This attitude is exactly part of the problem
> Also, you can see the full bodycam footage and UK peoples take on this stop at https://old.reddit.com/r/policeuk/comments/hbbhkb/a_calm_col....
The bodycam footage is in the article I linked too, thank you, and the comments on that sub are disgusting examples of exactly the lack of understanding I described.
> Bear in mind she was stopped because the car she was in had (illegally) tinted front windows.
It was established in court that the windows were not illegally tinted.
Stop spreading nonsense.
> All in all, she seems like someone who is ingesting too much American culture, most noticable in her saying: "You are killing black people" - what??
And it's this kind of dismissal of peoples fears that are propagating this problem.
Also, at no point did I claim the officers did anything sexist or racist. That entirely misses the point that the problem is his failure to understand that the way he is choosing to act is pointlessly escalating a situation because he failed to pause and reassess and rushed ahead with a course of action he had no reason to rush into*.
I've seen UK police be far more patient than this - they're fully capable of taking their time. There was no compelling need here to be in that kind of hurry.
I have seen it. I'm not denying the cop was calm. I called that out in my original comment.
But that does not change the point I made, that he keeps dismissing her obvious signs of distress as lies or indications of guilt, and in doing so demonstrates that he does not understand that people do have genuine reactions of fear to police.
By dismissing that fear and acting the way he is doing he is perpetrating that fear.
> Playing the race card in a country where there really is not systemic racism in the police force is disgusting.
Even Theresa May admits that the Met has issues with systemic racism, after a report commissioned by David Cameron revealed massive disparities in Met treatment by race.
To suggest there is not systemic racism in the police force is disgusting, when official reports as well as former top police officers have confirmed there is.
> You don't think her statement of "you're killing black people" is silly.
No, I think it is an expression of fear and panic, that whether or not that specific fear is justified should be sign to the police officer that they're escalating a situation there is no need to escalate.
I do find it deeply offensive that you keep mocking peoples fear response to this though.
It's not the job of the police to hold the hands of every paranoid individual and shush them back to a state of tranquility.
Is Theresa May some sort of authority on policing that her name keeps being mentioned here? As an external observer it seems that she was a complete failure at everything during her tenure, surely there's someone more appropriate that offered an opinion on this topic.
I said calm, not professional. I consider his failure to notice her distress and panic to make him totally unsuited to work with the public in pretty much any capacity. It was blatantly obvious that she was in distress. Had he seen someone acting like that towards someone not a police officer, he'd have run to assist in what would have seemed like a dangerous situation on the basis of her reaction.
He was blinded by a failure to understand that someone could react with that kind of fear to the police, and as a result proceeded to completely counter-productively escalate a situation that need not have been escalated at all.
> It's not the job of the police to hold the hands of every paranoid individual and shush them back to a state of tranquility.
A large part of the job of the police is to deal with people in distress; often with mental health issues. If they are unable to deal with people in distress with empathy they're not suitable to do the job.
> Is Theresa May some sort of authority on policing that her name keeps being mentioned here? As an external observer it seems that she was a complete failure at everything during her tenure, surely there's someone more appropriate that offered an opinion on this topic.
The point is that even she accepted the report that Cameron commissioned that demonstrated extensive systemic racism in the Met, despite the reluctance of her party to deal with racism in general. Someone else posted a bunch of links about systemic racism in the UK. At this point it is willful ignorance to suggest this isn't a real problem.
And if anyone arguing against the approach you support is apparently ignorant or provoking your disgust, I think I'd rather let you focus on fighting this good fight and dealing with its Brexit consequence.
Umm... It kinda should be. yeah. It certainly shouldn't be their job to shoot those people, or tackle those people, or manhandle those people.
If you find it offensive that some people actually expect the police to treat people with empathy and understand they may be dealing with scared and panicked people or people with mental health issues, then I have no sympathy whatsoever.
The police exists to serve, not to scare innocent people into staying home - at the moment that happens, the police has become the problem and needs to be dismantled.
I think you might find it helpful to do a bit of reading on systemic racism in the UK
[1] https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/publications/cjm/article/...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[3] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-jus...
