While I’m not usually inclined toward things that raise emotional or visceral reactions, this video does exactly that, and for a truly worthwhile reason.
Via the Free Thought Project, the video shows Alejandro Natividad, who somehow had the wherewithal to start recording with his phone, stare at the business end of police pistols and yet refuse to lie down upon command because he had committed no crime.
Natividad, had committed no crime, yet when police chose to interact with him, guns were drawn and he was told to get face down on the concrete.
Natividad non-violently refused to lay down because he knew he was right, and knew that he committed no crime. But this decision did not go over well with police.
Another officer showed up and drew his pistol as well and pointed it at Natividad. At this point Natividad is incredibly nervous but continues to film and holds his ground, refusing to lay down for doing nothing wrong.
Clearly fearful for his life, and with extremely good reason, Natividad could easily have just complied with the officers’ commands. Many, perhaps most, would have advised him to do just that, as there is little to gain from being yet another innocent dead body. But he refused.
“This is one man talking to another. There is a man behind that badge, be like a man. That is a coward pointing a gun at me.”
There is no doubt that those who take the perspective that if we just complied with police, it would make the cops’ life easier and safer (not that it’s unsafe, but from the “nothing is more important than protecting our cops” perspective), and can’t we just abide their commands?
The answer is of course we can, and its similarly the more prudent and safer course for the public as well. All it costs is our civil liberties and a bit of public humiliation from innocent people with a right to be left alone being forced to kiss concrete upon command.
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Unbelievable!
I had a gun pointed at me by a man hiding behind a badge once upon a time, without warrant or probable cause.
I was completely unarmed, as in the video. I complied, as most of us would. This is a very brave man, indeed.
Thanx for posting. What a way to start the day! Hopefully, some judges and justices, DAs and lawmakers will see this video. Maybe Mr. O’Bama and Mr. Holder too. Perhaps some of them will wake up to abuses of power which go on daily in the good ol
U.S. of A.,…”land of the free, home of the brave”. No more.
But how do we know that the guy saying he wasn’t a threat wasn’t also holding a giant bazooka? Clever editing. Probably.
Dan: I hope you are being sarcastic.
Are there no legal standards on when a cop can point a gun at someone? For example, there’s a legal standard from Garner and other Supreme Court cases for when deadly force may be used. Is there anything like that for when pointing a gun at someone is appropriate? Or, is it just complete officer discretion?
It’s questions like this that make me want to close comments to all non-CDLs. The monumental irrelevance of your question gives me a headache. And no, I do not want to answer it or discuss further why you think it’s a perfectly reasonable question.
what’s a CDL?
CDL = Criminal defense lawyer.
I don’t know if you consider this any more relevant than Liberaltarian’s comment, but are you saying that the order to lie face down was an illegal order and the subject could refuse to comply without committing a crime?
Or are you saying something more along the lines: it doesn’t matter whether the command was lawful or not because the policeman was in the wrong from an ethical perspective and it is courageous to take a stand against that police “wrongness” regardless of what the Terry-related 4a law might say.
Either of these positions seems reasonable to me, but I am not sure whether you are coming from one of these two reasonable perspectives, or somewhere else entirely.
No, it’s not any more relevant.
Natividad was a passenger in the car. He could not, by definition, have committed any crime by virtue of being a passenger in a car. Nor was there any officer safety justification whatsoever for the cops to point weapons at him. You don’t point a weapon unless you are justified in using it. There was none. And since Natividad has a constitutional right to be left alone if he could not have committed a crime, they had no corresponding authority to order him to lie on the ground upon threat of deadly force.
I think that your analysis is incorrect here because of Brendlin v. CA.
Then you have no clue what Brendlin was about, and it has absolutely no applicability here. Brendlin gave a passenger in a car that was stopped standing to move for suppression.
But that said, this wasn’t a stop and seizure at all.
Brendlin said that passengers in a traffic stop do not have a right to be left alone. At a minimum , under Brendlin, passengers have no right to leave without explicit permission from the policeman. I agree that this does not necessarily mean the policeman had a right to order the subject to the ground (or to clear leather), but I do not agree that this situation is akin to an individual who decides to walk away from a consent stop.
Yet again, you’ve gone off on a legal tangent because of your lack of knowledge or understanding of criminal law. Just because you’ve come up with a red herring doesn’t compel me to engage in a major discussion of why this doesn’t mean what you think it does. This is a criminal law blog, not a blog for dilettantes who want to indulge their interest but lack of understanding of criminal law.
Please don’t waste my time or anyone else’s because of this. Or do it elsewhere, with people similarly ignorant of criminal law if you find it necessary. Just not here.
