Narrator: Depictions of theoretical interactions with the police can be side-splittingly funny, when dramatized by a comedic genius like Chris Rock, as in this YouTube sensation titled: How Not to Get You’re A** Kicked by the Police.”
(Warning: contains coarse street language which may be offensive to some.)
Play excerpt of the following clip:Narrator: But real-life use-of-force police encounters are almost always more serious, sometimes, deadly serious, as this excerpt of a recent CBS-News report demonstrates:
Play excerpt of the following clip:Narrator: While some cases use-of-force cases can be highly controversial, my objective today is to deal with cases that aren't controversial at all, cases where the use of force, was clearly unnecessary, and therefore, inherently excessive.
Four examples from recent Utah history are particularly troublesome.
You may have heard of at least one of these cases.
Case Number 1: A young man is stopped and ticketed for speeding by a Utah Highway Patrol trooper. The driver's refusal to "sign a promise to appear"is escalated by the trooper into a tasering incident.
Case Number 2: A female speeder from out of state is arrested and then stripped search after declining to sign a promise to appear. She didn't sign because she knew it was going to be impossible for her to come back to Utah just to deal with a speeding ticket.
Case Number 3: A woman in her 70s was assaulted by a male police officer after she declined to give her name when confronted by a police officer intent on serving her with a citation for failure to adequately water her lawn. The officer already knew her name. He had been sent to her home to serve her with a citiation for failing to adequately water her lawn.
Case Number 4: A business owner is assaulted by a gang of Provo Police agents for stating his opinions about the professional conduct of a female animal control agent. When asked to produce his drivers license, he asked what her reason for wanting to see it was and reminded the officer that he was not driving his car when she arrived on the scene.
Before we watch the excerpts or the witness accounts of the events that transpired, I'd like to point out a common thread.
In each of the instances we're going to review, the actual crime was extremely minor. Not the kind of thing that a reasonable person would view as even justifying an arrest, much less the use of physical force.
But in each case, the police officer or officers involved manage to successfully escalate the situation to a point where the police agent's response is clearly out of proportion to the alleged offense which triggered involvement of the police in the first case.
Before we review each of these five cases that I'm asking you, the viewer to analyze, I'd like to ask you to put yourself in the place of each of these individuals and answer the following quiz question:
Do you, as an American citizen, have rights that you can reliably exert when confronted by a police officer that suspects that you have committed, or are in the process of committing, a crime?
Obviously, the answer to that question is yes.
But do have 100% assurance that you could
do you really know what those rights areThe answer to that question is yes. But
Before my first encounter In the United States, we have the right to remain silent when confronted by police
For me, this is easy.
I've had numerous run-ins with the police in recent years, even though I consider myself to be as law-abiding as the next guy.
- a female senior citizen being grabbed, slammed against a door jam, slammed to the floor, and wrestled with in order to put her in handcuffs
Play clip of Jared Massey:
Narrator: A young man, accompanied by his pregnant wife in the passenger seat of their SUV, is pulled over on suspicion of speeding by an officer of the Utah Highway Patrol. He disputes the charge, refuses to sign a notice to appear when given a ticket, and ends up being tasered twice by the trooper while his pregnant wife is ordered to remain in the passenger seat by the policeman.
A woman in her 70s responds to a knock at the front door of her homeanswers a the door tis in front of his pregtasered is pulled over with his pregnant speeder who refused to sign a promise to appear.
The purpose of this documentary is to encourage you to help me convince policy makers in America
and it's these kinds of cases that this documentary will focus on.
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re usually lacking in humor, as the following clip from CBS news demonstrates.
cases of And it is no doubt true that, in many cases, where police use beatings, tasering, mace, rubber bullets, or other aggressive tactics on some of the citizens that they confront in the line of their work as law enforcement officers, determining if the use of force was proper or not can require more information than may be available just from listening to witnesses or from watching video of the encounter.
