Should
you ever find yourself unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a
felony car stop, do us all a favor (yourself included). If I tell you
to put your hands up, keep them up, and do exactly as I tell you (which
is pretty much what I'm likely to tell you), for fuck's sake, do it.
Do
not start yelling about how I have the wrong person and you did nothing
wrong. If that is the truth we will figure it out once you're safely
in handcuffs. Most of the time, however, people who say this turn out
to by lying. Shocking, I know.
Do not reach down to your waistband, even if it is to pull your sagging pants back up.
Do not tell me what I need to do, what you're going to do, or whose badge you're going to have.
If
you do any of these things, do not be surprised if you find yourself
face down on the ground, possibly with Taser probes or bullet holes in
you.
When the police conduct a felony car stop, it is
because we have reasonable suspicion that a felony has been committed
and that you are somehow involved in the commission of that felony. We
do not do it for fun. I assure you, it is NOT fun. We do not do it
because you are black, hispanic, or whatever other ethincity you choose
to claim. In fact, we felony stop white folks too. Again, shocking,
right?
A felony car stop is a tense situation, and we take
it very seriously.
We would greatly appreciate it if the hood rats
would take it seriously also...
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2 comments:
Too many terrible shows on the boob tube where people talk their way out of being arrested.
Never fails to amaze me how people cannot separate fiction from the alleged real world.
Get this. A person you make a felony stop on may not have a clue what he or she is being stopped for. They may never have had an interaction with a police officer in their lives... It seems possible that you cannot understand the utter terror that a police officer, with drawn weapon can inspire in people whose only frame of reference is crime-drama and lurid news coverage of crime.
Even if you are a calm and courteous officer (Not given to yelling obscenities, cryptic orders such as the olden command to "assume the position" or, worse yet, contradictory commands), you need to understand and EXPLAIN.
Citizens, particularly the unarmed, law-abiding variety, are not used to an officers' concerns about the weapons they may never have touched. They are likely to be nervous and many people gesture without the slightest conscious volition - arms up, hand sweeps, hands in pockets... Nervousness also leads to what you may have heard as a tendency to babble... This same tendency can lead to a sort of discontinuity in action, where a person seems to forget what they were doing a moment before - as when they take their hands off the wheel or lower them.
Honestly, ordinary folks and cops are often so different in worldview that I'm only surprised you don't shoot more of us.
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