Cops tase man on busy highway who is then run over and killed by a car

100%

That said…you fly to Nashville (taking family to watch the Gators play Vandy) and land at 4:00pm…get your rental car 30 minutes later with your wife and three kids. A bike cop sitting at money making spot…they see Florida/Rental Car/Not going to fight $100 ticket…take the money. Apparently I missed a red light. I literally was in 6 lanes of traffic with my wife doing her best to give me the exit and try to figure out which way to turn. It was a three lane exit that merged with three other lanes. I was in the middle of our three and peripheral following the car
to my left and waiting to hear left or right from my wife. Literally 5 feet back (while we got a yellow/red apparently) I guess I ran. Bike cop wrote me. Killed me when I wasted 3 hours taking their stupid safety thing to keep the points off and it had a question about what to do to get to your location safely. The answer defined what I did. But…

I gave the guy respect. And owned the ticket. That said…I still wish I actually got out of the car to ask him some questions. 5:00 rush hour downtown Nashville…just wanted to get to my hotel safely. Doubt he cared about the real dangers on the road that day flying up the emergency lanes. I watched so many cars on a six lane highway run a half mile to a mile in the emergency lane to cut traffic while I did all I could to safely get to my hotel in a city I did not know at rush hour with my family in a rental car. That one really bothered me!!!

With all that said. If you respect police and you are not a criminal. There is absolutely no reason to fear police!

 

943.1717 Use of dart-firing stun guns.—
(1) A decision by a law enforcement officer, correctional officer, or correctional probation officer to use a dart-firing stun gun must involve an arrest or a custodial situation during which the person who is the subject of the arrest or custody escalates resistance to the officer from passive physical resistance to active physical resistance and the person:
(a) Has the apparent ability to physically threaten the officer or others; or
(b) Is preparing or attempting to flee or escape.

The video appears to show a situation where the officer knows the person has likely provided false information indicating it is an arrest or custodial situation. The person who was a subject of that then elevated the passive to physical by running after being frisked.

There might be more there. But if you think this was illegal and deserves prosecution based on what we saw…tax dollars would be wasted. Now if you can dive in and explain how a prosecutor wins this case. It would actually be interesting to hear and could change my mind. But I don’t see how any prosecutor brings a case against the officer based on the law you cited.

 

Honestly not sure what idea you're disagreeing with?

If you meant that you disagree that it's common for police to intentionally try to get people to give up their rights in traffic & terry stops, then you're missing one of the most common, routine tactics in all of policing. It's so common as to be banal, except the consequences for people can be anything but. If you didn't mean the above, my bad.

 

No I don’t think it is common and routine for police to try and have people give up their rights.

Are there viral videos of it happening? Yes. But to think it is routine and common is something I do not see. Most people have committed a violation. And the altercation proceeds cordially. Occasionally a power trip officer exerts themselves in a manner that is wrong and infringes on the person they stopped. Occasionally the person stopped wrongly makes an issue about their rights when their rights are not being violated. But those two situations are not the norm or routine.

 

The old F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about holding conflicting ideas in one's mind at the same time might be relevant in some of these discussions. Multiple things can be true at the same time, and often are.

Cops are like any other group IMO. There's a spectrum of good and bad and varying levels of competence and professionalism.

It's very common for cops to try to talk people into giving up their rights. Many give unlawful orders and suggest non compliance might result in arrest without expressly stating so. The smart ones will back-peddle if someone knows to ask the right questions for clarification. Others may give orders they think are lawful, but they may just be wrong about the law. I see this a lot with first amendment audits.

My understanding is that when investigating a crime or suspect, police are permitted to lie to people, and they often use that tool effectively. I've seen it many times on interrogation videos - although there may be some who don't use that tactic. And I doubt they see it as a bad thing to do what the rules allow when they believe the greater good requires it, especially if there's a missing child or dead body.

Of course, if a suspect gets a detail wrong, it opens up threats of obstruction and potential motivations for lying. The cross-examination style which allows leading questions is alone very powerful. This is a reason why you should never agree to debate on someone else's turf or allow them to ask all the questions. The power differential and arsenal of tools available make these interactions extremely one-sided.

Having said all that, it's also true that many times these cops are interrogating suspects who are absolutely guilty and determined to get away with very serious crimes. Some are even very good liars. Also, even for lesser crimes and traffic offenses, many citizens make the situation far worse for themselves because they're belligerent or think they're smarter than they are and keep digging their hole deeper. But it's also a learning experience to watch an interrogation of a suspect who is charged and convicted but cleared years later. The cops can be very convincing with their tactics and having so many advantages. I watched one recently and it was fascinating because I didn't know what ultimately happened until the end of the video.

I think this is a pretty balanced discussion from a criminal defense attorney about this stuff. There is a law enforcement guy in the room who doesn't seem at all offended by it and even seems to agree with the advice and summary of how law enforcement operates. I'd be curious if there's really any substantive disagreement from law enforcement or lawyers on the board.

 

This isn't only about the extreme cases of some officer being on a power trip. It is literally a feature of American policing with considerable related case law, data, and study. This feature was established long before the rise of ubiquitous camera phones and recording of police encounters. Keep in mind that most interactions with police are not custodial interrogations, which means police are not required to Mirandize people during these encounters. This is where and how rights are violated most often...as a matter of routine that people don't even realize. .

In fact, in traffic stops (similar with terry stops), any question other than asking you for your license, registration, and insurance by definition will have you giving up rights if you answer them because we all have a 5th amendment right to keep our traps shut. We also have a right against unreasonable searches and seizures where police employ questions to get you to give up those rights too, very often under the guise of a friendly conversational tone, thus making their questions seem innocuous to the driver. They can be everything but innocuous.

