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The Good Cop Get Donut; The Bad Cop Get No Donut
Polls are very popular on Ricochet. One of my favorites was “Which ten albums would you take with you if you were to be stranded on a deserted island?” or something like that. My first thought was to ask where the electricity is coming from to power the CD player?
So in light of the Bad Cop, No Donut essays I thought I would offer another poll: what laws are valid and need to be enforced, and-or what laws need not be enforced? When should an officer respond to a call for service and when should an officer decline a call for service?
I have some personal experience with these questions. One night, I pulled-over someone for making a left turn on a street that had a prominent “No Left Turn” sign posted at that intersection. The driver of the BMW was pretty snotty; BMW and Prius owners usually have attitudes (anecdotal evidence). I was informed by the driver I should be looking for burglars. I told him that the last burglar I caught told me I should be looking for people making illegal left turns (half true: I did catch one the week before, but he said no such thing).
The driver demanded the phone number to the mayors office, so — being a helpful police officer — I gave him the phone number. A week later a Sergeant said; “Watt, I need to talk to you for a moment. Do not give anyone the phone number to the mayors office.” Apparently the mayor did not want to hear from his constituents, at least not that one.
If you decide to participate in this poll you might want to read this New York Times piece on the Supreme Court decision in a Colorado case of whether police have an obligation to respond to calls for service:
Published in GeneralThe appeals court had permitted a lawsuit to proceed against a Colorado town, Castle Rock, for the failure of the police to respond to a woman’s pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters, whom he eventually killed.
…
The theory of the lawsuit Ms. Gonzales filed in federal district court in Denver was that Colorado law had given her an enforceable right to protection by instructing the police, on the court order, that “you shall arrest” or issue a warrant for the arrest of a violator. She argued that the order gave her a “property interest” within the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s due process guarantee, which prohibits the deprivation of property without due process.
But the majority on Monday saw little difference between the earlier case and this one, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278. Ms. Gonzales did not have a “property interest” in enforcing the restraining order, Justice Scalia said, adding that “such a right would not, of course, resemble any traditional conception of property.”
Although the protective order did mandate an arrest, or an arrest warrant, in so many words, Justice Scalia said, “a well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes.”
Police don’t need to protect the king’s land. Somewhere along the line, “public land” became synonymous with “Restricted government property: Keep out.” There is plenty of wilderness that is not used and yet citizens are forbidden from entering it.
I grew up a block away from a bit of forest surrounded by civilization. As kids, my friends and I often walked and biked through trails of our own making. Rope swings and forts were built by the creek. We sometimes took our BB guns to shoot and “hunt” as well as city laws will allow.
By the time I was a senior in high school, the police tried to keep people out of those woods. Politicians and bureaucrats don’t think public lands actually belong to the people. I can understand restrictions around power lines and other public utilities. But the wilderness belongs to us all, without need of permits.
With a million petty laws on the books, those are a few that could be peacefully ignored.
Well maybe it’s time for judges to practice some discretion involving lawsuits for accidents that occur on public lands, like dismissing 10 million lawsuits involving sledding accidents. This is another no-win situation for police officers. City wants to avoid lawsuit so who is tasked with enforcing the sledding ban, the police are of course.
Maybe I should have said y’all should stop saving tort lawyers.
At it’s most basic level, the job of the police is to enforce the law. That has become an impossible task as “the law” is no thing any person can know either to obey or to enforce. On purely theoretical grounds the police should enforce the whole of the law, but that is about as realistic as jumping across the Grand Canyon in a clown car. It’s not a matter any more of right and wrong choices; rather, it’s become a matter of bad and worse options on what laws get our limited resources.
On the practical side, in your experience, is a lot of policing done by happenstance and dumb luck? You obviously were able to pull over (and hopefully cite!) the snooty BMW driver only because you happened to be there to witness the violation and had no more pressing concerns to attend to at that moment in time. It strikes me that a lot of police work, especially in the area of traffic enforcement (which I’m all for) is exactly of this sort. As I drove to work in the blinding rain this morning there were no county or state assets on the highway to enforce the speed limit on those asshats travelling well above it on water covered roadways.
My view is that if the law is on the books it should be enforced. that is not the same thing as saying that I think most laws should be on the books. I don’t think they should. However, the rule of law is dependent upon the law actually being enforced.
