On: Virginia Police Caught Assaulting Teens, Video Deletion Fails

[foz → rantanplan]

I also watched the video. If you are legal to drive a car and you are stopped, and refuse to do what the police tells you to do, you can be arrested. There's no law that I know which says police are not allowed to arrest occupants in a car without parental consent.

I think the behaviour of the police was way over the top, but the way the kids acted was not smart, and I wouldn't be surprised if the police actions turn out to be legal. You can't just refuse, it's never going to end well. The only option is to comply. If the police are out of bounds, the challenge has to come later, in court, not on the road.

[aidos → foz]

Not smart? They're 17 year old kids, smart was generally not our forte at that age. I know it certainly wasn't mine :)

Smart or not doesn't really matter. The adults in the situation, whose job title is more or less "serve and protect," should have acted responsibly.

Though, the fact that the cops tried to delete the video suggests that they themselves fear that their actions where not entirely legal.

[oh_sigh → aidos]

Strangely, I and everyone I knew at 17 managed to make it through 17 without resisting arrest.

[aidos → oh_sigh]

So you didn't deal with cops using excessive force and then deleting your video evidence? Well neither did I, but that doesn't prove anything.

[oh_sigh → aidos]

The question is still open as to whether the officers deleted the video evidence, and it didn't look like excessive force to me, considering the kid was flailing around and actively resisting the officers lawful orders.

I hope the cop is punished or fired if he deleted the video evidence, but that is still up in the air whether that happened or not.

[rantanplan → foz]

People in this thread continue to talk about laws and blah blah.

I want to state 2 things: 1) The kid is not going to win a prize for his IQ, no one is denying that. 2) Fuck the laws. The laws change.

Here we're witnessing a full blown assault to a teenager. Actually where I come from this would classify as torture.

And you people keep talking about how lawful it is and how stupid the kid might be. Now I understand the problem you have over there.

[Udik → rantanplan]

Well said. It's not about the law, the law itself might be part of the problem. This looks more like a cultural problem. The level of hostility and distrust on both sides are appalling and the police officers are blindly applying a procedure that would be fit for dealing with the most dangerous criminals and situations. The escalation of the confrontation and the outburst of violence are extremely rapid and totally unjustified by the actual scenario (the fact that it might not be that exceptionally uncommon for a police officer in the USA to face somebody who is actually carrying a weapon and willing to use it is, to me, part of the same cultural problem).

In the end, the result is the following: four police cars involved in what should be a completely routine check; three young people psychologically and physically wounded; one of them, underage, in jail for months at the expense of society; endless time and resources spent in filling papers, in courts, with lawyers. It might look like the dead simple pragmatic approach to things, and yet it's completely deranged and immensely inefficient.

[jacquesm → Udik]

And last but not least the gap between civilians and the police force widened rather than narrowed. That's the real cost in my opinion.

[dang → rantanplan]

> Yes I watched the video you moron [...] WTF is wrong with you people?

Please don't post comments like this to Hacker News, even when someone has behaved unjustly and you feel strongly about it.

[rantanplan → dang]

You're right. I need to work on that.