Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin
I will quote from the article. It says, "Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and top union official Pat Lynch called for harsher penalties for people who resist arrest and assault cops at public assemblies."
My take on the article was obviously different from your take. I don't think there is any confusion about what the definition is of "resisting arrest". When you are placed under arrest, if you put up a physical fight, that is "resisting arrest". It would probably be "assaulting a police officer" too. I don't know for sure. I'm not a lawyer.
Anyway, I don't think they're looking to charge people with any type of "resisting arrest", let alone "felony resisting arrest", for simple civil disobedience. What they want to address is the people who were physically fighting with the officers when they were being arrested. There was way too much of that going on during the recent protests.
With regard to people blocking traffic (whether pedestrian traffic or automobile traffic), there is no excuse for that. I would love to see how sympathetic you would be if you were stuck in your car, not moving for 2 hours, because some idiots were laying in the street, protesting. In that situation I bet you would be the first person to want those people arrested. When the police order people to disperse, they need to disperse. If they want to file a complaint later on, that is their right. As big of jerks as cops can be sometimes, I will still follow their order, if they give me an order. I may question it, but if they get belligerent, I'm going to comply. If I don't like it, I will complain later. How can we have a civil society if people think they can just ignore police orders? In a civilized society, we have to respect the authority of the police. If they misbehave, we can file a complaint, we can contact our city leaders, etc. But in the heat of a civil disturbance, we need to comply with police orders, unless we want to live in anarchy.
|