I cited the driver. I’ll give you a case where I exercised my discretion not to cite. I pulled-over a driver, a female whose license was suspended. Her husband was too intoxicated to drive. I decided not to cite her because she was sober and only several miles from home. I told her to just park the car when she got home and no side trips on the way home. I didn’t cite her because it was a case of the lesser of two evils. It was far better that she drove home rather than her husband driving home.
I can imagine a world (that may already exist) where an officer could be put in the thumb screws by his boss for leaving money on the table like that.
Some of it is. There are those that break the law and have learned the hard way to make sure there is no uniform to witness their transgressions.
Then there is the case of the bicyclist pedaling down the street at around 0300 hours with a 40+ inch flat screen-television screen under one arm. This happened after my time as a police officer. He was stopped by a police officer. It wasn’t his television.
I question this supposed truism. I doubt the rule of good law is strongly correlated with enforcing bad law.
The problem is that the “rule of law” becomes the person/people who determine what is good law and what is bad law, also stated as the “rule of lawyers.”
An officer can run into trouble writing a ticket and then voiding a ticket. A “Cite book” contains sequential numbers on each ticket. You have to sign for the book and list the starting number and last number of the citations. If an officer voids a cite that cite must be turned in to the supervisors reports basket. One voided cite is not going to be a problem. Multiple voided cites from the same officer starts raising questions, like are you holding traffic court out on the road and taking bribes from drivers.
The largest percentage of money from traffic fines goes to the state and the counties. Very little of that money comes back to law enforcement agencies. I can only speak for Oregon on cite books and the distribution of money from fines.
Mike- I’m not sure how you define the rule of law?
I’m not sure how you define it either. Maybe I’m just not sure how it’s defined.
Wikipedia:
I think this is kind of a false dichotomy because I don’t want people making arbitrary decisions, I want people making correct decisions to the best of their ability rather than being forced to do wrong things in the name of law, or following law unthinkably.
Indeed. [Expletive] also rolls downhill. Just look at the grief NYPD received from the city when they exercised a great deal of discretion recently when writing citations.
So make sure you offer the bribe before they start writing the ticket?
That only works until the offender gets home. The phone call to Internal Affairs eventually comes from the offender when he realizes that the officer charged him too much to avoid court. Just like criminals are caught for being stupid, so too are officers that do stupid things.
Thread jack.
I *NEVER* see cops pulling people over for running red lights/left turns after the left-turn arrow has turned red, etc. I mean literally *never*, even when I’ve seen somebody do this even when a Police car is at the intersection. And it’s a rare red light at even a moderately busy intersection where you don’t see at least one vehicle, usually more than one, do this on every single cycle of the light.
These things are *far* greater safety hazards, and disrupters of the smooth flow of traffic than exceeding the speed limit on a straight clear stretch of roadway (excluding the clowns who are dodging in and out of traffic). Yet we all know people who’ve gotten speeding tickets, and we’ve all seen cars pulled over for speeding.
What’s with the idiotic prioritization by police departments?
If you want to see some crazy behavior, MWM, a local area recently put in flashing left turn arrows. It’s quite handy to not sit at a red light with no one coming the other direction, but at busy intersections light changes are always followed by clearing the 3-4 [expletives] who eased into the intersection while waiting for oncoming traffic to pass. What’s so damn hard about waiting at the line until you can actually make the turn?
No, you’re supposed to pull into the intersection to be able to make the turn when the light turns yellow and the cars coming the other way stop – as Gallagher put it “Three cars turn left on the yellow!”
Unfortunately, that was predicated on the rules of the road being followed such that oncoming cars traveling in a straight line actually stopped when the light turned red instead of continuing through the intersection for the next 5 seconds after it changes, after which the cars waiting to turn left can actually clear the intersection so that the cars at the now-green light going the other way who have been waiting for 10 seconds after their light changes can now start moving, assuming the guy who’s first in line will look up from his cell phone he’s been texting on to see that he can now move forward. <pauses to take a deep breath>
Which is why I say that behavior at red-light intersections is a far greater safety hazard than speeding. Because somebody’s eventually going to start shooting.
Likely apocyphal anecdote, but my father said he once beeped his horn behind a woman reading at a red light and she drove into cross traffic without ever looking up.
That is just so awesome, I hope it’s true.
I don’t believe that any system can eliminate the need of individual prudence and circumstantial judgments. The rule of law is a general order, not a comprehensive how-to manual for civic life.
