• jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    If they let you stay in the car, they’ve already decided you probably aren’t going to grab a gun from under the seat. So there’s no safety issue for them.

    Dude, you aren’t making a lick of sense. Google “officer shot during traffic stop” and tell me again that keeping your window rolled down during a traffic stop is unreasonable.

    crack the window as necessary, get out when ordered

    two things he refused to do? What are you talking about, dude?

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Did you watch the video? Your facts don’t quite match what it showed. He gave the cops his papers, and then he closed the window, because he didn’t need it open until they got back with his ticket. That’s when they started power tripping. If they wanted him out of the car, all they had to do was wait 10 or 20 seconds. It really was that simple. But they wanted violence, so that’s what they created.

      What’s actually dangerous to cops? The number one thing is bad driving by the cops themselves, which is the leading cause of death for officers on duty. During the pandemic, the pandemic itself was the other leading cause I think, because many officers didn’t believe in it and they put themselves at risk.

      Every year US cops shoot and kill over a thousand people. Many of those people are innocent. The risk to the average citizen is high, but the risk to the cop is much much lower. The last numbers I saw were in the hundreds, in the low hundreds, but it might even be lower than that. And now you’re trying to carve out a special situation, where the cop is not shot when they first approached the car, but is only later shot after they already got the papers from the driver, and specifically because the driver closed their tinted window. I wonder if you can find even a single example of that happening in the last year. This is an issue that I tend to pay attention to, and I can’t think of it happening in recent history.

      And you might want to argue that we should err on the side of caution. First of all, that’s not the law of the land. The Constitution doesn’t allow you to do that. Second, if the situation is as rare as I think it is, almost or entirely non-existent, then what you’re talking about is paranoia. In that case, you need a psychologist, not an open window. Third, the threat to the driver and passengers is real. If the cop makes a mistake, they may draw their gun and shoot people in the car. What if an acorn falls near them? They might shoot the driver. Sadly, this is a very real situation, unlike your hypothetical. In other words, the facts are not on your side here.