It’s incidents like this that make me very sympathetic to LEOs who display a short fuse in encounters with citizens. The story a few months back, about an officer who shot dead a drunk who was attempting to drive away despite being boxed in, was an example. I couldn’t believe the number of posters howling about how the shooting was “unnecessary”, because the perp couldn’t have actually gotten away in the vehicle on account of being boxed in. The guy was totally out-of-control, had rammed another vehicle with his car, and repeatedly refused police orders to get out of his car. As far as I’m concerned, that crosses the threshold to where police are justified in shooting first and asking questions later.
I know that procedures vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction all across the great nation, but I would support a uniform set of procedures to be used in every stop. It’s one thing to be stopped in broad daylight on a busy street with lots of passing traffic. It’s an entirely different matter when you’re by yourself and it’s dark and there’s no other cars or people around. When you get down to brass tacks all the various procedures from all the different agencies probably boil down to about the same thing. But I would like to know specifically what to expect if I am stopped at 2 am by an officer who is on patrol alone. Even if it means being treated as a threat until he or she has been convinced otherwise. For me it’s an inconvenience or embarrassing. For the officer it all too often becomes a matter of life and death.
I have only been stopped twice in my adult life, over 50 years now. It happens so infrequently that I really don’t know what the officer expects of me. I know now, from my last encounter to stay in the car, but for a lot of people it’s such an unsettling experience that they might well do the wrong thing. Once the stop takes that turn it places a much larger burden on the officer to feel safe.