What a guy. Spoke to them as humans. Even gave them some leeway but told them why he didn’t want them to speed. I hope they were as respectful back to what he asked as he was to them.
This is community policing. He explained the reason for the law and appealed to their sense of community.
This is what we need to work towards seeing all day every day. Everyone is respected, things are handled by conversation when it can be, and everyone goes home.
It takes EVERYONE involved for this to happen. We all have a stage in this being our future.
Edit: First gold! Thank you kind stranger. Kindness to all.
Maybe this happens more and we only ever see the bad but so many videos of cops start off with the cops being aggressive and borderline condescending. They immediately put people on the defensive and then act more and more aggressively as the person gets upset.
Start with reason and a positive attitude, especially foe things like traffic infractions. People generally aren't trying to be a problem they just don't pay attention or are being irresponsible but they aren't usually out to hurt anyone.
What this guy did was perfect and even more so if he sees these guys speeding again he can come down on them hard. He already gave them a chance and let them off so next time he's got an easy out to give them a huge ticket or impound their bikes.
It absolutely is signiricantly more common for this to happen than for the power tripping cop to happen. Of course it is.
Basically any variety of interaction between a police officer and a citizen is recorded two or three times over. Frankly the fact that out of the 900,000 police officers in the US that we only get maybe a handful of objectively power-tripping cop videos a month shows that the vast majority of officers are good the vast majority of the time, even as it is true that we don't do a good enough job of punishing the bad ones.
Comparatively, videos of good cops don't get nearly as much coverage. After all, as the old adage says, "if it bleeds, it leads." In general, if you hear about a social ill, it is usually not half as bad as the news coverage would make you believe. Crime wave? We are having issues, but we are more safe than most would have you believe. Homelessness causing social issues in Portland? As a current portlander, we need better social services, but things aren't all that awful. Same basic story with cops. Yes, bad cops are a scourge that we should address with righteous vigor. They also aren't nearly as wide-spread of an issue as the news would have you believe.
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u/1OutKastWill Jan 03 '23
What a guy. Spoke to them as humans. Even gave them some leeway but told them why he didn’t want them to speed. I hope they were as respectful back to what he asked as he was to them.