[CU Tiger]

Originally Posted by molson

FWIW, an officer has a right to take you out of your car at a traffic stop. If you refuse, the officer can physically remove you. Even though you're not under arrest when he asks you to leave the car. But, once you refuse to get out of the car, you've committed a misdemeanor crime and THAT'S an arrestable offense. I think there's a lot of disconnect there in a lot of these situations. A Terry stop or a traffic stop becomes a crime/arrest scenario only after the person disobeys a lawful order. The internet teaches you to just yell, "Am I under arrest?" over and over again, which doesn't recognize that there's scenarios (traffic stops and Terry stops) where you are not under arrest, but you are also not free to go, and are subject to lawful orders. You can see the officer kind of hesitate at first when the driver asked him if he was under arrest - because he wasn't under arrest. The second the driver resisted though, then the officer did lawfully control the scenario more and the driver WAS under arrest.

So the officer was entitled to use force to get him out of the car. He might have even gotten away with using the taser briefly - specifically for the purpose of getting him out of the car. Obviously here the officer used the taser beyond that purpose, and then there was rough stuff/neglect afterwards that also had no lawful purpose at all.

But the officer probably could have avoided all of the use-of-force questions just by communicating better with the driver. "No, you're not under arrest sir, but this is a traffic stop, so you're not free to go, and on traffic stops, I'm allowed to talk to you outside of the car, just for your safety and mine." This officer knew what he was allowed to do, he knew he could take the driver out of the car, and he he knew the second the driver resisted he controlled the driver and all of his movements and could arrest him. With people who aren't cut out mentally to be officers, knowledge of that law, knowing when you "control" a scenario and a person, can lead to an overconfidence/dickishness that can lead to tragedy.

Edit: Also, in every state I'm aware of, there's no requirement that an officer tell you the reason you're pulled over. 99% of the time, they should, it makes their jobs easier and avoids situations escalating, but they don't have to immediately tell you the nature of their reason for the stop upon your request. The reason they'll often ask you, "do you know why I pulled you over", is to see if they can get an admission for a traffic violation on tape. If you get arrested, that's a different story - most states have statutes requiring the officer to identify themselves and state the reason for arrest.

FWIW I read in another article that I cant find now, one of the points submitted by the prosecutor was that the officer never legally ordered him out of the car. He said the officer said "Ok thats it. Get out" never using the words "get out of the car" Since the kid cant remember the incident he can only speculate that the officer was saying "get out of here and leave" and then grabbed his leg.

Now thats a BS position, of course. But it does go to show the number of errors made by the officer. Another LEO in the same state posted something on reddit counting down the errors or violations of policy from the video and got over 100 before the kid exited the vehicle. All the way down to improper phonetics when reading the tag in.

Final point it cant be lost in all this, that this same officer has previously stopped this same kid 3 times. 1 was convicted and the other 2 were over turned for improper search violations.

I am of the opinion that the officer should have received life without the possibility of parole and his family should be forced to pay restitution to the victim.