There is a video link where it appears that the officer orders her to stop recording.
How have we gotten to where police get away with stopping people taking photos or video when they are not interfering with the proceedings?
Apparently some police (not all) feel “man with gun” (that is, possession) is a worse offense no matter the circumstances than an actual law breaker.
Sad state of affairs. When police interfere with private citizens using cameras, and harass gun owners it has a ripple effect on how gun owners and law abiding citizens view police in general. If good police officers don;t want to be painted with this brush they need to do what other professions do and start leveling professional criticism and penalties at these abusers. An engineer that violates engineering practice blatantly or too often will lose his license.
Love how they will “take it for evidence”
Those guys are a disgrace to the uniform & the majority of good LEO’s.
Hope the guy can find a lawyer willing to do a contingency lawsuit.
Disturbing behavior by these LEO’s.
Hope they get what’s coming to them.
They do not deserve a badge.
Really sad state of affairs our country is in. It just gets worse and worse every day…
Do a civil suit on the cops so the law suit will be on the own cops dime if he loses the case. The cop is messing with civil rights . there probably is a fed statute. This kind of stuff has to stop… Swat the swat so to say.
It is understandable he would be detained pending their investigation to figure out who was who, but this…despicable.
Is it even illegal in Michigan or in states with castle doctrine to merely point a gun at a trespasser on your property? Do you have to actually feel threatened for your life to even point the gun? On the street sure, but on your own property, especially with castle doctrine? Sounds fishy. Seems like the officers were pissed about being recorded and decided to screw the guy with BS charges.
“I’ll take that for evidence” lol
I just wanna know how someone can be obese and be a police officer. Are there not requirements? I don’t wanna hear how the police are going to protect us when I see obese cops everywhere. We have one doing traffic control every morning in front of my kids school and at least half are plain fat.
Rule #1: Never invite the man into your life.
Rule #2: Never, ever, ever have a gun in your hand when the police show up.
Many agencies simply do not mandate annual PT reqs post hire. Sad reality imo.
All insults aside. I get the fact that this guy was trespassing, but situations like this can easily turn into “he said, he said”. It’s going to come down to how well the property/homeowner can articulate the initial encounter.
The rest of the actions by the officers do not seem right and he needs to find a good lawyer to sue the police department. I am dumbfounded as to why they couldn’t have simply held the weapon (as often times happens) while the speak with the property owner.
Makes you wonder if the hooligan trespasser was the mayor’s nephew or something.
Watched the video and a few things. It is normal to put people into handcuffs on this type of call until you determine who is who and what happened. No problem with that.
What I do have a problem with is the officer telling the woman to turn the camera off and then deleting the file (destroying evidence)
If my officers had done that we would start an investigation and they would probably ended being fired as this is an integrity violation. The only reason to delete the file is to hide what you did wrong.
The charge sounds like a CYA thing. The officers know that the people are upset so the take a charge on to use as leverage. I have no idea if this is true but I can see it being plausible.
What strikes me as strange in this call is a trespasser call in the middle of the day. Usually prowlers come at night. Not sure I would confront someone on my property during the middle of daylight hours with a long gun unless something seemed fishy. Could be a misunderstanding not sure what the case was here. The actions of these officers does not paint them in a good light.
Pat
Well being in shape is best but I know plenty of obese cops by the BMI standard that fight just fine. We are not like soldiers in the military we are not required to hump gear into a location 20 miles into the woods. I would rather have an obese cop who can fight backing me up than some pencil thin punk who could not fight his way out of a wet paper sack. Personally I am well aware of the fact I am fat. I have battled with my weight my entire life. I do work out and I am trying to correct the problem. It does bother me when people judge someone strictly on their weight having no idea how they do the job as a whole. We all have flaws its a fact of life just with some of us those flaws are more visible than in others. As for standards most PD’s have PT tests when you get hired but nothing after that. I do agree it is something that we need to change. The problem is however its hard enough to get good officers now making the PT standards more difficult will diminish the pool of applicants even further. We have an opening right now where I am and I know we are going to have a difficult time attracting someone to work for what our starting pay is. Anyway the fitness issue deserves its own thread and is a distraction in this one.
Pat
Ok, who are you and what have you done with Pat?
ETA: The “trespasser” was a dirt biker using their land as a bike trail and the only reason they were armed was they were hunting on their land. The “trespasser” probably wasn’t up to anything worse than what he was doing and I don’t think the homeowner was out there to specifically confront him.
Integrity is important. I stick up for other cops when I feel they are in the right but trying to hide evidence is not right. If you did nothing wrong you should have no problem with people videotaping you. We are required to record all our contacts where I work. I have found that recordings have saved a lot more cops than they have hurt. The ones it has hurt should not have been cops in the first place.
Pat
On the fitness issue sort of a funny story. I went to a match about 4 years back where the match director set up a bunch of stages with a lot of PT in them (running). I took first at the match. After the match the match director came up to me and he is in good shape being a former military guy and he said I can’t believe you ran those courses faster than me. (Since I am fat) I told him I shoot faster so I don’t have to run as fast. That gave us both a laugh. But I was a lot faster and more accurate than he was and it more than made up for the slower 60 yard dashes he had worked into the courses of fire.
Pat
Yes but the homeowner is face down in the dirt while the tresspasser is sitting in a chair.
I was just messing with you. In the past you have had a tendency to defend nearly all cops with a great deal of benefit of the doubt. For the record I’ve been agreeing with you quite a bit lately.