7 ms·

While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this ca

by ck2 11y ago

While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this case. What this is, is an ultra-common case of yet another cop "escalating everything always" because there is no downside for them to do so. They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force. She should have never have been ordered to get out of the car, so this was a false arrest.

chippy 11y ago
As an aside, in the UK being rude as in using offensive language directed towards them twice is illegal and I think classed as assault.
- lsiebert 11y ago
  In the U.S. it has repeatedly been shown to be covered by the First Amendment. See http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telling-the-police-to-f-off-risky-first-amendment-business http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telling-the-police-to-f-...
- Joeboy 11y ago
  There's section 5 of the public order act which is about saying / doing things "likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress" to the public, which has been interpreted as including police officers. I don't know anything about having to say things twice or it being classed as assault.
  - thatBilly 11y ago
    There was a 2011 ruling in England where the judge said that officers were so regularly on the receiving end of the "rather commonplace" expletive that it was unlikely to cause them "harassment, alarm or distress". The Met continues to arrest people for swearing at police as they rejected the ruling. I know that Police Scotland continue to arrest people for swearing at police but I'm not sure how/if it has affected forces in England and Wales. At the time it was reported that the precedent could likely quash any future charges in similar circumstances.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    They tried to include horses too, although the case was dropped: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/4606022.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/46060... There's 2011 advice provided to the Met which says that courts are unlikely to convict because officers are assumed to be robust: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15816761 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15816761 It's probably a bad idea to direct insults at officers (because no-one likes being called a fucking facist wanker) and results will vary by location.
  - chippy 11y ago
    >twice I'm not sure, but I think that after the first time the officer should say "don't use that language at me" and therefore probably tells the citizen that they are causing harassment and distress. Then if they continue to do it, after the warning, it becomes an offence. So perhaps it should be "continues to use offensive language after a warning about the language has been given".
- richmarr 11y ago
  I was surprised by this, like other sibling commenters. I was under the impression that common assault is only enacted when the victim is threateningly contacted or injured, or has reasonable fear of that being about to happen. Maybe threatening language might play a part in that. Having a quick Google, the articles I've come across seem to indicate that swearing at police has in the past been interpreted as illegal, but nothing has mentioned it being classed as assault. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8902770/Swearing-at-police-is-not-a-crime-judge-rules.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8902770... http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jun/16/verbal-abuse-law http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010... Not a lawyer, obviously. Where did that opinion come from? Do you have a source?
- kriro 11y ago
  It's illegal in Germany as well ("Beamtenbeleidigung" literally insult of a civil servant). The fines are pretty mild but it's a funny law (imo). The line isn't exactly clear. Some things qualify as insults, others don't. Iirc "Clown" qualifies but "Bulle" (somewhat similar to the US use of pig=cop) doesn't because it is considered common use now. The rulings usually seem arbitrary. [The same laws apply for insulting non officers btw.] Edit: Upper limit is technically one year in prison or a corresponding monetary fine (value depends on your income as is standard in Germany)
  - hwh 11y ago
    There is no such thing as a "Beamtenbeleidigung" in Germany, though it is a quite common myth. People in office enjoy no special rights in that regard. There is a difference, though, in the law process. Insults as a criminal offense need a personal demand for a penalty to warrant persecution by the state. For people in office, this can be replaced by a substitution demand by the state, supposedly to warrant respect for office in general. Then, there isn't a catalogue for insults and their penalty. That's because criminal law in Germany is driven by the idea that the thing to be penalised is the individual guilt, rather than an objective action. This has a lot of consequences, one of them being that your action is weighted by what you wanted when doing the potentially criminal action, i.e. the intent.
wbhart 11y ago
Towards the end of the video, the officer in fact alleged she had kicked him. It's not clear to me when that happened. Possibly her foot scraped his leg in the initial scuffle to pull her out of the car. Alternatively, it may have happened in the portion that is off video. Either way, the female police officer noted evidence of the scuff, presumably on his uniform. Incidental things like these seem to be taken as evidence of "assault" all too often.
- a3n 11y ago
  The arrested woman is "lucky" she didn't get charged for the officer's dry cleaning.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - a3n 11y ago
    "Ferguson police beat a man and then charged him with 'destruction of property' for bloody uniforms" http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/15/1321904/-Ferguson-police-beat-a-man-and-then-charged-him-with-destruction-of-property-for-bloody-uniforms http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/15/1321904/-Ferguson-p...
gutnor 11y ago
> They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force. Maybe they do it for more mundane reasons: because they are bored of nothing happening and just decide to check a car to break monotony. Maybe they are having a bad day and something that would not have bothered them any other day is pissing them off. The problem is that comparatively to other first world countries, the US society is quite violent. You put a small army of armed regular human being on the street in a country with a small to medium expectation of violence and stupidity will have dearer consequences.
- rayiner 11y ago
