Jaywalking professor

(Besides which, note that his story doesn't make any sense: he was approached by one man, and then, without discussion, was suddenly wrestled to the ground by five? Which suggests that he got PLENTY of time to talk things over -- long enough for four more men to come by.)

Umm, because having pedestrians cross the street at unexpected spots makes it a thousand times more likely that they'll get hit by cars, cause cars to swerve into accidents and pileups, or otherwise contribute to death, injury, and property damage? Whereas if pedestrians cross the street at designated traffic stops, everyone's on the same page and no one gets surprised? I mean, sure, it's not a law you want to overenforce on pleasant little roads -- but c'mon, it's not like the principle doesn't make perfect sense.

lol

filthy, foetid paddy wagon

"It was a fantastic experience going into that detention centre and spending time with those miserable wretches of the earth."

Actually, wouldn't it be flout?

My roommate (in Atlanta obv.) got a jaywalking ticket. No cars around. The nearest crosswalk was two blocks away. The fine was ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE fucking dollars.

(It was Halloween; we suspect that the police needed to fill their quotas or some shit)

I know you're kidding, but jesus christ dude, you must have it backwards when you distinguish between Atlanta vs. the rest of Georgia

Gleefully Illiterate BOT OTM that we live in world where "attitude does not attract sympathy" means the same thing as "should be beat the fuck up"

you could post this sentence on any thread, and it would still be otm.

This is true of everything, though. (xpost!)

xpost alex took the words out of my mouth.

Furthermore, I will do it while wearing a cowboy hat and a "These colors don't run" t-shirt.

xpost done

That seems to fit with typical cop behavior, though, doesn't it? As soon as you start to get agitated or guarded with them, or violate their sense of the power dynamic, they move straight toward the process of subduing you. And that just makes you even more scared and agitated, which makes them ramp up the subduing-you process, which ... leads to harmless people getting taken to the ground because they're just a little freaked out. Judging by both sides of the story, I'd guess that that's what happened here: the guy got freaked out and "wait, I have something to say" led to "don't you dare touch me" lead to arrest. (And he's not claiming to have been "beat up," is he? It sounds more like he got scraped and bruised as they were taking him to the ground.)

It would be fucking terrific if police were willing to recognize when people were just getting huffy or scared, and maybe waste two minutes of their time humoring them by talking things over. Even from their perspective, surely it'd be less work to stand back and politely argue with the guy than it is to arrest him, file reports, etc. But they read any sort of agitation or argument on your part as if it just might be the precursor to your pulling a gun on them, which makes you read all their actions as if they're about to pull a gun on you, which ... cycle again.

When he filed his report, the cop also had one of the prof's peers as a witness who backed up the cop. The more I read about the prof, the more he seems like an asshat. Shockah.

FYI, the reason that the hotels hire off duty cops in this area to make people use crosswalks is because last year a jaywalking conventioneer got hit by a bus and killed.

Yeah, COPS cops will talk forever, but they tend to do it after they've got already taken the situation apart, right? I mean, if they're like "turn around and take your hand out of your pocket" and you're like "hey wait, lemme explain something" ... it's not really talking time yet.

Haha I flipped past one the other day with an embarrassed-looking man and an embarrassed-looking cop standing together in front of a truck --

Embarrassed-looking man: "I honestly did not realize she was a man."
Embarrassed-looking cop: "You're telling me you didn't know she was a man, and I can understand that."
Embarrassed-looking man: "It was dark in the bar."
Embarrassed-looking cop: "That's ... I can understand the misapprehension."

xpost

Yeah, Dan OTM -- I wish police didn't feel the need to escalate confrontation with anything apart from "yes sir / no ma'am," but in terms of personal risk I can't entirely blame them.

I might also add that I spent A LOT of time in this part of town when I was going to grad school and there are a lot of sketchy people, so I kind of think that cops down there deal with a lot of bullshit.

History prof: 'Atlanta police are barbaric' | ajc.com

I mean, you read this op-ed and pretty much everything makes sense.

Punchable? Absolutely. That said, "a decent, half-civilized country" = one in which you can mouth off to cops without getting thugged upon.

And a "fascist shithole" is a country in which cops kick the legs from under feeble old men because they don't like their attitude.

Now, maybe that's unfair to the good 'ol U.S. of A. Maybe this is about certain specific shitheads that should have their badges stripped and be forever barred from any kind of gun-holding work.

