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Tough Day To Be In Law Enforcement

fishonjazz said:
I dont think that statement is flat out wrong. I think that there are rare times that it is wrong but I think that most people not breaking any laws dont have to worry about it most of the time. So its usually correct imo. I dont know if there are statistics available but I would be surprised if the statistics showed that the majority of the time a person is not breaking any laws that they end up in trouble with the police.
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There are about 10 million arrests every year. Let's guess that this means 1 arrest for every 10 stops police make, so 100 million times police interact with people. Let's assume 15% are repeat stops of the same people. So we have 85 million unique interactions every year. This is 25% of the population with some contact with police every year. I don't think that's far-fetched really, although the statistics show you are far more likely to have this happen to you if you are a minority, so arguably a much smaller percentage of white people will be stopped. But even cutting that rate in half is still a 10% chance of having a run-in with police and least once in a year.

Granted this doesn't take anything into account regarding why they stopped anyone in general so it's obviously not definitive but it isn't crazy talk to think there is a decent chance of having some interaction with police.

For me personally the last time I was stopped by police was maybe 10 years ago for, of all things, having the light that illuminates the license plate being out. Pretty sure they were just probing. Maybe it was a slow night. Who knows?
 
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Last time I was pulled over was a few years ago at about 2 am. I was the only person on the road. As soon as he looked in the car, he practically apologized for pulling me over for making my left turn just a bit too wide. A white middle aged woman apparently wasn't what he was expecting.

I got the feeling he was bored and pulling over everyone that came by just to see if he could drum up some excitement.

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Last time I was pulled over, it was maybe 15 years ago. A good friend of mine and I were driving around on Christmas trying to see how many brick houses were still left in his neighbourhood. Apparently, that was suspicious. We were actually asked why we're out on Christmas. I pointed out that one of us is a Jew. I guess I could've said that the Catholic in the car has a grandmother whose surname is Hurwitz, but I suppose that was immaterial.

It seemed ridiculous at the time, but it seems even more ridiculous now. I was on a public road, obeying all traffic laws. They asked for my license and registration. Not sure what reasonable suspicion they might have had that my car wasn't registered or that I possessed no legal license to operate the vehicle.

I get that one of the roles of the police is crime prevention(it shouldn't be, really), but traffic stops and loitering laws and similar legislation are a stretch, at best.
 
JimLes said:
Last time I was pulled over, it was maybe 15 years ago. A good friend of mine and I were driving around on Christmas trying to see how many brick houses were still left in his neighbourhood. Apparently, that was suspicious. We were actually asked why we're out on Christmas. I pointed out that one of us is a Jew. I guess I could've said that the Catholic in the car has a grandmother whose surname is Hurwitz, but I suppose that was immaterial.

It seemed ridiculous at the time, but it seems even more ridiculous now. I was on a public road, obeying all traffic laws. They asked for my license and registration. Not sure what reasonable suspicion they might have had that my car wasn't registered or that I possessed no legal license to operate the vehicle.

I get that one of the roles of the police is crime prevention(it shouldn't be, really), but traffic stops and loitering laws and similar legislation are a stretch, at best.
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My bet is someone reported it.
 
JimLes said:
A car driving around on a public street? How many reports a day must they get then?
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A suspicious car casing the neighborhood on Christmas trying to find some place to rob. Context matters.
 
JimLes said:
That's like saying the most likely explanation for a headache is a brain tumor.
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No, not at all. If someone calls in a suspicious vehicle the police will 100% respond and initiate an interaction with the people in the car. There are busy bodies all over the place who look at the world like it's full of threats and dangers and it's their job to stop it.

These are some of the worst types of encounters because the police are trying to prove a negative, that you are not up to something. You say you're just looking at houses, yep, that's what someone up to no good would be doing. In these encounters if you decide to be silent the police will almost certainly take that as some sort of indication that you're trying to hide something. There really isn't anything you can say other than I'm trying to find aunt Mildred's house at 2724 Maplebrook Lane and then have Mildred pop out of 2724 and wave you over. Short of that the police are going to feel like they need to know 100% that you're clear because if they let you go easily and you commit a major crime they feel like that will be worse for them than if they detain you for an hour and arrest you on some sort of BS that gets dropped.
 
bigb said:
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it either, other than reading one article when she was convicted. He had an outstanding bench warrant. If I remember correctly, he was at first compliant and then jumped back in the car. So to say it was over expired registration doesn’t tell the whole story. But it leads back into Gameface’s posts.
I see the point you’re making, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. I do think police have an obligation to enforce the law, even if they are stupid laws like a broken tail light or expired plates. If they’re not going to enforce those laws, why have them? Erase them from the books. I’d argue the roads become less safe. If I have no reason to fix my non functioning brake lights, why would I? It doesn’t affect me unless someone rear ends me. Then it’s their fault for not stopping.



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So why not adjust the law so cops weren’t responding to nonfunctional brake lights? I think it takes 10 seconds to think about how making cops respond to brake lights and expired registrations leads to unnecessary escalation and death. Why not have a social worker or a mechanic come and help the person out instead of pulling them over, exploiting the situation for gain, and potentially escalating the situation unnecessarily?
 
@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:

www.sltrib.com

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 www.sltrib.com
 
bigb said:
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it either, other than reading one article when she was convicted. He had an outstanding bench warrant. If I remember correctly, he was at first compliant and then jumped back in the car. So to say it was over expired registration doesn’t tell the whole story. But it leads back into Gameface’s posts.
I see the point you’re making, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. I do think police have an obligation to enforce the law, even if they are stupid laws like a broken tail light or expired plates. If they’re not going to enforce those laws, why have them? Erase them from the books. I’d argue the roads become less safe. If I have no reason to fix my non functioning brake lights, why would I? It doesn’t affect me unless someone rear ends me. Then it’s their fault for not stopping.



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There are many many laws that go unenforced. This was something I thought about a lot years ago. I came up with the term "selective law enforcement" based on the abundance of laws that are at the discretion of the police to enforce. To me this is a massive problem.

To the point of your post I agree 100%. We should only have laws that MUST be enforced. Police should be required to enforce ALL laws at ALL times.

Of course, that would mean trimming the law books massively and leaving only those things that we deem essential.

I would support that legal system 100%. I would support a system where if a police officer sees a violation then it is their duty to respond and charge the perpetrator to the best of their ability and/or within reason.

Unfortunately we live under a system of selective lawn enforcement that allows for bias, ego, discrimination, etc., to influence who gets charged with a crime and when. It is an inherently unfair system.
 
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