<p>People getting outraged because they perceive a racial issue does not create a racial issue. She didn’t even accuse the cops of being racist, really. Her first racey comment was that there was probably a racist in the building across the street. Anyway, the photos have killed her case.</p>
<p>Why do people continue to insist upon minimizing or dismissing the point that Lergnom, Cardinal, LasMa and Hunt so accurately illuminated? The LAW in California permits citizens to decline to provide ID in this circumstance. Mr. Serve and Protect misstated the law. The victim here may not have been ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ in her demeanor, but she was nevertheless entitled to assert her rights under CALIFORNIA LAW, and have those rights respected by Mr. Serve and Protect.</p>
<p>
I read a really interesting study about that yesterday. I’m going to try to find it. </p>
<p>I would be very surprised if the issue of stop and ID doesn’t come before the California courts soon, so the law is clarified.</p>
<p>I don’t know if this was posted before or not: <a href=“Producer considers lawsuit after pre-Emmy arrest in Beverly Hills”>http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-producer-beverly-hills-arrest-reaction-20140829-story.html</a>
I note that Belk apparently didn’t put up a huge fuss during the process, but he did try to tell them they were making a mistake. They just ignored him–for six hours–until they saw the tape. Would they have treated a white guy the same, a white guy who said, “Hey, I’m a producer on the way to a pre-Emmy party!” It appears that he’ll have to sue them in order to get anything better than a self-serving semi-apology.</p>
<p>We can’t know. We do know they were waiting for the FBI for about 4 of those hours. I agree it’s a long time. I also know a white guy who spent a night in jail before being released without any charges filed but It didn’t make the news. “I’m a producer,” gets you nothing special in LA, though.</p>
<p>I don’t see how the photographs kill her case. She says that she was treated differently because she was black, that the police suspected her of being a prostitute, and that she was illegally required to show ID. All of these things are just as plausible now as they were at the beginning.</p>
<p>The police didn’t have the photographs. The photographs don’t create a retroactive right for the police to demand ID, if they didn’t have that right at the time. The photos don’t justify the police treating her differently than they would have treated a white woman in the same situation-- the situation that someone had called in a report and that was all the evidence the cops had.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen the photos, but if they do indeed show the couple having sex in the car (yuck) then, if the police had had them, they should have issued a citation or arrested the couple. But, again, the police didn’t have the photos.</p>
<p>Which again brings up the point eloquently made by conservative George Will years ago. Los Angeles needs to fire cops whose improper (or illegal) actions result in multi-million dollar settlements borne by the taxpayers. As the saying goes; grab 'em by the arse and their hearts and minds will follow.</p>
<p>This is yet another case where a police officer could have defused a situation, and chose instead to escalate it. </p>
<p>Police don’t have to see a crime in progress to detain a suspect and ask for ID. The LA chief of police is a very liberal guy. He reviewed the case and said the officers acted appropriately. </p>
<p>The behavior of these two, by engaging in public lewd acts, was a crime. And now she’s trying to have her 15 minutes of fame off of it. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you don’t pay attention to the averages, you won’t see the pattern of discrimination emerge. I met a successful black man who drives a really nice car, commuting into Seattle every day. He got pulled over for “swerving” one day, something he denied but the officer was convinced he had made the correct decision. Taken alone there would be no discrimination by the police. Fact is, he gets pulled over once a week on average. His record is seven times in one commute, a 12 mile stretch on I-5, twice by the same officer. Parsing it down to one event at a time, and putting more weight on the officer’s statement, is to believe that he was just whining about being pulled over. Only by seeing the averages do we see the discrimination.</p>
<p>While everyone is entitled to fully exercise their rights under the law, there is something selfish and arrogant about insisting that cops “work for me” on the one hand, and on the other, refusing to help them do their jobs. Not providing ID upon request simply because one does not have to, is going to take officers’ time away from other incidents, and cost taxpayers additional money if the investigation has to continue in order to ID a suspect who won’t ID himself “on principle.” Even the ACLU advises citizens to show their IDs if they have nothing to hide, for this reason. </p>
<p>
What’s more, it may be that every single time he was pulled over, he was speeding–like everybody else on the road. That still doesn’t mean that he’s being treated the same as a white person.</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with insisting on one’s rights and refusing to submit to illegal requests by the police. If the police want to speed things up, they can stop lying to people and asserting that they have the right to ID someone when they don’t.</p>
<p>The more people assert that we should acquiesce to illegal requests by police, the more I’m inspired to resist. If you as a taxpayer don’t want police to be delayed by my insisting on my rights, instruct them to stop violating people’s rights.</p>
<p>CF,
Are you saying that it is illegal for a cop to ask to see someone’s ID? What is your authority for that?</p>
<p>It is illegal for a cop to insist that you must provide ID in situations in which it isn’t required for you to do so. Which appears to be most situations in California.</p>
<p>Whether Watts was “required” to produce ID is the issue, not whether the cop was allowed to ask to see it (he was).</p>
<p>But Flossy, on your reasoning, we could never address racial disparities in policing because short of officers uttering racial slurs, there’s never going to be proof in an individual case that the police would have acted differently if the suspect were white. And indeed, in this case, it is possible that the officer would have reacted the same way to a white couple - although I don’t think even the officer himself would claim to know this absolutely. </p>
<p>That doesn’t mean we can’t address the considerable evidence that there are, as a whole, disparities in treatment of whites and blacks by law enforcement. One way of addressing that, IMO, would be to make better judgments about whether police intervention is necessary at all in cases like this - or whether, even if police were technically in their rights to handcuff Watts, they SHOULD have done so. What was the potential benefit of acting as they acted? What was the potential cost? </p>
<p>I don’t think you’ll ever get Flossy, razorsharp, actingmt et al. to acknowledge that racism exists in America, let alone in police-community relations. But I could be wrong. I would love to know what they think about the arrest statistics for drug crimes.</p>
<p>It’s not illegal for an officer to ask for ID. It’s surely illegal for him to put someone in handcuffs if they don’t show it and it wasn’t required.</p>