It's one or the other. 'Cuz tolerating this from cops is part of the slippery slope to stuff that's much harder to laff off, no matter how "punchable" the target.

XPOST no one said the cops "need" to be violent, in fact pretty much everyone has been saying that in saying the story isn't as bad as it might sound, it doesn't necessarily mean the cops didn't overreact (though they and some eye-witnesses apparently deny details like don has been pointing out)

Who thinks that? That's terrible.

'Cuz tolerating this from cops is part of the slippery slope to stuff that's much harder to laff off, no matter how "punchable" the target.

I'm going to call for a beating on the grounds of your ridiculous invocation of the "slippery slope" argument.

Good point. I'm accepting Prof's version of events for no real reason. And while I do have a great deal of suspicion for the "official version" of any story in which cops may have beaten or killed someone, I don't have much faith in the other side, either. Without knowing more, I mean.

If most witness accounts say the cops didn't knock him down and rough him up, or that he instigated the violence, then I've got no issue with the cops' behavior.

P.S. It's my own dang country. I'm allowed to insult it. As an American, you start to wonder, after a while, why the police have to attack, injure or kill so many unarmed people, and why it always seems to turn out that they were "acting appropriately" in doing so...

What's wrong with the slippery slope? I like the slippery slope. It sounds so dirty.

*may not actually be true

XPOST BEALES IS PAUL EDWARD WAGEMANN AND I CLAIM MY FIVE BUCKS.

So, since we're all allowed to own guns, cops should be free to shoot unarmed people? Just to be on the safe side?

I mean, I understand why American cops might be nervous, but I think we've created a culture of police entitlement in which violent misbehavior is simply tolerated, unless a LOT of witnesses step forward to complain. And sometimes even that doesn't seem to matter.

This is used to great effect in Idiocracy with the cops calling everyone "particular individual" and speaking in a string of Law-And-Order-isms.

"I mistook the normal attitude of an Atlanta police officer for arrogance, aggression and menace. He, I suppose, mistook the normal demeanor of an aging and old-fashioned European intellectual for prevarication or provocation."

This is telling.

Adam, you're swalling the prof's version of events hook, line, and sinker, right down to parroting his language and describing him as a "feeble old man." (He keeps playing that up, as if he's a nonagenarian invalid.) And I think you're kinda wrong about any "slippery slope" here. The rights police are asserting here is not really that slippery: that once they say "show me your ID or face arrest," you show the ID, or that once they say "you are under arrest," then you either get in the car or they force you into the car. There's no slope -- all they're claiming is the authority to forcibly arrest people.

Which can be damned inconvenient if you don't want to be arrested, but that's the system we've come up with: the police have a general right to arrest anyone who doesn't cooperate with them. The part that keeps that from being a "police state" is that you're then treated to a judicial review of the matter, where you can talk things over at great length. And note that in this case, the judicial review worked the way it should have: there was no compelling reason to do anything with the guy except say "okay, go home."

I do sympathize with the stupid bullshit cops get on a regular basis and I am always extremely co-operative with the police not only out of sympathy but out of an acute sense of self-preservation but I'm curious as to why so many people here seem to be sympathizing with a cop who resorted to violence rather than an esteemed professor and writer with a strange accent? Is it some class thing? Is is resentment over a foreigner not knowing how to behave here? Is it his tone or the substance of what he says? I sense a lot of prejudice on both sides, though that may very well be a prejudice of my own.

M. White, if I may jump in here, it's not really a class thing it's more of an American thing. This is how cops act in America. If a cop asks you to do something, you do it. I think most Americans feel this way. It has nothing to do with resentment or anything like that.

If there's resentment toward the prof, I'd guess it stems from the fact that most of us acknowledge certain necessary powers of the police, and all of us realize that -- no matter how much it sucks -- if a cop is going to arrest you, you have to let him/her arrest you peaceably, and so it's hard to dig up sympathy for someone who believes it's such an incredible atrocity that someone would ticket or try to arrest him. I would be far more sympathetic to him if the foreground of his story were "I'm sorry but I didn't recognize him as a police officer; I was scared and thought maybe he was going to rob or kidnap me; etc."

xpost -- We might be more used to it, being American, but the concept that cops can tell you to do stuff is pretty freaking widespread! I mean, WTF, if an English policeman pulls you over and asks for your ID, and you don't feel like giving it to him, he doesn't just say "my, how dreadfully disagreeable" and move along, does he?

