later? You betcha, and I would go the whole way like a lamb. But then again, I don’t have the juvenile contempt for authority figures I suspect so many of our Libertarian brothers carry with them as they drive 8 or 9 over the speed limit on the way to work.
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I think it’s generally agreed we’ve screwed up. Hatred of the police is a cultural element missing in many other nations. Thus, their default when they’re at fault is an unreasonable aggression made reasonable: it is not a cops fault that the citizenry is too hostile for a reasonable non-gendarme police job, military but not quite an occupation. They’re forced to cope in this while normal citizens are forced to exaggerated deference. This is not a situation that can continue.
Now, try finding a reason for this that isn’t the fault of blacks. I’ll wait.
James Versluys August 20, 2014 at 7:49 pm
On the other hand, America is unique: we get the police force we demand. This doesn’t happen to many nations.
We demand Dirty Harry stop being a liberal pussy, giving the sociopath extravagant legal protection, then a few years later we get angry at the aggressive cops we created. It goes in cycles as routine as any we have.
Yes, they’re out of control. Then again, we made them, and they do obey written and unwritten laws. In ten years, we will be screaming for them to kill him.