Posted on 07/19/2016 2:21:50 PM PDT by Faith Presses On
I am almost positive I was stopped by the New Hampshire officer a while back. He was pleasant and polite and asked me why I had taken so long pull over. I told him I was looking for a shoulder to pull off the road so he would be safe.
“I am almost positive I was stopped by the New Hampshire officer a while back. He was pleasant and polite and asked me why I had taken so long pull over. I told him I was looking for a shoulder to pull off the road so he would be safe.”
I think it was the Mass cop that lost it. He is the one suspended without pay.
“Several cops have the situation under control when the cop in the light blue shirt runs up to the front, holsters his weapon and then jumps on the guy.”
The situation really wasn’t under control, though. The man wasn’t apprehended. Once he was cuffed and under their control, that would mean the situation was under control.
He had already acted totally unreasonably, without respect for the lives of other people or the police, and for the law.
And since he fled like that, who is to say that he would just reasonably surrender? Who is to say he wouldn’t suddenly shift into flight/resist mode again? He might have jumped into his car again, despite it having been damaged by the spiked strips the police put down (I recently saw a man who apparently fled an accident driving along with one front wheel hanging off at a sharp angle - when he tried turning a corner, the wheel came off.)
I know tasers can be iffy things, so at that point they had the choice of shooting him, physically overwhelming him, or acting like he had never resisted arrest and fled in the first place.
A couple of them chose to use overwhelming force. It could seem just like brutality, but when dealing with someone who has already resisted as he has, that force could justifiably be applied as a way to neutralize his threat - to physically convince him through using overwhelming force to not offer any resistance.
If you only consider that he got out of the car apparently peaceably at the end, and not considering that he had a chance to do that the first time, but instead physically resisted the officers by fleeing and put scores of people in danger as well, then you aren’t looking at and considering the whole picture. He was, by his actions, a most serious physical threat, the same as if he had been armed and willing to shoot. He was willing to be that lethal.
“The situation really wasn’t under control, though. The man wasn’t apprehended.”
He was face-down on the ground with six guns pointed at him ...
Can I use that excuse if I beat someone up?
I have but, I was so in love and she needed to know “She was the one”.
I, I just couldn’t let her get away....
I eventually had to stop to use the bathroom and the Amtrack train she was on sped away....
/S
” He was, by his actions, a most serious physical threat,”
Then why did the officer in question holster his firearm ...
Keep trying. He DIDN’T kill anyone. The cops should have waited till their adrenaline receded before attacking him if that’s all it was.
“If you only consider that he got out of the car apparently peaceably at the end, and not considering that he had a chance to do that the first time, but instead physically resisted the officers by fleeing and put scores of people in danger as well, then you aren’t looking at and considering the whole picture. “
You have to look at the present situation. If he is not resisting arrest you can’t beat him up.
The man wasn’t subdued and still needed to be. Just because he suddenly was acting reasonable doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t suddenly act unreasonably again. There was absolutely NO guarantee that he would just lie there and allow himself to be cuffed.
By definition, someone who leads police on a 100 mph+ car chase, which easily could have killed any number of people, isn’t someone to expect reasonable behavior from.
Would you have been surprised to hear if during this chase he had killed seven people in a couple of cars? Or a few pedestrians?
And how many times in your life have you been irate? Can you even say the number is less than 100?
The public debate around policing is getting warped.
Now, politicians only make errors that can’t be judged because what’s it’s not fair to use “20/20 hindsight” against them.
But the 20/20 hindsight is enough to vilify police officers.
If these officers had just done that to a man who was loitering somewhere refusing to leave, that would be one thing.
But that isn’t the case. That was an extremely difficult situation they were in, and for all they knew, that man wasn’t done putting up a fight, and who knows what he might have come up with next. They knew he had a prior record of assault.
As we can see from the Alton Sterling shooting, the physical arrest can be very difficult to do with a resisting subject (which is what this man was - never forget he fled). Reportedly Sterling was tasered, then he was physically taken down. And he resisted.
In this case, by a couple of officers using overwhelming force, they neutralized any further potential threat he posed. That can be taken as strategy. If he had been given more of an opportunity to resist, it might have been another situation where the suspect ended up shot.
Many years ago I a CHP hit his lights on me. It was a very dark and secluded section of I15 at the time. I didn’t pull over for a mile or so until I hit a stretch of light. Near Poway.
The officer was made (and had a ride along). He asked my why I didn’t pull over immediately. I said “I was looking for a safe place to pull over”. He responded “oh you don’t have to worry about us”.
I said ... “I wasn’t”.
No more questions. He wrote me a ticket for broken tail light, which he wouldn’t let me inspect at the time. Sure enough, when I got home, all the tail lights were working fine.
3 months later on that exact stretch of 15 just south of Poway a CHP officer murdered a young women when she refused to have sex with him.
Dad was an NYPD cop. He spoke of rubber hoses as not leaving too many marks.
He himself was not the kind to do something like a beat down even to someone who needed it. But he did subscribe to the use of it.
He would say they would do it to young idiots and if they weren’t real hard core criminals, let them go.....tell them if they caught them doing it again....yatta yatta yatta.
He said there was a low rate of recidivism.
“He had already shown he wasn’t by going on that chase.”
Again, you don’t get to beat up a guy who is NOT resisting arrest. At that point he was NOT resisting and was in fact rationally complying with the police commands.
“How do you know he wasn’t willing to die before he would be arrested again, or just wanted to die then, period. “
You are right. They should have just shot him 33 times and save the taxpayers a lot of money ...
“Do you or don’t you consider someone who had just taken police on a 100+ mph chase a serious physical threat ? “
He was down on the ground and NOT resisting. In fact he was complying with the police requests.
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