Without prudence, without wisdom and humility before one’s neighbors, frequent exceptions can indeed undermine the rule of law. As always, culture and government rely on each other and cannot function independently. Without exceptions and occasional preference for the spirit of a law over the letter of the law, the rule of law can become oppressive… as it is today (for that reason and others).
I believe the same principle applies to vigilantism. Rule of law only limits the need of vigilantism, rather than eliminates it entirely. Sometimes existing laws are insufficient. Again, culture provides the difference between justice and anarchy.
As a Christian, I do believe we have an obligation to respect even burdensome and unjust laws; though I am not sure to what extent.
I would put it more succinctly, that enforcement of the law needs to be predictable. It shouldn’t be arbitrary (Blacks get pulled over but Whites don’t for the same offense) or so seldom enforced that when it is actually enforced it’s essentially random.
Mike- “I think this is kind of a false dichotomy because I don’t want people making arbitrary decisions, I want people making correct decisions to the best of their ability rather than being forced to do wrong things in the name of law, or following law unthinkably.”
The problem is that when you abandon the actual law as the criterion for making “correct” decisions you have moved from the rule of law to the rule of men. Men’s decisions outside of the law may be desirable, but they are arbitrary. I’d think a Republican president’s decision to stop enforcing the capital gains tax to be good economic policy, but it would certainly be lawless.
My favorite police story is about a man who is pulled over for drunk driving. The officer has him get out of the car for a sobriety test. Then a nearby incident seizes the officer’s attention, and he has to step away. “Don’t go anywhere” the officer instructs. When the policeman doesn’t immediately return, the man decides he isn’t going to wait and he drives off.
The next morning, the man hears the doorbell and loud banging on the door. It’s the policeman. “Open your garage!” he barks. Dazed and still a little drunk, the man obliges and takes the officer to his garage. And there is a police cruiser. The man’s own car is now parked in the street.
The officer chose not to report the incident.
MFM- “I would put it more succinctly, that enforcement of the law needs to be predictable. It shouldn’t be arbitrary (Blacks get pulled over but Whites don’t for the same offense) or so seldom enforced that when it is actually enforced it’s essentially random.”
But in your example enforcement is predictable. It just isn’t lawful.
I’ve been pulled over a few times for speeding, but only got a ticket once (I was 17, so it was inevitable). The other times the officers certainly exercised discretion.
1. Was clocked doing 45 in a 35, but where the officer actually pulled me over was 20 ft shy of where the speed transitioned to 45. I pointed to the sign. He told me that I could do 45 until I passed the sign, but let me go.
2. Was clocked doing 65 in a 55 on an empty rural road, but had the car full of 3 very loud kids and a very pregnant wife. The sheriff heard the noise from the kids as he walked up and told them to stop distracting daddy.
3. Most recent was a couple of months back. Had been doing brake work on my car but didn’t finish till after midnight. Figured I’d test the car at that time as the roads would be empty. Only problem was that the engine kept wanting to stall (a problem not previously encountered, else I would not have gone out), so I really had to rev it. It rather helped my story that he heard the car stall out when I stopped for him, and that I was still in my oil-spattered work clothes.
No, he’s right, Salvatore. You have it backwards. With so many laws, selective enforcement is inevitable due to limited knowledge (of the laws) and resources. All the laws remain technically valid. But which laws will be enforced depends on who is enforcing them, when, and why.
Ignorance of a law is not a legal defense against that law. Thus, laws become potential weapons for harming one’s political or personal opponents.
The effectiveness of “rule of law” depends in part on its limited scope.
I’ve gotten a friendly warning that a tail light had burned out. It was much appreciated.
One isn’t likely to notice that kind of problem without someone else pointing it out.
Aaron- “No, he’s right, Salvatore. You have it backwards. With so many laws, selective enforcement is inevitable due to limited knowledge (of the laws) and resources. All the laws remain technically valid. But which laws will be enforced depends on who is enforcing them, when, and why.”
I agree with you that the very volume of law makes selective enforcement a practical necessity, but I think that is an argument for having fewer laws. When enforcement is necessarily left to the discretion of those in power we have ceased to live under the rule of law. It is antithetical to the rule of law that enforcement be dependent upon the identity of the enforcer, just as much as when enforcement depends on the identity of the perpetrator.