From St. Paul:
Someone on Reddit who says he’s a cop explains:
Cop here, I can’t say what happened prior to when the video taping started. However, I can tell you what does justify a kick to the chest. If you refuse to obey a lawful order just one time, an officer is justified to use a personal weapon strike (meaning our hands, feet, legs, elbows etc…) for distraction purposes in order to gain compliance. With that said, the guy has already been pepper sprayed and is verbally arguing not listening to the officer to put his hands behind his back. He is bigger than the officer. This alone justifies that use of force. He could have tased him, but chose the lesser of the two.
Now, I don’t know the story, I’m not going to judge him based on just video. It always looks bad to kick someone, but it’s obvious the guy was noncompliant. Here is a little trivia tip for everyone. It doesn’t matter if a cop arresting you is unlawfully arresting you. You still must comply. Even if you have an attorney standing next to you telling you the arrest is unlawful, you cannot fight it until court. So the guys argument of not having warrants is pointless. He must comply.
I trust that clears everything up. I know I was distracted by the personal weapon strike. If this isn’t sufficient, Turley explains further.
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Many states have laws allowing proportional force to resist unlawful arrest. You’d just be suicidal to attempt it.
Ya think?
One would think police departments nationwide would publicize these distraction blows more widely. Knowing we could get a boot to the chest would go a long way towards keeping us in line.
Or, to paraphrase Dr. Strangelove, “Of course, the whole point of a Distraction Blow is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?”
I had never even heard the phrase until today. I had always thought it was just a kick in the chest for fun, but now I know it’s an official maneuver, which of course changes everything.
He was lucky it was a kick to the chest and not the face as I’ve seen in other video tapped arrests.
The concept of “distraction blows” to effectuate an arrest in this situation is completely moronic. The instinctual reaction is tense your body and move your arms to protect your head not go limp and put your heads behind your back. Of course if you tense up and try to protect yourself from unwarranted strikes you are resisting and more strikes are necessary. This leads to cases like Kelly Thomas who because he was mentally challenged probably didn’t realize trying to protect himself was causing them to hit him more.
I think the main problem here is the lack of oversight of LEO trainers. There are shockingly high number of LE trainers with trumped up or false credentials who feed into the hype about cell phone guns etc. that cause LEO to be overly fearful of even in relatively mundane situations.
It’s nice to know the commenting officer has overruled the Supreme Court (John Bad Elk)…
You can just press charges against the cop once it’s determined that the arrest was without probable cause.
Kidnapping, false inprisonment, agrivated assault, use of a firearm in the commission…
I’ve been told that case was decided under the common law, which has been superceded almost everywhere by laws making the police our overlords.
Funny that. I thought there was a constitutional restriction on the issuance of patents of nobility…
How can a police officer give you a lawful order to comply with an unlawful arrest? “Lawful orders” in many cases are just excuses for thugs to force you to submit.
You really need to stop getting your legal education from 50s TV shows.
As disturbing (if not more) than the kick was when he had the other officer help Nelly (the man being arrested) to stand, with Nelly offering no resistance, and then the two of them, with no evident provocation, slammed him into the hood of the squad car. And further, one of the officers seemed to be pulling Nelly’s head back with his hair while they emptied his pockets, again despite the fact that he was not resisting. And it also seemed as if they continued pulling his head when they tried to force him into the car, at which point he fell over — a big man like that falling on a curb could cause a serious head injury. Repulsive all around. And what a waste of community policing resources t have something like six cars and a dozen or more officers respond to this incident.
Thanks for your continued (or should I say, returned) monitoring of such incidents.
Didn’t you notice how he put up no resistance? That is proof of the effectiveness of the police strategy, only surpassed by the potential of first beating him unconscious and then kicking him again for good measure. The strategy works exceptionally well.
“If you refuse to obey a lawful order just one time, an officer is justified to use a personal weapon strike”
Obviously he has a different definition of the word “Justified” than we mere civilians have.
Incidentally, September is prostate cancer awareness month. Men’s cancers kill as many people a year as breast cancer, so go to the doc and get checked.
This was too excessive force. The proper response is for the officer to call for back up, not kick the man in the chest, which can be deadly. It is no defense to excessive force that the subject was resisting arrest.
You should start tagging your posts so that it’s easy to go back and see the others in the But For Video series.
I should have done that 5000 posts ago. It’s a little late now.
And watch the DA laugh straight to your face when you ask him to file charges against a cop.
What is wrong with these officers? It’s no wonder that the black community hates law enforcement. This is over the top!