Remember, a cop's job is to put you in jail. They use force and the threat of force out on the streets, get you to sign a citation on the streets, and then leave it up to the courts, lawyers, and judges to put you away. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, the police are there to "protect and serve."
A jury of 12 people are currently deciding if Daniel Penny will spend the next 15 years in prison & if he’s convicted it might be because he was naïve enough to speak with police without an attorney present. Just because they approach you as your friend doesn’t mean they are…… pic.twitter.com/dWxRVQvWrz
— Brett Pike (@ClassicLearner) December 5, 2024
Penny's situation reminds me a little of the Eric Garner murder by NYPD officers, murdering him for selling individual cigarettes to folks who couldn't or didn't want to buy a full pack.
Robert Wenzel's assessment of confronting police on the streets is smart.
Courts are certainly not completely fair but you will have a much better chance than by resisting on the street.
That said, there is a lot of talk in the media about “police brutality,” but when it comes down to it, all police confrontations are about, at a minimum, implied police violence. You are either going to have to follow a copper’s requests, or he is going to escalate as far as he has to—to death (yours), if necessary.
To lower the amount of “police brutality,” a society needs to lower the number of potential confrontations police have with the public.
The confrontation the police had with Garner was allegedly over his selling loose cigarettes. It was probably a bogus claim, but the police needed some cover story. The question remains, though, why should police be enforcers preventing private transactions over loose cigarettes? Forget government cigarette tax laws, one would think that police on patrol are supposedly on patrol “to protect the public” against violence, not enforce government edicts.
Elsewhere, Wenzel makes this excellent point,
In NYC, the cops involved in the scuffle with Garner were not local sidewalk cops.
The cops in those confrontations did not know Brown and Garner and so they had no way to judge how much of a real threat they were. And there was the “us versus them” mentality on both sides, partly because of the zero-tolerance policy. Wilson ordering Brown to the sidewalk and NYPD cops attempting to arrest Garner for selling loosies.
Don't ignore this classic by James Duane.