(P.S. there's one possible resentment that is class-related: his apparent belief that because he doesn't look or act "like a criminal," he deserves extra consideration and deference from police, some benefit of the doubt that the "desperate dregs" in the wagon did not.)

Having read many of his books, I'm finding it hard to believe F-A was acting as if he were above the law. I tend to buy his 'I didn't recognize him as a cop - America's full of dangerous stange people - show me YOUR ID' tale of paranoia. Also, if you've ever felt that you were falsely arrested and that most of the thuggish people in the wagon around you were not, you too might descend to such expressions as 'desperate dregs' - especially if you were an Oxford don. In nay case, I can tell you this, it's not making Atlanta look any more appealing to me.

Also, I think there's a side to the 'that's how America is' argument that would be unacceptable if we were talking about shunting natives to reservations or lynching southern blacks or frankly getting mugged by the Mexican police or beaten by CRS in Paris.

Woah, dude. Two hugely hugely different things, okay?

We all agree that we have to just cooperate with it and trust in the legal process, because no one has suggested any better system for doing things

The first part of this has NOTHING to do with how he acts or may act in a situation with the police, by the way.

Now, I don't know what really happened here. But I think that there are lots of ways to deal with noncooperative people other than roughing them up.

Tangenially-related anecdote that proves nothing but functions in leiu of real proof:

I watched a video of an arrest in Africa (can't remember what country) a while ago, on some "COPS"-type TV show. A crazy man was running amok through a village with a machete. Not hurting anyone, but threatening to, and refusing to drop the weapon when confronted by police.

The cops, without body armor but armed with pistols, chased this guy for hours, dodging machete swings. They never fired a shot. They tried to throw nets over him, threw water at him, attempted to disarm him over and over. Eventually they got him down and took the machete away. Then trucked him off, still struggling, without ever hitting him once or using a choke hold.

Interviewed afterwards, the cops basically said, "Sure, we could have shot him, but we knew that he was crazy and that his actions weren't really his fault. We took personal risks rather than killing him because that's the nature of the job."

And I thought, this would NEVER happen in my country. No way, no how. No matter where you are, you fail to drop a machete when a cop says so, they're probably gonna kill you. You swing at a cop with a machete, they're almost certainly gonna kill you, and if not, you're gonna have at least a few broken ribs to show for your troubles.

Bad policy is bad policy. I know you don't like the slippery slope but once you start excusing the cops for acting like thugs, they'll keep pushing it, and beating up people who ask to see your badge before they submit IS thuggish and paternalistic. Have you ever been in a town where the cips are afraid, politically, of the people? They're sure as hell a lot more circumspect in their dealings with the citizenry. My real point there was about how insular America believes that everyone should be perfectly savvy about how shit works in America even though half of us couldn't find a given country on the map. Are you really saying that the cop couldn't have recognized that the prof was a foregner and cut him a second of slack? That he couldn't have been trained to defuse the situation? Quit arguing for lowered standards and fight for higher ones, sheesh. DHS is already keeping professors and students out of the country, which will make us more parochial and more insular. We're already looking and behaving less like an admirable country as it is and I am perfectly willing to exercise my rights as a patriotic American and say 'fuck that.'

I'm sorry if I come from a city where I'm more scared of the cops beating me up for my fajitas than arresting me for jaywalking or smoking weed in the street.

Friend of mine, albeit in the 80's.

My only complaint is with the verb 'trust'. If you wish to have faith, that's fine, but you also need sunshine laws, some amount of community police oversight, a commitmment to an independent judiciary (which F-A lauds btw), a civilized incarceration system, and a sensibility that avoids the paternalistic tendency to criminalize every petty little thing.

This is exactly how I feel, re: police violence. The circumstances under which any violent response by a police officer is acceptable should be VERY, VERY stringently defined and enforced.

Since they're allowed to carry guns and control the behavior of ordinary citizens, and since their word carries more weight in court than that of ordinary citizens, they should be held to the highest standard possible.

it does?

Adam, you're conflating totally different things. I can acknowledge the police's authority to arrest people and still have grave concerns about the circumstances in which they'll fire their weapons. Those are two totally different acts, with very different consequences, and there needn't be any slope connecting them.

