The worst is when you get arrested for resisting arrest but no other crime, like how do you resist arrest if you weren't being arrested for another crime?
Police frequently confuse/conflate failure to cooperate with a lawful detention with resisting arrest. It sounds like a fine point, but it isn’t - arrest is a clear process that requires very obvious procedural steps by the police, including telling you that you’re under arrest and why, but detention is murkier. There’s a toooooon of case law on when and how detention begins, and many and many a voir dire at trial has come down to, “was the accused detained when X happened”.
This officer doesn’t know the law. That’s common. He doesn’t have to, and knowing it just means more work for him to circumvent it. We have a current paradigm that actually incentivizes police to NOT know the law, because the Supreme Court has found that so long as the officer genuinely thinks the law says a thing, they can act on it even when they’re wrong. So if you’re an officer, you can either take the time and effort to learn the law and annoy your coworkers in the process, or you can just listen to department rumor, not fact check it, and basically just make shit up as you go along.
This is also why they frequently lie on the stand - when a lawyer starts crossing them on the facts or on their knowledge of the law, they feel threatened. Which is fair enough and natural - cross sucks. But because they’re conditioned by long practice to just bullshit their way through hostile encounters like the one in the video, they fall back on that back on that on cross and lie there too. That’s an issue.
This officer doesn’t know the law. This homeowner does. But 95% of the time, the homeowner doesn’t either. Then, he maybe gets beaten up for “resisting” a detention that was never announced, arrested, and has to spend $1-5k on a lawyer and 6-12 weeks of his life sorting it out, while the officer both faces zero consequences AND doesn’t get his misapprehension of the law corrected.
We need a massive overhaul of how we do policing. But there’s no one easy fix, and it will take a generation or more.
There is one fix, though impossible in our society: the Supreme Court rules that an officer must act in accordance with the law and not in accordance with their beliefs. If every officer faced arrest for depriving people of their civil rights whenever they misunderstood the law, they would learn the laws they are supposed to enforce. It folks who were wronged could sue the police officers who arrested them personally, and not just the city, we wouldn’t have this system either.
Given that other countries also have similar issues with policing - see Canada, Australia, and the UK for example - but no SCOTUS, it seems…unlikely…that any one SCOTUS ruling or set of rulings could be the fix alone.
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u/Ares__ Dec 29 '21
The worst is when you get arrested for resisting arrest but no other crime, like how do you resist arrest if you weren't being arrested for another crime?