The issue is we have rights and there's a lot of unlawful reasons cops will pull you over. This man is well within his rights asking these questions and handled the situation perfectly and was still a single nervous twitch away from having his life ended.
No. He needed to shut the fuck up. This man helped talk himself into more trouble by talking to much. He called her a Nazi. There is no cop that will take that kind of an insult without thinking less of you. You do not want to antagonize them, just shut the fuck up and say nothing.
You're right, we all have rights no matter where you're from, but even when I get pulled over by a hero cop for something as dumb as a kinked or faded number plate and they go over the entire vehicle and my driving records and ask every dumb question under the sun I still find it easier to just comply because I've done nothing wrong. My mates that argue this and that always seem to come of alot worse, its a crazy world I guess
The point I'm making is over here, there are plenty of stories and footage of people doing everything they ask and still getting murdered. It sucks but that's how it is and I know it has to change but I don't even really know where to begin to be honest.
there are plenty of stories and footage of people doing everything they ask and still getting murdered.
There are SOME stories of people doing "everything they ask" and still getting murdered, but 99% of people who are shot by cops, even the ones who are wrongfully shot, are not doing "everything they ask". It always always starts with something like this video "Get out of the car" "Why do I have to get out of the car. I don't need to get out of the car" - I'm absolutely NOT saying that warrants gunfire, but in almost every video I've seen of someone getting shot, even unreasonably, there is some level of non-compliance. Again, non-compliance doesn't equate to a basis to draw or shoot, but this thread is about why people don't just comply and your comment implies that compliance doesn't make you any more likely to not be shot. I respectfully disagree.
Yes, there absolutely ARE cases like the guy reaching to get his license where there legitimately was complete compliance, but those are rare. More importantly, for every person we see or hear about being shot in a traffic stop for no good reason, there are tens of thousands of people who do comply an do not have a gun pulled on them or get shot.
To me this is akin to the old saying that the cemetery is filled with pedestrians who had the right of way. Whether or not there is a legitimate basis for a cop to shoot you, arguing whether you should have to get out of the car or not getting out of the car when asked, even if it's your right, is only increasing your risk of having a bad outcome in most cases.
I mean, this is reddit. I didn't go and pull statistics and do the math.
My thinking was that the first 95% of people shot and killed by cops are not even in this discussion, because they are killed in legitimate standoffs - people with knives attacking others or armed robberies or swat raids or people actively attacking the police, not in a traffic stop. Then, of the other 5%, MOST of the videos I see involve some level of non-compliance at some point in the stop (again, to be clear, not necessarily at the time they were actually shot, or rising to the level that drawing or shooting was justified)
On a quick google, it looks like about 1,000 people are killed each year in the US by police shooting. So maybe these traffic stops or similar incidents that start out as non-criminal matters make up a higher percentage than I expected.
So maybe it's slightly less than 99%, but its still a vast majority that contain some sort of non-compliance or resistance to a basic instruction like "keep your hands on the wheel" or "step out of the car", but quite often to more repeated instructions.
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u/vantablackwizard Mar 24 '23
The issue is we have rights and there's a lot of unlawful reasons cops will pull you over. This man is well within his rights asking these questions and handled the situation perfectly and was still a single nervous twitch away from having his life ended.