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/europe/black-britain-systemic...
That is not the question.
The assertion is that the lady was terrified, the constable failed to acknowledge this, and failed to act appropriately.
The constable doesn't seem like a raging racist to me. That makes this video even more important to learn from. Let me recap.
1. The car was not moving. 2. It was dark. 3. The constable thinks the window is too tinted, but it's hard to tell in the dark. 4. The lady doesn't want to be handled by police. 5. The constable agrees to get a woman officer on site, but is suspicious about the civilian's failure to cooperate. 6. The constable is irritated about being defied. 7. The officer chooses not to wait 10 minutes for the lady officer to arrive.
The end result is a confrontation between a civilian and police officers, then somebody jailed for legally tinted windows.
I am not black. I cannot completely put myself in the woman's place. But I don't have to do that to see problems here.
1. Making an issue of a parked car with possibly tinted windows after dark is a clear fishing expedition. It doesn't have to be racially motivated to be wrong.
2. De-escalate. De-escalate. De-escalate. Just chill for 10 minutes and let the lady officer show up. While you're waiting, ask the woman about the weather, if she's done anything interesting that day. Did she pay to have the windows tinted? Small talk. Build some rapport. Maybe even just outline a bit of what is going to happen when the lady officer does show up.
If the constable was suspicious about the tinting, the most he would have expected was to write a citation. But he was prepared from the very beginning to smash windows and detain by force if necessary. Why would that be necessary? Why was there some expectation of that from the outset?
The fellow seems nice. He seems polite. He seems very suspicious. He acts suspicious. He escalates when he is defied. There's no real way around it. He picked a fight. That's not nice.
I can totally see myself mishandling this situation. To me, that makes it a great video to pick apart and study inside and out to learn from.
Lesson #1: Why did you approach the car in the first place? What was your true suspicion? What was your real intent?
Be honest. This is really, really important. Getting this answer right really, really matters.
It's not that this officer need to have gone after her for being black. The big issue is that he just simply can not comprehend - as he indicates from the start - why she would be afraid of the police if she hasn't done anything wrong.
And then everything goes downhill once he's made the decision not to believe that she's actually scared, and interprets everything in that light.
Unfortunately this problem self-amplifies - this woman got one more reason to be afraid of the police, and this story gives other people reasons to be afraid of the police, and the only way to deal with that is for the police to learn to deal with that fear.
What people also seem to forget is that irrespective of racism, police needs to be able to deal with people who get panic attacks or have mental health issues or are intoxicated all the time. If they can not understand that someone might be genuinely in panic without being a criminal, and acting accordingly, the racism or not those officers will treat innocent people in ways they don't deserve.
> Just chill for 10 minutes
Not an option AT ALL. Chill outside the vehicle is what was offered to her, she refused
Once stopped, that woman is in police custody. If anything happens her or she injures herself whilst in police custody, it is a MASSIVE deal.
As the officer knows nothing about this woman other than she is refusing to engage, he had reason to believe she may have something in the car which was of danger to the woman herself or others. This may be something as benign as a bag of drugs which she then chokes on. Ridiculous as it sounds, that's why policies and procedures are put in place.
At the end of the day, coppers on the street who interact with the public everyday are much more attuned to peoples behaviour than armchair experts on the internet.
Outside her vehicle she doesn't benefit from the HEPA air filter of her car. She could get bitten by a stray dog. She could step on the needle of a careless drug user. She could be struck by a frisbee.
See how stupid it is to make dumb hypotheticals?
Here's a not-so-hypothetical. She could get in a physical confrontation with a police officer.
It seems incredible that anyone would argue she is safer outside her car than inside her car. There is no reason for her to have to get out of her car. If the window is too tinted, write the citation. If the vehicle is unfit for the road, let her call a tow truck or a friend with a trailer without getting out of her car until she feels safe.
You write that is sounds ridiculous. That is because it IS ridiculous. That is why policies and procedures are put in place?
Coppers on the street are not the only people who interact with the public everyday. When their policies and procedures are ridiculous, they should not get a free pass.
Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine the officer was a librarian instead. A librarian with lots of experience interacting with the public. Imagine that the suspected infraction was an overdue or ruined book. Do the policies and procedures still make sense? Does the officer's behavior still make sense?
From the article linked in the parent's post:
"Court documents later established they were within the legal limit."
There was no need for the police to use violent force against this terrified woman, but they did it anyway.
How do you think police determine if they're in limit or not. They test them. She could have been on her way in 5 minutes but chose to act like an idiot.
UK police are generally quite good at de-escalating situations they understand. I've praised them for that many times. E.g. they will go into situations with completely irate people without weapons, and rely on deescalation to bring it under control.
What was it about this situation that prevented this officer from doing that? I've seen first hand that UK police are fully capable of being far more patient in far more serious situations. What was the urgency here?
The police officer chose to escalate in a situation where the suspect was calm until he acted, and where his basis for wanting to search her vehicle in the first place was her fear reaction.
Police need to be able to handle people with mental health issues, so whether or not you think her fear was justified, their way of handling it demonstrated a total failure of compassion in a situation where they had no basis for knowing why she was expressing fear.
The issue remains all too often entirely blind to this kind of fear because they don't believe it is real and fail to understand it, and reacts by making all kinds of flawed conclusions, like in this case where the footage shows signal after signal that her fear of him is genuine, and his response is to assume the only explanation is that she is hiding something.
As we know in retrospect, he demonstrated that he can not be relied on to make that kind of judgement.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerscruton/2014/08/30/why-did...
Do people choose to have panic attacks? There are lots of documented cases of people who have panic attacks on planes and flip out. Are they "idiots" in your mind?
> A consultant psychiatrist’s note says Bennett had a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder from a serious house fire and is likely to have been unable to comply with police instructions because she was experiencing a severe panic attack.
I'm fairly sure the concept of a police constable giving a member of the public a "lawful order" doesn't exist in UK law. There are laws that give the police discretion to do things in particular situations, but no blanket ability to issue orders.
And thankfully, illegality is determined by the courts on the basis of evidence and circumstance, not the police.
Over window tinting.
But she could very well be having a legitimate physiological response (of which a panic attack could be one)... in which case she's not "being an idiot". As long as it was a good faith emotional response, your conclusions still aren't warranted.
They could have given her one of those saying take the paperwork for the windows to the police station any time in the next week. She could have taken a friend with her if she's nervous.
Violence is never the answer in a situation like that. The police officer was entirely wrong.
From the cam video I've seen she was clearly frightened of them. They could have chosen to use empathy instead of force.
They really ought to use this and cases like it as a training case to teach officers to recognize when they start doubling down on a course of action that is so obviously counter-productive instead of pausing to reassess, as whether or not they were technically "wrong", he clearly did an awful job and ended up wasting police resources.
So even in a scenario where the police don't care about empathy at all this way of responding was counter-productive.
What is the point?
/s
This is the fault of the media which is fishing for clicks and demonizing the police to the point that people are becoming paranoid.
Even Theresa May acknowledged in her very first speech as PM that there were problems with institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police for example.
And top Met officers have also talked about problems with racism [1] and warned about misuse of stop and search. Each little abuse of power adds to an environment of fear.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/14/former-top-m...
When she told the police this, their response was "I don’t believe you because you’re talking to police officers."
She ended up being arrested for obstruction because they kept failing to understand that her reluctance to comply was because they terrified her, and they can be heard in the bodycam footage [1] going "This is nonsense, there's something in this vehicle" after listening to her telling her dad she's afraid the police officer is going to harm her.
When the police officer starts dragging her out, she is screaming over the phone for her dad to call the police.
The officer is thankfully relatively calm, and it ended without physical harm to her, but this is a quite stark demonstration of the kind of fear the police has created, and how they then perpetuate that by not teaching their officers to understand the existence of that fear and interpret non-compliance resulting from that fear as indication of criminal activity.
She's was cleared, and is pursuing a claim against the police, but of course a claim will not address the fundamental ignorance among a lot of police officers about the fear they are inducing.
I can only imagine how much worse that fear must be in the US - at least in the UK police is rarely carrying firearms - and how awful that fear must be for parents.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/nurse-claims-m...