I mean, look -- there were a bunch of recent stories with suspects getting killed or beate...n
Well, I think ONE thing is pretty clear.
Don't RUN from the cops. The one common denominator from most of the recently publicized cop shootings of citizens, is that the citizen generally ran from the officer.
But one thing to do for sure...don't act like an ass, if you are (and you should) exerting your rights, do so in a calm, non-threatening fashion. Don't shout. Don't curse, use clear concise language. The "Am I free to go" statement is a very simple and very powerful thing to say and get an answer to.
If you don't give them a reason to beat you...99.999% of the time they are not..
Tell that to poor Mr. Sureshbhai Patel: http://www.al.com/news/index.s...
Bad example. He actually resisted arrest and comes from a country where the police are far more corrupt than they are in the U.S. so he had some fear. Although, he did not speak English (how I don't know since English has been taught in India schools for over a century), he also did not submit and tried to get away from the cops. Now, the cop reaction was excessive--throwing the man down hard to a concrete slab and breaking a vertebrae or two--the man did resist arrest. It could have been handled a lot better.
On the contrary, this is a good example. That the LEO got fired and arrested is inconsequential to the argument at hand (the probability of a LEO beating the crap out of you for no valid reason.) The LEO's arrest is a consequence of the event whose probability is into question, so this is irrelevant.
As for the old grandpa resisting arrest, well that is still not a reason. For starters he wasn't resisting, he was simply in a state of not knowing what to do in the face of having uniformed strangers "touching" him during a patdown, not understanding WTF was going on.
That is not resisting. No judge in any goddamned court in this country (nor most LEOS) will ever find that as an example of resisting arrest. Let's be real.
So right there is a counter-example of the claim that if you do nothing (code for "act reasonable") will not get you taken like a piñata by a LEO.
Secondly, this "resisting arrest" mantra is very troublesome and common in forums.
What if instead of an old grandpa from India with zero English skills, we have an adult that is clearly suffering from mental retardation, and he walks back/away from LEOs during a patdown.
Is that resisting? And if so, does that warrant a beat down?
What about a deaf person who cannot hear you, who cannot comply with your orders? Is that person resisting arrest? Fuck no.
kfor.com/2014/02/26/dash-cam-video-deaf-man-charged-with-resisting-arrest-officers-cleared/
At some point, LEOs (and people in general) are bound to exercise common sense, decency, and compassion. In Mr. Patel's case, the LEO clearly understood the old man didn't speak English. Logic would dictate that the officer (a college degree holder and thus, supposedly, sufficiently educated to know better) would know that this person was not capable of understanding instructions, nor following them.
That right there blows up the argument that he was resisting arrest. You can't allege resistance to arrest when you (or should know) the person is incapacitated to comply (be them by obvious language barriers or physical/mental incapacity.) I mean, you can argue that it is so, just in the same way we can argue the world was created in 7 days and that the world is flat with the sun orbiting it.
It happens all the time, all the fucking time, for no reasons, for no valid reasons, not even for quasi-reasons that could be stretched into something barely resembling a reason. It just that nowadays, this type of shit gets move visible because the ubiquitous presence of cameras.