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?
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.