Everyone Has the Right to Mouth Off to Cops | Hacker News Reader

Everyone Has the Right to Mouth Off to Cops

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56 pointsfrostmatthew73 comments

I think that whole incident shows that dash cams and other types of cop cams don't necessarily curb police abuse. I think the main reason is that they all feel pretty confident that even if they completely break the law there is likely to be no consequences for the police. Until we start holding the police accountable for breaking the law. The problem is that the only people who are willing to do that type of work (policing) are often people who are attracted to the idea of being able to exert power over other people (sociopathic inclinations in many cases). If we start prosecuting them and holding them accountable then it will be really hard to find people to do the job because there is no advantage to beating and killing people as a police officer if the consequences for doing it are the same as an ordinary citizen. If that were the case, the violent sociopaths might as well just go out and take their chances without the uniform. It is the same reason that pedophiles are attracted to the priesthood, they know that they can victimize people and be protected while doing it. Violent sociopaths are attracted to policing for the same reason, they know that they can exert power over others and be protected.

Also, people who are not violent sociopaths may develop such tendencies by doing the job (Stanford prison experiment).

I don't believe that we do have that right. I believe that the law says we do, but practically, cops have near-absolute authority to detain and arrest you, and you'd be hard-pressed to prevail in a civil case of unlawful arrest (and at that point, you've already been dragged down to the station, had your fingerprints uploaded to the Federal database, been strip-searched and spent time in a cell).

I also believe that upper-middle-class white males will have much more success in exercising that right than members of other societal groups will.

As the saying goes, you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.

I believe anyone that has obvious visible wealth can easily exercise that right -- police like that are bullies and only pick on those they know cannot defend themselves. If you take a upper-middle-class white man and dress him as if he were homeless, he will get the asshole treatment. Likewise p-diddy is renowned for talking shit to cops and having them meekly walk away many times in the past.

Not necessarily. I drive a Mercedes roadster. Several years ago I was pulled over by a cop who started ranting about how "rich people like you think they are above the law." I pushed back hard which the officer didn't appreciate so he told me he'd make it the job of his deputies to pull me over every day for the next week, which he delivered on. In fact, when I wanted to get somewhere in a reasonable amount of time I'd take the SUV. Of course because of his escalation of the issue I did walk away from my court date with a dismissal and the officer being quite literally restrained by his colleagues. So okay, maybe it helps but certainly doesn't prevent abusive behavior. There are many officers out there with economic chips on their shoulders.

What makes you think males are less likely to be detained and arrested?

Personally my money is on upper-middle-class old ladies.

Indeed. I'm white and male, and mouthing off to a cop once is the only time in my life I've been arrested.

Maybe I have a legal right to do so, but I'll never be doing it again.

Of course we have the right. The question is whether or not it is wise to exercise that right. In many (most?) cases, that would be an unwise choice, for the reasons you mentioned. And yes, that is problematic.

I believe it is important to understand that having a right, but choosing not to exercise it is a philosophically different scenario than not having the right in the first place.

Facing an angry police officer is one of the first examples in How to Win Friends and Influence People. I remember once where I turned the wrong way into a construction area late at night and accidentally drove on the tar. The officer was pissed at me and suspected I was drunk (I hadn't had a drop). Calmly explaining that I was tired and lost and had screwed up out of confusion rather than malice got me out of there with only a lecture.

>I also believe that upper-middle-class white males will have much more success in exercising that right than members of other societal groups will.

There is overwhelming evidence that women are treated more leniently, not men. Here is one example: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002

"...large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted."

The fact that there is a bias between male/female does not suggest that there is not also bias between races within the male group.

That wasn't the argument.

Very true. There's a mountain of evidence for that, too. If you're young and black and male you get the perfect storm of harsh treatment.

Yes but they said male, which implies that gender is part of the equation

I think that this is a misuse of 'right' in an important way. Rights are things that you have innately, not things that you are given; your rights can be abused or abrogated, but not taken away. Thinking of rights as things that are given to you, I believe, makes it easier on some subtle, even just linguistic, level to stop fighting for them when a purely philosophically committed person might fight on.