And M, you're totally begging the question here, and you've completely evaded my query about what procedure you'd recomment. How are the police "acting like thugs" here -- by arresting a person who fails to present ID in order to be ticketed? What "higher standard" would you write into procedure? And what constitutes the "violence" here -- the fact that, when a man tried to avoid arrest, they brought him to the ground without significant injury? What "higher standard" would you write into that one?

Would you criticize this sequence of events if it had happened to a drunk driver? Policeman stops drunk driver, asks for identification. Drunk driver refuses to provide it. Policeman says "I'm going to have to arrest you, then." Drunk driver tries to argue and avoid arrest. Policeman safely brings drunk driver to ground and takes him to station.

That's a precise procedural equivalent to what happened to this guy; it sounds entirely by-the-book to me, and every one of the procedures in that book seems like a sensible high standard to me already.

"Other officers helped him handcuff the historian. According to Leonpacher's report, the professor said: "Well now I believe that you are the police."

Let's be very clear, I will never advocate resisting arrest or even being personally vindictive to law enforcement, but a free society, and better, a civilized society should keep an eye on these things. F-A's biggest mistake, imo, was to say 'everyone else was doing' as opposed to asking. There are crosswalks in Britain and he should know better to jaywalk anywhere unless he's sure of himself. In the account I made upthread about getting busted for jaywalking in L.A., the cop said something very interesting to me. I said, "I looked up the hill and there was no-one coming (it was a one way street) so I didn't impede the flow of traffic and I looked to my left and there was no-one in the right turn lane (one can, as Woody Allen pointed out, make right turns on red light in CA) so I don't see what I did?

He replied, "Ah, but you didn't see me so you WEREN'T really totally aware of your surroundings." He had been about 100 feet back in the righ turn lane. "I can't let these people see you getting away with this."

I'd already told him that one could jaywalk with impunity in San Francisco and that I didn't realize it was so harshly penalized so I merely said, "Well, now I know, officer. I hate to rush you but they're calling for me on the production I'm working on around the corner." My radio was indeed crackling with a call for 'locations'. He wrote it out and wished me a good day. It was about $55.00, 'cause he only gave cited me for crossing against the 'don't walk' sign.

Since we're both reading the same material, maybe the difference lies in the experience we've had with cops, or what we imagine cops are like? I dunno.

Anyway, I do think that it's reasonable to talk about police violence in an aggregate sense. Non-lethal and lethal violence may just be different faces of the same coin.

Still, I admit I overreacted in my initial responses. Based on what I know (vs. what I imagine), there's no reason to call for the firing/prosecution of the cops involved. I was outta line in that.

My prejudice is entirely against intellectuals with no realworld skills, a type I had to deal with fairly often when I worked for the U. of Miss. They were a trial, a chore and a pain. If they'd look up from their research just a little bit and figure out how the world works off-campus, they'd be able to avoid situations like F-A found himself in. On the other hand, maybe distaste for the "real world" is what pushed them into academe to begin with. I know my issues may be unfair to them, and it's more my problem than theirs, but this case really rubbed against that prejudice.

Though they weren't really supposed to help with lock-ups (i.e. stopping pedestrian and vehicular traffic for a shot) the cops on one shoot, when begged ''cause the light was going down and since they would be with us even after nightfall 'til the bitter end, acquiesced. One young and stern officer was at an intersection 90 degrees from mine. I was covering his side walk and watching for any looie-loos who might come out from the storefronts for what would be a 30 second take at most. A car came up and the driver was rubbernecking at the set and the crew and the lights and didn't see the cop until the last moment. The cop was at the crosswalk itself and he started screaming at the guy less in a 'don't hit people in the crosswalk, asshole' way than in a 'obey the command of an officer in uniform way' freaking the driver out. However, his voice had been loud enough that they had to shoot the scene over. One of the 2nd AD's complained to me and I told him to go fuck himslef, we weren't supposed to be using cops for that anyway; it's illegal. The Sergeant, well experienced in augmenting his salary with movie detail overtime, heard this and he came over to talk to the cop, making the following points:

1) The production co. doesn't have the right to stop anyone. They can only ask for your co-operation.
2.) You get more flies with honey than vinegar. Most people will be glad to help if you ask them respectfully and smile.
3.) The reason the car got so close was 'cause you were rubbernecking too. You should have been stopping them 20 feet up the hill.
4.) We all want to get home as soon as possible, right? Don't forget to smile.

