<p><a href=“http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/PEN/3/1/15/2/s647”>http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/PEN/3/1/15/2/s647</a></p>
<p>??? </p>
<p>No one has said they were engaging in lewd conduct, but I guess all it takes is for one person to be offended. Could have just been someone who was not a fan of interracial relationships.</p>
<p>LAPD says a citizen called 911 and reported lewd conduct describing the car and the couple. I’m not a lawyer. IDK.</p>
<p>I am sort of surprised that this sort of thing (meaning the offended citizen) would happen in LA of all places. Studio City is in the “San Pornando Valley” where a lot of the adult-film industry is based. </p>
<p>If the cops are responding to a call, that might be different. They don’t necessarily have to see the “crime” to begin asking questions in most states.</p>
<p>I believe the point is CA has no “stop and identify” statute. That someone calls in and says something is not probable cause to detain a person; the officer didn’t see anything, there was no complaint filed, nothing to justify a stop. And since the man she was with - her husband - spoke to the police, they truly had no legal justification to detain her. By placing her in cuffs, she was under law put in custody. That means she can sue for false arrest or its equivalent even though no actual arrest was made. </p>
<p>I don’t understand the police putting people in cuffs so often now. The photos are of a slender young woman. She can’t pose a threat and you have no legal right to detain her so what are you doing?</p>
<p>I am more disturbed, however, by the police taking down a man with a terminal illness because they determined he was drunk and dangerous to his children. Again, why are police officers forcing a man to the ground and ordering him to stop flailing … when he has Huntington’s Disease? When they’ve observed his movements … I gather they’re too stupid to tell the difference between ill and drunk and aren’t trained well enough to compensate for their stupidity. </p>
<p>I don’t see anything wrong with bursting into tears if you’re innocently kissing your husband and all of a sudden the cops turn up and put you in handcuffs. I’d probably burst into tears too. </p>
<p>What’s funny to me is that she’s wearing puffy floral print shorts, a t-shirt and running shoes. The outfit is about as far from “prostitute” as it can get given that it’s a warm climate.</p>
<p>Yes but she was Kissing While Black. Not only that, she was kissing a white guy. So naturally she must be a prostitute, no matter how ordinary and non-prostitutey her clothes were. </p>
<p>The white guy showed his ID and then proceeded to photograph his wife having a fit instead of suggesting she also show her ID so they could go home. It’s weird.</p>
<p>I’ll tell you what’s weird, Flossy. Here are two things:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Police handcuffing a woman in normal clothing who was kissing her husband.</p></li>
<li><p>CC posters not understanding when a black woman finally says, enough is enough, I don’t have to show my damn ID to every cop that thinks I’m a prostitute just because I’m a black woman.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I hope she gets a huge judgment from the LAPD. Maybe then they’ll realize that not every black person is a criminal.</p>
<p>Flossy, she didn’t “pitch a fit.” She was on a call with her dad, and since she was certain she had done nothing wrong and that the police didn’t have a legal right to demand her ID, she WALKED AWAY. In what world does that qualify as pitching a fit? </p>
<p>Sally, her boyfriend who is apparently not her husband after all is the one who said she got hysterical. Actually, he said the cops threatened to drug her and take her to a psyche ward so apparently it was quite a scene.Of course, I have no idea if it’s true but that’s where I got the idea that she pitched a fit. After the fit and the photos of the fit she showed her ID and was promptly released. Now, if they had no right to ask for ID’s they have a problem but they insist they did have that right after the reported lewd conduct and interestingly they asked two people for ID’s, one white and one black. The boyfriend is a celebrity chef and says his publicist is working on the situation.</p>
<p>"I could tell that whoever called on us (including the officers), saw a tatted RAWKer white boy and a hot bootie shorted black girl and thought we were a HO (prostitute) & a TRICK (client). "</p>
<p>She was not arrested on suspicion of prostitution. But, it’s a great headline.</p>
<p>I am white, my husband is black. We’re too old and fat to be mistaken for a prostitute and john, but boy, has it been assumed many times that we are not together. I’m loading groceries onto the belt, he’s pushing the cart and the cashier tells me he’s “stealing” my child. I go through the line onto the monorail handing the girl both of our tickets, he’s behind me and it’s assumed he is trying to get on for free. “TICKET SIR!” Uh, my WIFE just gave them to you. The hospital blocks him from my room at Urgent Care, assuming he is not with me, despite walking in NEXT to me. At hotels separate desk people have come up to us, assuming we’re not together. Happens all the time. </p>