With that said, I agree that it is important to distinguish the practical consequences of exercising your rights from their philosophical consequences, though: while you should be able to behave in a lawful manner to police officers without fear of reprisal, it is important to realise that you probably can't.

One of the cases linked is pretty shocking and absurd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGSrGmHsT8s

What drives me crazy is the corporativism of police union and syndicates, turning a blind eye even when there's a 3 min video (!) recording the absurdity of the case.

Here's what Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association, said about the case:

"Detective Cherry is a person of good character and an excellent detective. He really should not be judged by one isolated incident."

Except, it wasn't at all isolated:

"Over the course of his 14-1/2 years on the force, Det. Cherry has has received a total of 13 civilian complaints against him according to a person with knowledge of the latest complaint." [1][2]

And, even if it was his first abuse, why should he get a free pass?

[1] http://gothamist.com/2015/04/02/cherry_jammed_up.php

[2] http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2015/04/01/nypd-officer-who-...

> "Detective Cherry is a person of good character and an excellent detective. He really should not be judged by one isolated incident."

Is this how they treat suspects? You have to marvel at the cognitive dissonance.

https://popehat.com/2015/04/29/cops-we-need-rights-more-than...

In NZ, if a police officer arrested someone because they were verbally abusive to that officer, he or she would not remain an officer for long.

Though here it might be different? Police always work in pairs and so there is sort of a peer driven enforcement of proper professional behaviour. Not sure if thats the same in the states.

In reality, you have the right to mouth off to everyone. But, generally not a good choice because if you're mouthing off to everyone, there's a good chance you're just a dickhead. Why not just be civil?

> Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

> and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

> and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

http://stimmyabby.tumblr.com/post/115216522824/sometimes-peo...

And sometimes, people who think "I'm not going to treat you like an authority" are in fact not treating that authority like a person. It's a very fine line between not respecting authority and not respecting a person.

If you disagree with a policeman's authority, the correct way to challenge that is to acknowledge that you disagree with them, and respond in a professional manner - formal complaints, courts, whatever. Not by being difficult to them on the side of the road.

If you disagree with their treatment of you (respect like a person), the correct way to deal with that still isn't to argue on the side of the road. If they aren't treating you with respect (as a person), why would you think that getting into a confrontation with them in that environment is going to change their mind? (Have you ever seen a sporting referee change their decision after a player argued with them?)

The word "respect" is problematic, partially because of this ambiguity. Another problematic aspect is that it inherently sets up a relation between people: it's a transitive verb. To respect someone is to make them somehow important to one's own thought process. (There are cases in which that importance has been earned; a random interaction with police is not such a case.) I try to respect no one, but to be courteous with everyone. Courtesy is a goal to which I can direct myself.

Rereading what I just wrote, I recognize it as a very privileged statement. Just the same, we'd live in a better world if everyone could feel that way, if they chose.

> Why not just be civil?

I agree that you shouldn't be rude to Police (or better put, you should treat them with the same respect you'd treat anyone else), but it's important that you can be rude. "The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest, is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state." - Justice William J. Brennan Jr.

I said in a previous thread that police should make it a point of pride to be able to ignore irritated or verbally abusive people. Just play it straight and robotically to slowly calm people down. I believe a lot of police actually do this already, but is there on-going training to keep the rest on track?

If you'd like to see an excellent example of professionalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IPct574o4w

I'm not convinced that I wouldn't have just punched that kid in the face...

Wow. If that was in the U.S., the cop would have pulled a weapon on the kid the moment he stepped out of the car.

And the cop has the legal right to not give you the benefit of the doubt when you do. The majority of the time you have a hostile interaction with police is because you broke the law in some minor way.

This is exactly what happened to Sandra Brand. She exercised her right to mouth off and she got arrested, totally legally for something the police typically ignore.

You gotta be 100% sure you are clean when you try this. And even then a shitty cop could just make something up.