  The U.S. is quite violent compared to many third world countries. Our homicide rate is almost double that of Bangladesh.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    Without blacks murdering other blacks in gang violence the numbers are roughly the same as other developed countries, as this article reluctantly admits at the end. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/black-americans-are-killed-at-12-times-the-rate-of-people-in-other-developed-countries/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/black-americans-are-kille...
    - tptacek 11y ago
      Where by "roughly the same" you mean "twice as high", and by "black" you mean "black and hispanic", and, of course, the demography that creates those statistics and confounds simple comparisons like that is left entirely out of your one-liner.
glenndebacker 11y ago
In Belgium it is a criminal offence to 'insult' a police officer, they call it "Smaad aan de politie" in Dutch/Flemish. I know because I got a verbalisation once and I didn't need to say a lot to get it. Thankfully I didn't need to go to court and got a criminal record that way. I once lived next to a guy who drank a lot and who assaulted his older daughter when he drank too much. We had thin wales so we heard the scuffles and the cries. We always called the police but they didn't do anything about the situation. To be honest Belgian justice is a joke, in a lot of cases involving violence they never prosecute anybody. After I while I got really fed-up after the x number of times the police came and did really nothing than telling the guy to be quit.. . I made - not saying that I was correct - remark that being a police officer in Belgium must really been the most pointless job you could do. Drive your bike without a light and you get fined, hitting your children and you get a free pass. That - and that alone - was enough to get verbalised.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  Same in NL, but people go around it by making it an opinion instead of a direct insult, then it becomes freedom of speech. As in, instead of saying "You're a dick", you go "I think you're a dick". Subtle, but apparently enough.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    I have heard plenty of people insult police officers in public and even spit at them in the Netherlands without them doing anything. I learnt in school it is illegal to do so, I have never seen any of them do anything about it in real life. Even without the subtleties; quite the opposite.
- gerty 11y ago
  Police officers have constantly crown prosecutors (or their assistants) on the line and these are the people who really call the shots on whom to arrest and how to proceed whenever something's getting serious. Going by the description, dad/daughter affair should have definitely been referred to Tribunal de la Jeunesse and I bet it was. Belgian prisons are also overcrowded and justice system understaffed so that prosecuting small one-time offenses is definitely not a priority.
prawn 11y ago
Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people. There should be no incentive for arrest in a situation like this, no power struggle, but instead they should be proud and rewarded for having deescalated any non-violent situation. Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back. In this case, the woman was irritated because she was being penalised for a really, really minor infraction. And then she was defensive because persisting with the cigarette request and the demand to leave the car seemed unfair. And then she was rude because he was abusing his authority and he was too embarrassed to acquiesce to a member of the public (giving him the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't because she was a woman and a black woman). The police should accept in the first, explain in the second and then deescalate in the third stage of a case like this.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back. But that's not about de-escalation training. That's about focus on duties. You poke a toe over the wrong line and you're going to get aggressively yelled at, or shoved. https://youtube.com/watch?v=e65-wLp1yyI https://youtube.com/watch?v=e65-wLp1yyI https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKOj1sQh3Jw https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKOj1sQh3Jw https://youtube.com/watch?v=_bW4bRcEVEk https://youtube.com/watch?v=_bW4bRcEVEk https://youtube.com/watch?v=xDPK1kPWj1E https://youtube.com/watch?v=xDPK1kPWj1E These are armed soldiers, not police.
  - prawn 11y ago
    I think it goes without saying that there's a line. And also that they're still famously robotic. The police should react appropriately when faced with violence or an especially difficult customer, but their focus on duties should be to minimise fiery situations where they can.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  "Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people." They are trained in de-escalation techniques. The issue is that in so many of these videos, it's not the person they've stopped or arrested, but the police themselves being the ones _actively_ escalating a situation until a use of force is near inevitable.
rhino369 11y ago
>While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this case. It isn't illegal to be rude, but the cop also doesn't have to let you off if you are being an asshole. She broke the law and he was going to be nice and let her off with a warning. Instead she was combative and he decided not to. He asked her nicely to put out the cigarette and she essentially told him to fuck off she can do what she wants. Nobody has to sit there as inhale your shitty smoke. Cops can order you out of your car for no reason once you got pulled over. It is definitely not false arrest. And I think the cop had totally reasonable grounds to make her get out. Would you sit there and get shittalked while someones blowing smoke in your face because she has an authority/anger problem. Being a dick to a police office who can still use his discretion to let you off is a really dumb move.
- akilism 11y ago
  where do you get that he was going to be nice from?
  - rhino369 11y ago
    He said it was a warning in the video. Though I guess he could be lying.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      No, he does not.
      - rhino369 11y ago
        Yes, he does. 12:19 in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=762&v=yf8GR3OO9mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=762&v=yf8GR3OO9mU
        rmxt 11y ago
        A post facto warning isn't really a warning, is it? "You were getting a warning, but now you're going to jail." Why not admit the "warning" upfront? Maybe exactly like the one happening the first minute of the video?