Do we have any idea what happened before the video? It could have (or might not) have some relevance as to why the officer had his gun out.
Without more information, it is impossible to determine if this is justified or not.
Via source link:
No info to question or challenge narrative.
I don’t see a reason for the sidearm based on the video and the narrative, but I’m real hesitant to just condemn it without knowing all of the facts.
I could speculate all sorts of reasons, like when he drove it onto the corner (up on the curb?), it was heading generally towards the officer. The problem with that is that it is just speculation, and valueless for justifying the weapon being drawn.
There’s a huge gap between endorsing the drawn gun and condemning it. But you know as well as I do why a gun is drawn and pointed.
In NY he could have been charged with OGA.
That’s a fault of the overbreadth of OGA (obstructing governmental administration, Bill), not Natividad. And even then, I don’t see it.
Personally, I think it should be a felony, with a mandatory minimum of five years. Obstructing
Governmental Administration S 195.05 covers just about everything but the kitchen sink, thru generous inclusion of factors favoring the the City/State. Only kidding!
My Take: UnConstitutionally Vague on its face. And hence, legally unenforceable, except in the most obvious and egregious cases which may be beyond dispute. I wish to remind the readership that IANAL, which make me more qualified than most lawyers (and lawmakers) to comment on this v. important topic. After all, “misuse of legal process” is an archaic phrase–generally unknown to the populace–and incomprehensible to the sovereign, as it is to entrenched local and state law enforcement apparatuses in authority.
Authority is only as legitimate as,… we’ll pick it up another time, with your blessings! Enough is enough. Also, it occurred to me today, belatedly, that the posted video might be a “re-enactment”, a v. slick Hollywood production geared to go “viral”. If so, v. well done! Extremely well done! My gut instinct is that it’s the real deal. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, as we learned in grad school. Call me a “believer”.
OGA = OGravated Assault?!? (With a dead weapon!)
There you go again, inciting the children esteemed one…
Well, if you are going to go there, the least you could have done was to carry over to your front page Natividad talking about his roulette balls of steel that were quickly ascending to his throat in rightful fear as he reflected on his potential martyrdom that day on the streets of ‘Merica via the source you linked.
We will see if this temporary encounter of his with the enforcers of the law weighs into the larger tapestry that is stuck in the loom.
–“I wasn’t under arrest the deputy even admits that I did nothing yet had a gun pointed at me. Where’s the logic in that? I was afraid and if I was going to get harmed I’d much rather take it standing than on my face.”–
P.S. This post IMHO will make a few of your readers stupider and perhaps even leave a few to conclude you passively endorse civil disobedience in situations like this where the barrels pointed at the “children” are chambered with lead and the tear gas is still in the trunk.
Just saying…if you are saying it say it, if not then don’t. You are getting to old to straddle. The big blind Natividad was standing in front of wasn’t a bad percentage play to ruffle a few feathers in a card game.
I think what he did was foolhardy. And quite brave. I wouldn’t have done it, and wouldn’t advise anyone else to do it. Still…
“Still…”.
?!, That ain’t gonna do it esteemed one!
You rarely get my dander up but this afternoon I was damn near considering slipping some thumb drives full of you tube videos of the nature you posted today but with the “kids” all getting shot dead into the trick or treat baskets of the goblins tonight.
But I sipped wine through a straw out of a coffee cup in my very realistic looking rubber President’s masks (I have a lot of them including FDR’s and I mix it up) and handed out chocolate in between bitching at my wife half heartily for not letting me play Frank Zappa on the porch speakers instead.
All the while thinking about a hollowed rant to bestow on your back porch after smashing all your pumpkins for posting this post on Halloween.
“Still…” That’s all eh?
Perhaps, but there isn’t exactly anything “new” going on with this encounter you posted less the fact it was filmed.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that the unarmed “kid” with the guns pointed at him here was articulate, didn’t do shit to deserve it, and was not otherwise involved in some BS misdemeanor or petty violation which also doesn’t merit intsta-draw down, and only accused the officer of being a coward and not a _______, ________ ,______ and_________. So what the heck, put it out there some more.
Natividad’s encounter has been making the rounds and he has been talking to more than a few sources.
Good for him.
Doesn’t mean we are going to start seeing this shit weekly on the six o’clock news yet.
Although it happens weekly if not daily, we will definitely not be seeing it on the news the day before a grand jury indicts the first police officer in the nation for being a paranoid asshat for felonious brandishing of a deadly weapon for no good fucking reason.
It ain’t going to happen until the those in the thick blue pool and the “ordinary folk” come to a meeting of the minds.