> "arrested, totally legally for something the police typically ignore"

That's not totally legal any more, because it violates the fourteenth amendment. The exercise of your rights does not justify police charging you with unrelated offenses they would normally let slide; they have to treat all citizens fairly regardless of the extent to which they choose to do legal things.

But no cop (or few cops) are dumb enough to outright say, "I arrested Mr Foo because he was a mouthy little bastard." Instead, you become just one of the N drivers for whom an expired inspection sticker or failure to stay in marked lanes becomes a citation (and maybe a tow) instead of a warning. Good luck proving a causality between your specific attitude or choice to exercise your rights and the outcome of the traffic stop.

For the wide variety of cases where there is discretion afforded the officer in the field, you can antagonize someone who has a great deal of discretion in how the rest of your day will unfold, or you can be polite and civil.

I choose polite and civil and have had overwhelmingly neutral-to-positive outcomes from my encounters with police. And I'm talking getting stopped for passing people across an intersection, 25 over on a highway, expired registration/inspection, open exhaust, a suspended license, and once even being caught smoking the tires and doing donuts in a public parking lot. (I often drove like a jackass a decade ago.)

You can exercise your rights to their fullest extent and take what you get, or you can "hack" the system to your advantage by being quiet, civil, and respectful.

Yeah, it's really hard to successfully prosecute a charge like this. But if you at least try, then a cop like the one in question will probably perjure himself at some point or some other evidence will turn up that can get the bully's badge taken away.

Nah. Mouthing off to a cop doesn't make you a protected class.

It would be illegal to only enforce the law against blacks. But just against people who shittalk the cop is legally fine.

The 14th Amendment doesn't mean you have to be treated exactly the same. This is why cops are allowed to give you a warning.

Protected classes don't have much to do with the 14th amendment. It doesn't define any classes narrower than all citizens. Laws that do define protected classes may derive their authority from the 14th amendment, but that doesn't mean that equal protection arguments can only be made using the protected classes that Congress has singled out as needing more explicit statutes about.

You simply cannot create any kind of class of people who have different rights except through due process, and officers' whims aren't due process.

Please, please do not "Mouth Off," or whatever people call it, a cop. I understand this is much easier said than done, specially when someone is being disrespectfully and you feel your dignity is at play.

I suggest every time a cop stops you you try to record the entire scene, and have it be automatically recorded somewhere else in case they try to delete it.

Even if you do not record, be polite, keep as quiet as you can and take your time later to complaint and spread the information via every channel you know/want.

In the moment, anything you say or do, is likely to work against you.

At a traffic stop there are a few things to keep in mind before deciding to mouth off.

1. More than half of traffic stops result in a warning, not a ticket. When the violation is too severe for a warning, in many cases the ticket will be for a lesser level of offense. For instant, in many states the fine and effect on insurance rates for speeding is higher if the speed was more than some threshold over the limit. Often if you are over the threshold, the officer will write the ticket for just under.

Being rude and obnoxious will greatly increase the chances that you'll get the ticket, and that it won't be written down to a lesser level offense.

2. You don't know what the prior stops that day have been like. Maybe the officer has just dealt with a string of drivers who were rude and obnoxious, and were trying to pushing him to his limits, and he's managed to barely kkep his calm. Not knowing this, you could easily push him farther than you intended.

3. You don't know who the next person stopped will be. You are putting the officer in a bad mood for them, which could make it less likely they will get a warning, or more likely something they do will get them in trouble.

>2. You don't know what the prior stops that day have been like. Maybe the officer has just dealt with a string of drivers who were rude and obnoxious, and were trying to pushing him to his limits, and he's managed to barely his calm. Not knowing this, you could easily push him farther than you intended.

In which case he should be fired.

Prior incidents are not an excuse for a supposed professional, and doubly so if he is paid by the taxpayers.

Would you give the same courtesy to a waiter, a bus or taxi driver, a sales clerk, etc?

Actually, yes. I expect them to be human and capable of running out of patience as much as the next person.

For instance, when I have a waiter that gets verbally abused by a neighboring table, I go out of my way to swing the pendulum in the other direction by being very polite, understanding, and more patient than normal.

