So you're saying she should get preferential treatment because she's black?
No. I'm saying the cop should have more sense than to provoke unnecessary encounters.
He pulled that woman over to issue a warning or a summons. He knows that no one likes being stopped by a cop and that the emotional effect of that experience ranges from nervous annoyance to festering anger. So why didn't he just issue the warning, or write the summons, say good day and be on his way? Why did he take the step which he knew would provoke an angry and/or belligerent response from this woman?
Was it racism, or
authoritarian ego compulsion, or both?
Regardless of which or what, he is paid to enforce traffic laws by issuing warnings or summonses -- not for exercising his racial disposition or his ego -- which is exactly what he did. Now she is dead, he is suspended, the taxpayers will pay the price for it and sensible cops all over America will be compromised by another clearly unnecessary Black death incident.
It's common practice for an officer to have you put out your cigarette.
Really? What else is it
common practice for cops to do? The obvious question is,
WHY? Is smoking cigarettes against the law? Is smoking in one's car illegal? Having no further enforcement concern than a minor traffic offense, does a cop have a legal right to order the recipient of a warning or a summons to put his/her cigarette out? The answer is no -- even if the redundant order is softened by the word,
please. It's still an implicit order.
So why do they do it. In this example we have a basic nobody, a yokel who were it not for civil service would be delivering packages for FedEx or flipping burgers. Now he's equipped with the ability to intimidate some nervous or pissed-off individual with the choice between receiving a traffic warning or a summons in exchange for the simple price of kissing his ass by not telling him where to go.
In fact i've been asked several times to do so over the years. And the amazing part? I never went to jail over it.
I think most people submit to these small-minded nobodies-with-badges because a warning is a better choice than a summons. Unless I am in a particularly bad mood I probably would submit, too. But sooner or later a Sandra Bland will come along, challenge the excess, the shit will hit the fan and a lot of innocent people will be compromised because of it.
I think we can rest assured this cop's supervisor has told the rest of his subordinates to knock off the extraneous,
"put the cigarette out," nonsense. In fact, quite a few chickens have been coming home to roost where excessive conduct by police is concerned and the public is beginning to tire of it.
I think it would be a good idea to remove police discretion as to whether to issue a warning or a summons. I believe that should depend on the offenders past driving record and nothing else.