<p>So it makes perfect sense to me that people assumed that these two were not a couple and that something illegal was going on. Just like the usual apologists for it happening are defending it. Honestly, I don’t know why MORE black people don’t “pitch a fit”.</p>
<p>Witnesses in the building across the street say they were having sex in the car. But, who cares? Either the cops had cause to ID them or they didn’t. If they did then showing an ID would have been the smart thing to do. And, the LAPD audio of the incident has been released. It doesn’t make her look very good nor do her interviews. Basically, she says as an artist it is her job to raise awareness. Awareness of exactly what is unclear. “Do you know who I am? I’m calling my publicist.” Followed by, “Miss, if you would have just shown us your ID we would have been gone 15 minutes ago.” Good grief.</p>
<p>Every once in a while, the police make the mistake of hassling a famous black person.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/09/15/newday-intv-watts-django-actress-mistaken-for-prostitute.cnn.html”>http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/09/15/newday-intv-watts-django-actress-mistaken-for-prostitute.cnn.html</a>
Here’s the interview from CNN. It’s obvious after watching it that she was interested only in the publicity she could get. The officer was within his rights to ask her for ID even though she thinks she wasn’t obligated to show it if she “wasn’t doing anything wrong”. And she was awfully cagey about what she and her boyfriend were actually doing in the car. She says that they were both fully clothed, as if that makes everything okay. Unless the car had tinted windows that were all closed, I can think of a few things they could have been doing with their clothes on that could have prompted a phone call from a neighbor, and it wouldn’t matter whether they were both white, both black, or mixed.</p>
<p>From the audio:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I can call the police, make up some story about a person, and that allows the police to harass the person without any more evidence than that? I’m not seeing the “reasonable suspicion” of a crime here, other than the fact that she was black and he was white. I don’t think a white woman would have been asked for ID.</p>
<p>This is the same kind of situation as the black dude who was tackled and handcuffed by the police because he was waiting around to pick up his kids at school, in St. Paul. Cops harass black people in a way they don’t harass similar white people.</p>
<p>Cell phones are our friends in documenting police overreach.</p>
<p>To repeat the legal point, as a lawyer, there is no probable cause for demanding ID. Imagine you’re the cop: you get a radio call that there’s a reported lewd act - not witnesses, just a report of a call, because “witnesses” requires actual statements made, not just a phone call, legally speaking - and you get there and there’s no lewd act going on. You ask a question and the guy says he’s this girl’s boyfriend and she says she’s not doing anything. That’s the end of it legally: you didn’t see anything and the people who may have been involved are dressed and not doing anything illegal and they deny doing anything illegal. Your job as a cop now is to walk away. </p>
<p>But you don’t: you demand ID. What is the point of demanding ID? It’s to run a check on you and to harass you into not hanging around that area. This comes up a lot in criminal cases: a cop demands ID, runs it and then arrests the guy and if the guy has a half-decent lawyer that case gets tossed because, in the absence of a stop & ID law, you had no probable cause to demand ID. </p>
<p>Why demand ID? Because this is a “nice area” and you’re responding as a cop to complaints by these “nice people” and you want are jumping to a conclusion that this woman, who is obviously African-American, is or at least may be a prostitute and you don’t want her hanging around here. So you demand ID though there is no probable cause to do so - and saying the words “probable cause”, as the cop does, doesn’t create it. Saying the words is meant as a tool to coerce people into complying when they have the legal right to say no. It’s a common tactic: announce you have probable cause to stop x and imply something bad will happen if x doesn’t comply. </p>
<p>This actress is correct: the treatment was intentional harassment of her in an attempt to drive what this cop believed was perhaps a prostitute out of this nice area. She was treated this way because she’s a thin, attractive, minority female who was with a white male in a car. She would not have been treated this way if she were a similarly dressed white woman. I say “similarly dressed” because it’s certainly possible to imagine a white woman, thin and attractive, but dressed in a truly provocative manner; she might be harassed too. </p>
<p>Cops purposely misquote the law ALL THE TIME to people they want to give a hard time to. There’s a reason why prosecutors often dismiss charges levied by police amidst allegations of police misconduct, followed by a legal settlement provided courtesy of the taxpaying public. Ask Abner Louima of New York, or countless others from Los Angeles. And of course now we have another innovation from less than honest policemen; an assault charge for bleeding on officers’ uniforms after they’ve beaten you senseless.</p>