Trying to balance out the universe often works out in your favor as well.

Idealistically, I'd like people in high-intensity situations behave almost like robots, but that's simply not realistic.

>Actually, yes. I expect them to be human and capable of running out of patience as much as the next person.

That's just sad.

A professional supposedly trained to handle stressful situations, carrying lethal force, and paid by the citizenry to "serve and protect" is the LAST PERSON that should be excused for "running out of patience as much as the next person".

And in better societies, they aren't.

I understand your perspective. I suppose the reason why I take this approach is because ordinary citizenry, with CHLs in my case, can be carrying weapons with them most of the time.

CHL holders (like myself) are armed with more knowledge in fatal use & consequences, but there's zero training to "handle stressful situations" in a professional manner, besides acting responsibly in accordance with the law.

That's probably why a lot of us in Texas opt not to be huge jerks in traffic or interpersonal situations because _you never know who's carrying_.

This mentality just naturally translates to law enforcement who _supposed_ to be trained in defusing a situation first.

What do you mean by "give the same courtesy" to those others? #2 was not about giving courtesy to anyone.

The fact is that people are more prone to make mistakes when they are angry, and the more angry they are, the more likely are the mistakes. This is true of almost all people, professional or not.

If you are purposefully trying to antagonize the officer, you presumably have some maximum anger level you want to push him to, because you don't want to push him to the point where he will make mistakes that cause you serious problems.

The point of #2 is that you don't know what the initial anger level is from recent prior stops, and so you need to be very careful here for your protection.

In waiter terms, if I wanted to piss off my waiter for some reason, I'd likely want to piss him off to the point that he has a bad day, and maybe says something rude to me that gets him in trouble with his manager, but not piss him off to the point that he's going to urinate in soup. So yes, I'd apply #2 here--and so be very concerned that he might already be angry from prior rude customers, and so what I expect will just push him to acting verbally against me might push him to urinated in my soup.

And yes, if he urinates in my soup, he should be fired. There is no amount of satisfaction I could get from him being fired, though, that I would consider worth eating urine tainted soup for.

>What do you mean by "give the same courtesy" to those others? #2 was not about giving courtesy to anyone.

The courtesy I refer to is accepting that a cop is allowed to behave unprofessionaly because he was "angered by someone before". It's not an excuse for ANY professional to take it out on a customer (or a citizen in the case of cop or state employee) whether they had "a bad day" or a "bad previous exchange" or not.

>The fact is that people are more prone to make mistakes when they are angry, and the more angry they are, the more likely are the mistakes. This is true of almost all people, professional or not.

And another fact is that people who "are angry" while serving people (whether customers or citizens) AND let it show, should either be scolded by their superiors, fined or fired.

Then, they'll know next time they want to "express their anger", to think twice about it. Instead of, you know, bashing some guy, thretening and beating a woman, or killing some black kid.

>The point of #2 is that you don't know what the initial anger level is from recent prior stops, and so you need to be very careful here for your protection.

That's true only in places were citizens expect to be treated like shit and suffer consequences from "angry cops". In most of Western and Nothern Europe, a cop is supposed to behave professionally at all times, and nobody gives a fuck about their previous (or even current) "anger level".

Even if you tell them "fuck you" and push them, they should still behave professionally. Getting "revenge" and "anger mode on" is not professional. And "hey, whatchagonnado, we're all humans" is no excuse from a professional carrying a gun and supposed to enforce the law.

That people are afraid to antagonise cops and feel that can legitimately behave unprofessionally if "antagonized" and depending on their "anger level", is what gives cops card blanche to do the shit they do in the US (or Latin America, Africa, etc).

>>The fact is that people are more prone to make mistakes when they are angry, and the more angry they are, the more likely are the mistakes. This is true of almost all people, professional or not.

> And another fact is that people who "are angry" while serving people (whether customers or citizens) AND let it show, should either be scolded by their superiors, fined or fired.

