Law is pretty straightforward. The officer is allowed to order you 25 feet back. The LEO must be doing an “official duty” which is not defined in the act, and you must be capable of understanding and complying. They say get back, you must. There’s not really anything else detailing when they may do this, so I’m guessing it’s any time they’re on the job.
The bill’s proponents say there’s nothing you can see from close-up that you cannot see from 25 feet away. Disingenuous bullshit.
This is likely a good thing. Cops making an arrest are already in a stressful enough position. They don’t needs groups of people crowding them while shouting. Filming is fine, I’m actually in favor of that. The problem is when 10-30 people are yelling and everyone is holding something its way too easy for someone to make an adrenaline fueled mistake. A little breathing room for everyone should help a lot more often than it hurts.
I wouldn’t call it a flaw. The typical claim is that you can use a gun to save your family’s lives. Not save your tv.
I’d like a study that also imcludes that.
What I’d really like to know how many wife murderers bought their guns to protect their wives
This new law would allow the police to legally make an adrenaline-fueled mistake. So, helpful to everyone!
Cop pulls a car over. Now they could legally tell all of the passengers to get out of the vehicle and stand 25 feet away while the arrest is happening, even if it is for speeding or DWB. Even in the rain or snow. So, helpful to everyone!
There’s also a common belief that a gun is to be used to protect the “virtue” of one’s wife and daughters, And in my wife’s family, there is a property-protection element. When you don’t have much, when there is recreational pharmacology production in the vicinity, and when the sheriff’s department response time is 20-30 minutes or more…
Of course the cop won’t have a 25-foot tape measure, so the radius will be estimated. I can imagine bystanders being arrested for interfering if they were actually within 50 feet, in some cases…
I think it’s not unreasonable that officers have space to do their job and to minimize security issues…but this is going to be abused.
In the case of property, it could make some sense. The problem is that the gun itself is more valuable than the thing you’re protecting. I mean, not always. But you’d need a very high chance of being burglarized, and/or a lot of valuables in your house, and for the burglar to come unarmed, before it pays off.
Also, I don’t think it would make sense to keep a gun to protect your wife’s “virtue” from a stranger breaking in to commit rape… But I guess we could count many of these wife-murders as protecting her virtue.
(That’s in the house. Might make sense for a woman to keep a gun with her at all times while walking through the park at night or whatever.)
What will happen is that the police will use this to arrest someone as part of an abuse of power on questionable grounds of interference, it’ll land in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the judges there will rubber stamp the law by arguing that police business is serious business, wide latitude must be given to the police when doing serious business and they can’t be expected to use a tape measure and so anything that can reasonably be interpreted as 25 feet - even if it’s a city block or more - is OK, while also invoking qualified immunity.
And then you’ll have at least 4 of the 9 at SCOTUS agree and the question is where Roberts and ACB land.
I can already see “Get back, get- you’re under arrest for disobeying an order, stop resisting” happening in the span of about 4 seconds.
one of the most glaring recent examples of police misconduct, recorded at close range with onlookers begging for the police to relent while the police continued to yell at the crowd to back off and deprive a man of any and all breathing room and breathing ability. solid choice of words man
George Floyd agrees.
But, but, those people were preventing that policeman from getting up!! If they were just a little farther away, I’m sure he would have relented.
/s, in case of stupidity.
Or possibly Chauvin may have actually listened to one of the other officers if the crowd had been further away. Or the officers tied up with crowd control may have had more time to look and recognize that he was going to far and done something about it.
In general calming a situation down results in better outcomes. You all know this. Yes it is possible that this law will be abused. In fact, given enough incidents it almost certainly will be, a few times. Welcome to the real world. It is likely to do much more good than harm. That makes it worth doing.
Chauvin was convicted of murder. I can agree with you that giving people space in tense situations is helpful, but lets not make excuses for people that have presented their case to a jury and were found guilty.
I’m not making excuses for him. He was out of control and killed a man. What I’m saying is that it is possible he, or more likely someone else, could have gotten things calmed down with a little more mental and physical space to work with.
Counterfactuals are tough to be certain about, but my guess is no, the not listening to fellow officer was more about rank/experience and ego, hyperfocus on immediate sensory inputs vs big picture thinking, frustration with initial resistance.
More likely with out the surrounding crowd and video evidence he would not have been convicted. I can’t say this for sure but it does seem to follow a past pattern.
I agree. Having someone breathing over my shoulder already drives me nuts. I can’t imagine trying to operate while having someone shoving their phone in my face and screaming
Possible. But what’s for certain is that people are recording cops wrongdoings and this is I tensed to prevent that. An uncertainty vs a certainty.
To be fair not all recordings are as bad as the ones that lead to incidents like Floyd George. It’s also not unreasonable to ask for space.
It’s unfortunate that these rules tend to bolster police without providing a counterweight for the public’s protection leaving room for abuse in a context in which previous abuse has happened.