by ck2 11y ago

chippy 11y ago

As an aside, in the UK being rude as in using offensive language directed towards them twice is illegal and I think classed as assault.

lsiebert 11y ago
In the U.S. it has repeatedly been shown to be covered by the First Amendment. See http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telling-the-police-to-f-off-risky-first-amendment-business http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telling-the-police-to-f-...
Joeboy 11y ago
There's section 5 of the public order act which is about saying / doing things "likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress" to the public, which has been interpreted as including police officers. I don't know anything about having to say things twice or it being classed as assault.
- thatBilly 11y ago
  There was a 2011 ruling in England where the judge said that officers were so regularly on the receiving end of the "rather commonplace" expletive that it was unlikely to cause them "harassment, alarm or distress". The Met continues to arrest people for swearing at police as they rejected the ruling. I know that Police Scotland continue to arrest people for swearing at police but I'm not sure how/if it has affected forces in England and Wales. At the time it was reported that the precedent could likely quash any future charges in similar circumstances.
- DanBC 11y ago
  They tried to include horses too, although the case was dropped: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/4606022.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/46060... There's 2011 advice provided to the Met which says that courts are unlikely to convict because officers are assumed to be robust: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15816761 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15816761 It's probably a bad idea to direct insults at officers (because no-one likes being called a fucking facist wanker) and results will vary by location.
- chippy 11y ago
  >twice I'm not sure, but I think that after the first time the officer should say "don't use that language at me" and therefore probably tells the citizen that they are causing harassment and distress. Then if they continue to do it, after the warning, it becomes an offence. So perhaps it should be "continues to use offensive language after a warning about the language has been given".
richmarr 11y ago
I was surprised by this, like other sibling commenters. I was under the impression that common assault is only enacted when the victim is threateningly contacted or injured, or has reasonable fear of that being about to happen. Maybe threatening language might play a part in that. Having a quick Google, the articles I've come across seem to indicate that swearing at police has in the past been interpreted as illegal, but nothing has mentioned it being classed as assault. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8902770/Swearing-at-police-is-not-a-crime-judge-rules.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8902770... http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jun/16/verbal-abuse-law http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010... Not a lawyer, obviously. Where did that opinion come from? Do you have a source?
kriro 11y ago
It's illegal in Germany as well ("Beamtenbeleidigung" literally insult of a civil servant). The fines are pretty mild but it's a funny law (imo). The line isn't exactly clear. Some things qualify as insults, others don't. Iirc "Clown" qualifies but "Bulle" (somewhat similar to the US use of pig=cop) doesn't because it is considered common use now. The rulings usually seem arbitrary. [The same laws apply for insulting non officers btw.] Edit: Upper limit is technically one year in prison or a corresponding monetary fine (value depends on your income as is standard in Germany)
- hwh 11y ago
  There is no such thing as a "Beamtenbeleidigung" in Germany, though it is a quite common myth. People in office enjoy no special rights in that regard. There is a difference, though, in the law process. Insults as a criminal offense need a personal demand for a penalty to warrant persecution by the state. For people in office, this can be replaced by a substitution demand by the state, supposedly to warrant respect for office in general. Then, there isn't a catalogue for insults and their penalty. That's because criminal law in Germany is driven by the idea that the thing to be penalised is the individual guilt, rather than an objective action. This has a lot of consequences, one of them being that your action is weighted by what you wanted when doing the potentially criminal action, i.e. the intent.