Generally there is no way to know that they let it show. That's because in the massively overwhelming majority of the cases, being in a bad mood will shift the behavior from something that is common and legal to something else that is common and legal but less favorable to the person who was stopped. Generally, the officer won't even know that his bad mood influenced his decision.

I don't think this is a good idea even if it is your right. Sure, stand up for yourself, don't grovel, but rudeness doesn't particularly improve any situation, especially one where you are at a total disadvantage.

Cops are people. If you cannot behave like a human you should expect to be treated like a rabid dog. Yes of course there are bad cops, the number of precious little entitled uncivil little snowflakes vastly outnumber those.

I was always taught to respect others and respect authority. In a civilized world, you should be civil to everyone. I would no sooner mouth off to a cop as I would mouth off anyone else. It's disrespectful and speaks volumes about the person spouting off and nothing about who he's going off on.

Respect and civility to everyone is a higher cause. To even think of doing otherwise is beyond right thinking.

And yet, that doesn't make it legal for a cop to arrest you for being uncivil.

There's a big big difference between what's polite and what's legal.

My point is, every decent, moral, law-abiding citizen is unconcerned about the need for any article such as this.

Every decent, moral, law-abiding citizen should be outraged that the people responsible for safeguarding us and upholding the law are violating it on a regular basis.

This, right here, is exactly the point.

Your positio fails from the same fallacy as "if you do no wrong you have nothing to hide" arguments against privacy rights.

Part of right thinking, I feel, is recognising the rights others have even outside your own philosophical framework. I completely agree with being civil to everyone, as far as possible—though, at a certain point, I think that an emotional response to uncivil provocation can be excused. With that said, I also feel that I should recognise others' rights to exercise their, well, rights, even when I disagree with them. As GBS said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him; the unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Good for you.

Should disrespectful people be intimidated, arrested, injured or killed because they're not respectful, obedient citizens like you?

There are thousands and thousands of police interactions with the public every day and rarely does such a thing happen. Perhaps your total knowledge of this is based on what you read on HN or news blurbs on your local TV news.

> Perhaps your total knowledge of this is based on what you read on HN or news blurbs on your local TV news.

Is this the level of civility and respectfulness you use in your interactions with angry police officers? If so I would suggest it is probably not sufficient to keep you out of trouble.

We're glad you're here to set us all straight. How did you achieve total knowledge?

I think and read.

You can believe what you want and believe it is a moral stance, but as a response to the article posted your statement counts as an endorsement of the violent conduct exercised in response to those who do not share your perspective. That fact poses a damning implication on the morality of your beliefs.

Unless you would like to clarify that you respect the rights of those who disagree with you?

Telling people to be civil and respectful to each other is an endorsement of violent conduct? I think I stumbled on the wrong type of forum.

On this forum, we expect people to read TFA. Reading TFA and then making these generic, just-world sorts of comments, you evince inhumanely little regard for the life of Sandra Bland.

You act like she's a martyr. I don't care if I'm just standing in my front yard, if the police decide to arrest me, I'm not going to fight and kick them. The police are just the errand boys of the law. Fighting and screaming like a caged animal is stupid, and in itself makes you a criminal.

'See what she got when she was in jail? They obviously killed her and staged a massive government cover up. You have to fight them to the death if you disagree with their judgement in any way. We just have to train the police to let people go if they disagree strongly enough.' Right?

I wrote two sentences. In one of them, I referred to the life that Sandra Bland once had. If that's all it takes for martyrdom, we're all going to be martyrs. Your political judgement would be more sound if you were less emotional, or perhaps if you improved your reading comprehension.

And every cop has the right to punish you for it. Not a real legal right of course, but one forged through generations of corruption, insecurity, and abuse of power!

Insulting a cop is actually a crime in Germany. But ironically, you're probably in less danger for doing it than you would be in the US, where it's technically your right, but effectively not.

In Germany, you'd get a citation and a fine. In the US you roll the dice on a beating, a night or two in jail, and/or a thought-up charge as retaliation.