If it comes the way of tear gas, flash bang grenades, and chaos in the streets that costs the man a few coins and the boys and girls in blue some grief, so be it.
It certainly doesn’t have to go down that way.
But I hardly find it wise (even on the heels of warning of Natividad’s risky stand in this ocean of blue worshiping civil rights shredding bullshit) to passively go with “Still…” all things considered!
You are right, I get you and I think most of your readers do as well, but enough with the dead bodies in the street.
I should think the operating wisdom to spread to the “kids” today would be to encourage
a stand that doesn’t have six of your loved ones carrying you to your grave and putting you in the ground after one, two or a dozen police officers put several more than a few dozen bullets through you to put you on the ground in a pool of your own blood.
These “kids” today have a few new tools, a few of the same old tools, and a few tools they haven’t been smart enough to figure out how to use yet; some of which just need a little dusting off and new applications to prosper and others still needing to be invented.
I really don’t think one or a hundred more martyred within their ranks is gonna do them any good.
The unraveling of stop and frisk, Eric Garner, the simmering Ferguson situation, just to name a few events you have posted about recently aren’t exactly ghosts.
Who knows what was going through Natividad’s mind when HIS situation went down? Brave but foolish you say?
I don’t know but I can guarantee you one thing Natividad, the “kid” from La Quinta, CA population 37,000 nestled within the boundaries of a still notorious Riverside County is lucky he isn’t dead.
It’s a fucking outrage alright and sadly it’s looking like the “kids” will need some help but I shudder to think what will come to pass if they give up.
But fuck martyr syndrome which is also cowardly and does nothing but put another kid in ground and send another mother to bitter pastures which cannot easily if ever be overcome.
Excuse the rant! But intentionally or not you are pushing the line with this one and IMHO not giving the “kids” any advice or tools that are up to the task at hand with your straddling conclusion.
Now if you will excuse me. It’s time to have one more cup of wine before putting on my black wool mackinaw cruiser, worn out tin pants, old school nike gym shoes, and my Nixon mask to go scare the living shit out of any adolescent or young adult hoodlums prowling the neighborhood thinking about smashing pumpkins.
Good thing I know my way around the neighborhood, have been doing this for a while, and still know handful of the cops or I just might get shot by one of the “kids” if the cops I don’t know, don’t shoot me first.
P.S. I wonder what one of those new fangled mortar firework shells would do to a mail box? There is a relatively young couple that moved into the neighborhood this summer while I was away. I guess they don’t “do” Halloween but they were spotted in their kitchen tonight according to a few of the guardians of the goblins.
If something were to happen to their mail box I could roll on over there tomorrow and give them a new mail box as a house warming gift.
Who knows they might invite me in for coffee. If they do I will make sure to fill them in on this little story I read about the Candy Bitch in the law blogs and fill them in on all the hoodlums running around the neighborhood these days.
Rumor has it she is a lawyer and her hubby works for the the county in the finance department. I wonder if a Frank Zappa t-shirt over a turtle neck with a wool vest would be too casual of dress to deliver a mail box housewarming gift?
Happy Halloween SJ back page readers!
Don’t let the esteemed one get away with inciting riotous behavior in the children or yourselves…
Concise? Still…
This I thought was cutting:
“This is one man talking to another. There is a man behind that badge, be like a man. That is a coward pointing a gun at me.”
Brave and lucky he did not become just another story of a dead brownskin by the shiny badgers. I would have laid down, discretion (and survival) being the better point of valor. When you live in a police state best to avoid the police.
“When you live in a police state–comma–best to avoid the police. A little punctuation never hurts. After all, this is not Australia which butchers the English language mercilessly. Regularly and rapidly!
My real point is: That is easy for you to say! Sometimes they [the cops] just happen upon you when you’re least expecting it. Catch my drift? Or maybe you’re a hermit living in the woods somewhere under the stars with little more than your god, guitar, and bag of weed; not necessarily in that order. (Cell phone service, if you’re lucky.) Note the semi-colon. Kurt Vonnegut, amongst other great writers, was a careful employer of the semi-colon.
It’s difficult to know what to do or what to say when confronted with overwhelming force and authority, trust me on that one. Many will agree with me. Being a lawyer might help, but then again, maybe not. It all depends,…. upon how quickly the officer wants to get home for supper.
I wouldn’t have taken the risk either. It doesn’t seem like a good bet, and I have no desire to become a martyr.
Well, whatever one may think of our founding revolutionaries, many men did exactly that. Stood their ground. The next thing you know, thousands stood their ground. And, unfortunately, here we are, full circle. And things will continue to get worse until enough men stand their ground.