wbhart 11y ago

Towards the end of the video, the officer in fact alleged she had kicked him. It's not clear to me when that happened. Possibly her foot scraped his leg in the initial scuffle to pull her out of the car. Alternatively, it may have happened in the portion that is off video. Either way, the female police officer noted evidence of the scuff, presumably on his uniform. Incidental things like these seem to be taken as evidence of "assault" all too often.

a3n 11y ago
The arrested woman is "lucky" she didn't get charged for the officer's dry cleaning.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- a3n 11y ago
  "Ferguson police beat a man and then charged him with 'destruction of property' for bloody uniforms" http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/15/1321904/-Ferguson-police-beat-a-man-and-then-charged-him-with-destruction-of-property-for-bloody-uniforms http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/15/1321904/-Ferguson-p...

gutnor 11y ago

> They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force. Maybe they do it for more mundane reasons: because they are bored of nothing happening and just decide to check a car to break monotony. Maybe they are having a bad day and something that would not have bothered them any other day is pissing them off. The problem is that comparatively to other first world countries, the US society is quite violent. You put a small army of armed regular human being on the street in a country with a small to medium expectation of violence and stupidity will have dearer consequences.

rayiner 11y ago
The U.S. is quite violent compared to many third world countries. Our homicide rate is almost double that of Bangladesh.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Without blacks murdering other blacks in gang violence the numbers are roughly the same as other developed countries, as this article reluctantly admits at the end. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/black-americans-are-killed-at-12-times-the-rate-of-people-in-other-developed-countries/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/black-americans-are-kille...
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Where by "roughly the same" you mean "twice as high", and by "black" you mean "black and hispanic", and, of course, the demography that creates those statistics and confounds simple comparisons like that is left entirely out of your one-liner.

glenndebacker 11y ago

In Belgium it is a criminal offence to 'insult' a police officer, they call it "Smaad aan de politie" in Dutch/Flemish. I know because I got a verbalisation once and I didn't need to say a lot to get it. Thankfully I didn't need to go to court and got a criminal record that way. I once lived next to a guy who drank a lot and who assaulted his older daughter when he drank too much. We had thin wales so we heard the scuffles and the cries. We always called the police but they didn't do anything about the situation. To be honest Belgian justice is a joke, in a lot of cases involving violence they never prosecute anybody. After I while I got really fed-up after the x number of times the police came and did really nothing than telling the guy to be quit.. . I made - not saying that I was correct - remark that being a police officer in Belgium must really been the most pointless job you could do. Drive your bike without a light and you get fined, hitting your children and you get a free pass. That - and that alone - was enough to get verbalised.

Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Same in NL, but people go around it by making it an opinion instead of a direct insult, then it becomes freedom of speech. As in, instead of saying "You're a dick", you go "I think you're a dick". Subtle, but apparently enough.
- tluyben2 11y ago
  I have heard plenty of people insult police officers in public and even spit at them in the Netherlands without them doing anything. I learnt in school it is illegal to do so, I have never seen any of them do anything about it in real life. Even without the subtleties; quite the opposite.
gerty 11y ago
Police officers have constantly crown prosecutors (or their assistants) on the line and these are the people who really call the shots on whom to arrest and how to proceed whenever something's getting serious. Going by the description, dad/daughter affair should have definitely been referred to Tribunal de la Jeunesse and I bet it was. Belgian prisons are also overcrowded and justice system understaffed so that prosecuting small one-time offenses is definitely not a priority.

prawn 11y ago

Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people. There should be no incentive for arrest in a situation like this, no power struggle, but instead they should be proud and rewarded for having deescalated any non-violent situation. Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back. In this case, the woman was irritated because she was being penalised for a really, really minor infraction. And then she was defensive because persisting with the cigarette request and the demand to leave the car seemed unfair. And then she was rude because he was abusing his authority and he was too embarrassed to acquiesce to a member of the public (giving him the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't because she was a woman and a black woman). The police should accept in the first, explain in the second and then deescalate in the third stage of a case like this.

DanBC 11y ago
> Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back. But that's not about de-escalation training. That's about focus on duties. You poke a toe over the wrong line and you're going to get aggressively yelled at, or shoved. https://youtube.com/watch?v=e65-wLp1yyI https://youtube.com/watch?v=e65-wLp1yyI https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKOj1sQh3Jw https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKOj1sQh3Jw https://youtube.com/watch?v=_bW4bRcEVEk https://youtube.com/watch?v=_bW4bRcEVEk https://youtube.com/watch?v=xDPK1kPWj1E https://youtube.com/watch?v=xDPK1kPWj1E These are armed soldiers, not police.
- prawn 11y ago
  I think it goes without saying that there's a line. And also that they're still famously robotic. The police should react appropriately when faced with violence or an especially difficult customer, but their focus on duties should be to minimise fiery situations where they can.
FireBeyond 11y ago
"Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people." They are trained in de-escalation techniques. The issue is that in so many of these videos, it's not the person they've stopped or arrested, but the police themselves being the ones _actively_ escalating a situation until a use of force is near inevitable.

rhino369 11y ago

>While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this case. It isn't illegal to be rude, but the cop also doesn't have to let you off if you are being an asshole. She broke the law and he was going to be nice and let her off with a warning. Instead she was combative and he decided not to. He asked her nicely to put out the cigarette and she essentially told him to fuck off she can do what she wants. Nobody has to sit there as inhale your shitty smoke. Cops can order you out of your car for no reason once you got pulled over. It is definitely not false arrest. And I think the cop had totally reasonable grounds to make her get out. Would you sit there and get shittalked while someones blowing smoke in your face because she has an authority/anger problem. Being a dick to a police office who can still use his discretion to let you off is a really dumb move.

akilism 11y ago
where do you get that he was going to be nice from?
- rhino369 11y ago
  He said it was a warning in the video. Though I guess he could be lying.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    No, he does not.
    - rhino369 11y ago
      Yes, he does. 12:19 in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=762&v=yf8GR3OO9mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=762&v=yf8GR3OO9mU
      - rmxt 11y ago
        A post facto warning isn't really a warning, is it? "You were getting a warning, but now you're going to jail." Why not admit the "warning" upfront? Maybe exactly like the one happening the first minute of the video?