This is a common myth. There is no such thing as a "Beamtenbeleidigung" ("Insulting a civil Servant") in German law. Insulting a cop is handled by the same laws as insulting everyone else. It's just that public prosecutors will be more likely to actually criminally prosecute, instead of deferring the insulted party to a civil suit on the matter.

That's not a very great explanation of it. In the base of it, insulting someone breaks StGB §185 and a lawsuit over it can be initated by a civilian as per StPO §374. Civil servants are different because their superiors have the ability to sue in their stead as per StGB §77a.

http://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/185.html - http://dejure.org/gesetze/StPO/374.html - http://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/77a.html

So what? We probably also have a legal right to walk up to random people in the mall and tell them to go fuck themselves. But why would we?

There is a police problem in the country sure. A startling proportion of police are probably abusive, racist, violent, power hungry and probably stupid to boot. They are maybe often lazy and dishonest and protected by corrupt unions. But how does flipping them off make them any less so or do anything in any way to improve the situation?

Here's the bottom line.. Police officers are people too. They have a pretty tough job and see a lot of trash. So they likely are a bit jaded already. Cut them a break and treat them with civility. Work in your community to insure that police act civilly as well (or else find other professions). Basic manners on all sides are an important feature of human relations that seems to be forgotten about in the modern world.

> Cut them a break and treat them with civility.

Nobody with the power to kill citizens with impunity deserves a break of any kind. That policing is not the most heavily scrutinized job in America is a bug, and while I believe you have good intentions in entreating that we treat them nicely, I think that the systemic failures of their culture and their practice have demonstrated that, if anything, we should be doing the exact opposite.

I don't assume a cop is going to hassle me, but I'm a well-to-do white male and I do know how to both play the game and how to correctly assert my legal rights, just in case. I do assume that that cop will hassle any number of my friends without those check-marks of privilege and foreknowledge, because, systematically, they do exactly that. That makes more than the barest of civility a very big ask.

Oh, don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting bad cop behavior should be "cut a break". I'm just saying cops are humans... just like you and I. For this alone they are worth a certain measure of respect.

Also, they have job that requires them to interface with human trash for much of their working day. Although in a perfect world it shouldn't, this might tend to make someone a little grumpy and hostile toward others.

I'm not excusing the fact that the job probably attracts more than it's share of psychopathic bullies. Nor any of the misdeeds. But in order to improve the situation we should take a realistic and humane look at what cops are seeing. And we should demand the type of cops that take exactly the same approach towards their "clients".

Only your last sentence rings at all true to me; lots of people deal with very bad individuals every day, but somehow only the ones whose sworn duty is to serve and protect are the ones killing people over it. I'll consider more than the barest of civility appropriate when they as a culture stop killing people for the temerity to exist while being black.

This isn't a "well, if we're nicer to them, they'll stop hurting people" sort of thing. Expecting the disempowered to be humane towards those with power is at best unrealistic and at worst damaging. Should cops--the people in power--start acting in aggregate like reasonable human beings, then the people without power--everyone else, but especially minorities and the poor--won't have a reason to think that cops are likely to be dangerous to them. The change literally-literally must start with the people with guns and badges, and frankly calls to the contrary feel like useful idiocy.

Probably some cops say (or at least secretly think) exactly the same kinds of things you are saying about black people. "If they would just act right... until then, fuck em. They don't deserve respect."

What exactly does acting rudely or disrespectfully in either case achieve?

The cops have guns and the power to imprison or kill you without even the pretense of a committed crime. The power imbalance literally-literally leaves it in their hands. But being nice to them won't keep your head from intercepting a Maglite should you be of the wrong skin color. So why should the powerless listen to you at all? Why should I not recognize the pervasive damage that is being caused and provide support (in the form of social approval) to them?

Every action that any person ever takes is inherently political in the social context. What you advocate hurts the people least able to afford that hurt, and that's really troubling. Calling for niceties and "respect" to the members of a culture that can't stop killing fellow Americans, while sounding very nice, is tantamount to calling for better servile behaviour. And maybe that doesn't trouble you, but it does trouble me.

Your first two paragraphs are BS. Your last paragraph is unbridled truth.

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