The answers you provide can allow police to develop probable cause to justify things like vehicle searches, writing additional tickets or even making an arrest, despite not having any particularized suspicion at the outset and maybe only a hunch, biased as those hunches and perceptions may be. Often is the case that police will employ other tactics, such as stalling for time and prolonging the stop (many times beyond the vagueish time-frame set by SCOTUS) with conversation to allow for K9 unit to arrive at the scene in order to allow dogs to sniff cars, again even where they didn't have reasonable or any particularized or articuable suspicion and without probable cause.

History has shown us that everyone should have a healthy fear of police, or at the very least, suspicion, criminal or not. Many are even well-justified in having a literal fear of physical harm, ridiculous as that might seem. .

 

Eh…we certainly agree to a point. But we also disagree to a point.

Policing is one of the toughest jobs out there. Literally. And finding capable competent people to do it is not easy. Human behavior makes it beyond challenging. But for the most part they do an excellent job.

 

Yes, it's legal for cops to lie. However, some states are passing common sense laws.

These new laws stop cops from lying to kids.

Based on mounting evidence that minors are especially susceptible to false confessions, criminal justice reformers in several states are demanding tighter rules for juvenile interrogations. The latest such push is happening in New York, where reformers hope to pass legislation requiring that minors have access to legal counsel prior to police interviews.

Maryland and Washington state already enforce such a rule. And in 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first two states to ban police from lying to minors during interrogations.

Wrongful convictions have shown that teenagers are less likely than adults to understand their Miranda rights and more likely to focus on immediate rewards rather than long-term consequences. According to the Innocence Project, nearly 30 percent of DNA exonerations involved false confessions, and roughly a third of defendants in those cases were 18 or younger when they confessed.

Law enforcement opposition also scuttled a 2022 Colorado bill that would have banned police from lying to juvenile suspects while trying to extract confessions. "Tough on crime" lawmakers called it "anti–law enforcement" and "pro-criminal."

 

Don't dispute it's a tough job and that it's getting even more challenging finding capable officers, not to mention there is a chasm between abilities and unreasonable expectations placed upon police. But the routine violation of rights is among the most pernicious problems in policing and it is widespread because it's a feature. Seems hard to make a reasonable argument that police are doing an excellent job if people's rights are routinely violated.

 

I've been thinking about this because of the dialogue in the thread (which is fantastic, imo). What about the question of whether or not there are any weapons in the vehicle? Do you know if there is a requirement to answer that question? Not challenging your assertion, genuinely curious.

 

That’s just it…people’s rights are not routinely being violated. The vast majority of stops are for cause. You are caught up on the minority…

 

The simple answer is that other than providing common driving docs in traffic stops that are legally requested (i.e. if the stop was legit), you're under no legal or constitutional obligation to answer questions, even about guns.

Same time,it might not be a bad idea to alert them to your legal guns, but imo even that depends on particulars.

 

I wasn't writing to the legitimacy of traffic stops in themselves, although that too is a problem, if also closely related. The violations that I've been writing to are about the ways in which police question people during those stops.

If you don't want to call it a violation--so be it--call it police deliberately & routinely getting people to give up their rights, often unwittingly. This shouldn't be a a feature of govt in a free society whose job it is to protect those rights.

 

Since we are telling stories, here's my cut and paste from a different thread just in case someone missed this epicness.

My female cop story...

I was in my mid-20s. Some friends were at a guy's house that I knew. They were drinking and having a good time and I got invited over.

The homeowner had a couple people over that I didn't know. Anywho, I go over, have some beers, and am I having a good time. Well, after some beers and gauging the crowd, I walk out to the vehicle and roll up a doobie. Here I am, walking back up the driveway with a J hanging out of my mouth, about to fire it up. I bring the lighter to fire it up, and at that exact time, I overhear that the female standing under the carport is a cop. Turns out to be a narcotics division cop. So I snatch the J out of my mouth and stick it in my cigarette pack.

Time passes and she comes up to me me and asks me if I have any weed. I don't even know what I said. I just know it caught me off guard and I was a little worried. Doesn't matter what I said because the next words out of her mouth was "You're going to smoke with my friend or we're going to have a problem. Got it?"

So, the cop, her friend, and I go inside the house. At this point, she had told me she works for the narc division. The cop sits on my lap, i stick the J on my lips and ask her to light it up for me.. (I know, right?). She did. We smoke and partway through she starts making out with me.

Later that night, I was getting a cig and roach dropped out of my pack. The cop used what I believe to be a dept issued Flashlight to help me look for it.

A short time later, I was walking by and she stopped my in my tracks, reached both hands around me and stuck em both down the back of pants and drawers and grabbed two handfuls of my bare ass. It was.. weird. Lol.

Nothing ever came of it, but that night is burned until my memory. Not too many people could say they had a female drug officer sit in their lap and fire up a J for them..

@BigCypressGator1981 Looking at the other thread, I mentioned that I had a pic of the officer I just had to find it. We'll, I found it. I just have to find it, again.

 

The cop is a complete idiot and not aware of his surroundings so should easily not be a cop.

With that said, the guy that ran is what caused it to get to that. Pretty sure running from cops has never led to positive results.

 

Yep.

There are some here who just despise those that protect them. They are incapable of understanding all fields of work have people who should not be in them.

But if a female officer rubs one up while one violates the law it is cute and funny and good to the ones who despise police because the officer was not doing their job.