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Inevitably, these stories provoke comments and tweets from conservatives saying that the person who got beaten/tased/shot/whatever basically deserved what they got. “The right thing to do,” these people insist, “is to be nice and polite to the cop and do whatever he says, and then later sue him if he violated your constitutional rights.”
Of course, this argument misses at least three salient points. The first is that we ought to reject the idea that a condition of not having excess force used against you is bowing and scraping before cops. One of the key differences between a free society and a totalitarian one is that in a free society, being a jerk to someone in a uniform isn’t legally punishable by summary physical abuse meted out by the person wearing the uniform in question.
Second, the people most often targeted by bad police behavior are the least likely to be able to afford a lawyer. Accordingly, they are dependent on lawyers who are willing to take their case on contingency – which, if you politely obey the cop and accordingly don’t get abused and/or don’t end up on television, means you won’t find anyone to take your case. And the at risk communities here know it.
Third, this “solution” ignores what happens when private citizens take cops to court – which is, pretty much inevitably, that servile juries take the cop’s side pretty much no matter what. Case in point, Lisa Mearkle, a Pennsylvania cop who last year was indicted with murder for shooting an unarmed suspect.
Right there, just based on what I’ve already said, you know this was a pretty special case, given that an astonishingly small number of cops are ever indicted for anything, including deaths involving unarmed suspects.
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