So his advice was to be respectful and be polite and it was partly professional (Don't stare. You're at work) and partly tactical (stand up the hill and not right at the intersection).

That same Sergeant once told me that what was mind-boggling to him as a cop, in uniform, with a gun on his hip, was that people would mouth off to him, a man who could use the very wide power of disobeying a police officer, without compunction, but the second he pulled out his citation pad and pen, when money came into play, they became remarkably more co-operative.

Nabisco, upon reflection, I don't know how relevant that is, but policing seems to me as much an art as a science and Leonpacher just seems like a mediocre cop to me. If a civilain says, show me your badge or your ID, show him your badge, if only to make sure that if anything goes down, HE's the asshole.

I submit that we need both people with real world skills and intellectuals. I'd rather work with the former and dine with the later, as a rule, though. The thing is that the police have to police EVERYBODY; shy people, crazy people, outgoing people, happy people, sociopaths, manipulative people, mythomaniacs, moralistic browbeaters, racists, people fucked-up on drugs, college professors, homeless people, clerks, beauticians, etc...

You do see that the way you handled the situation was totally, completely different from the way the professor did, right?

Notice my preface - F-A's biggest mistake, imo

No argument here. I struggle with my predispositions. I also have a friend who is an Oxford don AND has real world skills, so my sympathy for the dude in Atlanta is lessened.

Even if some action was warranted, was injurious force warranted? The professor wasn't seriously injured, of course, but he was roughed up (according to his own version of the events, anyway).

I don't think all rules of behavior can be quantified and set in stone. Rather, we should expect police officers to display a modicum of judgement, tact and sensitivity. When it comes to the application of force, poor judgement should not be accepted, even if the actions in question are technically within bounds.

We do have crosswalks in Britain but you're under no obligation to obey them. We don't have jaywalking laws, you can cross wherever and whenever you want.

That said, I was aware of the jaywalking laws when I went to the US, and really a professor who has presumably travelled abroad before should be aware of them as well.

in the UK if they really don't want you to walk across somewhere, they'll put up railings to discourage it -- and plenty of people (ie me) will walk round the railings and walk through the traffic

(i think it is actually really illegal on motorways)

Haha, I'm starting to think maybe you guys are the ones who trust cops more than me: I prefer for as many of their tactics and procedures as possible to be set in stone! There's a long history of bad things happening when people with guns and authority just get told to use their own judgment.

As for whether force was necessary, eh, we could go round and round on this, but if you say "you are under arrest" and someone keeps saying "no I'm not" -- what's the other option here? I mean, I think we all agree that it'd have been nice if they'd spent a couple minutes saying "hey, don't worry, here's my badge, I'm just gonna write you a ticket" before arrest even came into the picture. But I'm not gonna criticize them too much for, like, properly arresting someone. (And c'mon, if pressing someone to the ground is "injurious force," then every uncooperative arrestee in history has been exposed to injurious force.)

That being said, it's very troubling that the police officer refused to provide ID, and it's that detail (if true) that prevents me from writing off the prof as a total jackoff.

Aus cops are, I think, more like US ones - they'll shoot you if you do something stupid to be honest (like wave a sword about, or be aboriginal. Um.)

http://ase.tufts.edu/faculty-guide/images/photos/fFernandez-Armesto.jpg

awesome!

The only part about the cop I think might have been iffy was that he said he never pulled out his badge because F-A kept asking him for his driver's license...cop was wearing other police-identified gear and there were other policemen in the visible area so he had no idea why F-A was being so difficult. There were hundreds of people in the immediate vicinity of the incident and everyone was following the rent-a-cops to keep order at the crosswalks. F-A pretended like he didn't have to follow the rules and when a cop called him out on it, he played the dumb foreigner card as a defense.

Well, I tried that, and got hit by ten tons of Nabisco-logic. It's a shame when he disagrees with you on something, because you've gotta be world debating champion or whatever to win your side of the argument.

Dude has now himself written a lengthy spiel about the American system in the Independent (well, where else?) today. I had a brief read, but I think it'd be better served up here. As soon as it turns up on the site, I'll link it, and the Yanks can redouble their mirth.

In America they have jaywalking conventions?

-- ledge (tomdotledge...) (webmail), Yesterday 9:08 PM. (ledge) (link)

There was a big problem with pedestrians getting hit in Atlanta for many years