Well I have long advocated for a set of protocols that apply to police interactions. I think it's a boring thing to talk about and it gets technical so I think most of the times I've talked about it it has been ignored.@Gameface you’ve had a bunch of good posts in this thread. One thing I’d like to point out, is why do we have to have special instructions for how to interact with police? The whole point that we have to have these instructions, tells us how messed up our law enforcement and judicial system is.
1. Police are incentivized to nitpick.
2. Police officers have too much power.
3. The judicial system incentivizes racial profiling. When looking for cars with problems, are you going to do it in Holladay or West Valley City? When looking to search someone, are you going to do it to well spoken white dude in a suit in Alpine or some Spanish speaking brown dudes in normal clothes?
4. When taken advantage of, who’s more likely to fight back (legally), an affluent person from north salt lake or a poor person from Taylorsville?
The structure we have in place gives the police far too much power to be judge, jury, and executioner and the system we have in place crushes the poorest among us. It happens all the time:
Utah police can take cash and property from suspects, even if charges are never filed. Last year, officers seized items worth $2.5 million.
Police in Utah last year took more than $2.1 million in cash under a state law that allows officers to seize someone’s property — even if they have never been charged or convicted of a crime.www.sltrib.com
I think that there needs to be a national standard for traffic stops. What that means is that when a traffic stop is initiated there are standard actions that need to be taken by both the police and the citizen being stopped. The stop becomes a sort of a "dance" or a pre-choreographed series of actions that both parties are fully aware of. These series of actions both provide for the maximum safety of police officers and the civilians, as when everyone is following the protocols there is no justification for escalation.
Now not all traffic stops are created equally, so there would be certain signals the police would give that you are being subject to a more aggressive category of traffic stop. If that were the case you would have a more specific and more stringent series of actions you would have to take in order to be compliant with the seriousness of the stop you are involved in.
Without getting into the weeds, these protocols would be legal tools. If a person violated the protocols be it the officer or civilian, that would have real legal consequences. But for the civilian, if they failed to follow the protocols the police would enter their non-compliance protocols which would have elements of de-escalation and enhanced security for officers. The officers would inform the civilian that there have been deemed non-compliant with the protocols and the police would then move back, take action to prevent the vehicle from leaving the scene and wait until they had the manpower and preparation to take control of the situation with everyone's safety in mind. There would then be an attempt to get the people out of the non-compliant vehicle through verbal persuasion. Then those people would be taken into custody in as gentle and respectful a manner as possible if they follow the instructions given to them. Part of this non-compliance protocol would be the acknowledgement that one or more of the people being stopped might be having a mental health issue, or have an established mental health issue, or be intoxicated or otherwise unable to complete the normal protocols. So this is not just a way for the police to make this situation more precarious. This is something that would take expert guidance to create a situation where many criteria would need to be considered. First, that you have a nonviolent person who is confused or disoriented and needs to be put in a position where they are not a threat and therefore are not threatened by police. Again, experts need to establish the way this is done. Second, a person who is of diminished capacity, either through a mental health issue, a language barrier, intoxication, or something else. There needs to be a series of actions the police can take with maximum deliberation to safely take these people into custody. Third is a person being willfully defiant. These people should be identified as such and it should be made clear to them that they have entered a special status in the protocols as a dangerous person and steps should be made clear to them that they can take to exit that status. The most important part, if a person does not take steps to become compliant, is that the police action is according to a deliberate plan and that the series of actions they take maximize their own safety first and have the best possibility of taking the subject into custody without harm second.
I mean this is just the basic concept. I think a large developed nation like the U.S. should be able to make this happen so that the wild wild west police encounters that we see so often become a thing of the past.
