The initial stop wasn't too bad. The officer informs the driver that he was speeding and then asks to see his driver's license and registration. The officer is under no obligation to explain the details of the speeding violation or to read him his miranda rights. When the driver becomes non-compliant and eventually refuses to sign the citation the officer decides to make an arrest. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. In most states a citation is considered a summons to court and your signature on that citation is your promise to appear on the date and time indicated. It is not an admission of guilt. By refusing to sign, you are refusing that promise to appear. Now I can't speak for all states, but in my state the officer then has the authority to arrest you. To affect that arrest he uses what is called "a ladder of escalating force". The rungs of the ladder are verbal commands, light touch, physical restraint or pain compliance, and deadly force. There used to be a rung in between physical restraint and deadly force. That was the carotid restraint or choke hold. If you ever watched cage fighting you've seen the choke hold. That's were the guy is turning purple and he's tapping out like there's no tomorrow. It was very effective and put the guy out just long enough to put the cuffs on. But because some people were dying they took that tool away and prohibited officers from using it. So for quite awhile there was this gap between physical restraint or pain compliance and deadly force. It was technically filled by the night stick or baton but officers rarely use the baton on a traffic stop except maybe the collapsible steel kind and most I knew didn't feel real comfortable with it. I guess the taser is meant to fill that gap. I was never trained on the taser so I don't know much about it or where it is on the ladder. I assume it's right after the pain compliance stuff and mostly used for a combative subject that you don't want to close with. Bottom line is you're trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to control the situation. Sometimes your journey up the ladder stops at the first rung. Sometimes it skips all the rungs in between and goes directly to deadly force. Depends on the situation.
Anyway the driver resisted arrest by refusing the officers orders after he was told that he was under arrest. It's too bad the officer wasn't closer when he did this. I would have probably been a lot closer and gone to the light touch by holding his arm at the elbow and directing him to the patrol car while speaking to him. From that position you could feel if he was going to pull away or pull into you and then you could have gone up the next rung with either a wrist lock, arm bar take down or hair pull take down or a variety of other stuff you're trained in. If he was still too much to handle then going for the choke hold would have been a viable option but since that is no longer legal then pushing away and using your taser or gun depending on threat level, would be the only things left. I was surprised to see him so far away from the driver when he broke the bad news and even more surprised when he went right to the taser. I think this might be a training issue. Personal opinion in looking at the driver's demeanor and body language is that this arrest could have probably been made at the first or second rung of the ladder even though the first rung didn't appear to be working all that well. There's no doubt this would make a good training video...
Bottom line...if the officer felt threatened and believed he could not have handled it any other way, then he was justified in doing what he did. The driver was the fuel that fed this fire, not the officer. Once the driver started back to his car after being advised he was under arrest then the choices for the officer became very limited and they all involved some sort of physical force. Under no circumstance would I have let him return to the vehicle. I think it still holds true that traffic stops are the number one killer of police officers in the line of duty. As part of my training I viewed dash cams showing how officers met violent deaths on "routine" traffic stops. I still remember the one incident of a female trooper that was nearly beat to death by a guy twice her size while his three year old son watched. It's a tough job and cops sometimes don't do it perfectly. Lord knows I didn't. But I always came home.
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