You have probably seen crowds of people with their hands up – a protest meme over police trigger-happiness.
Apparently, it has been taken literally … by the other side.
As hallucinatory as this may sound, if you’re pulled over in the city of Topeka, Kansas for any reason – including non-criminal trivialities such as having an out of date inspection sticker, a dead brake light, or because you’re spotted unbuckled – the cops there will henceforth expect – scratch that, order – everyone in the vehicle to assume the Perp Pose.
This includes old people, kids. God help you if you have a rotator cuff injury and have difficulty putting your hands up above your head. And god help you twice if you make the mistake of reaching for your driver’s license or fumbling with your purse.
They call it “hand compliance” (see here) but it’s more than just your hands involved. You will be expected – legally required – to “freeze” and remain motionless until ordered otherwise. Mind: Any failure to “freeze” will henceforth be taken as a legal threat to – you guessed it – officer safety.
And you know what (often and increasingly) comes next.
Expect this to spread.
Cancer tends to.
“We all want to go home to our families, and this makes it safer for us to approach vehicles to gain that compliance. It gives us a chance to survive these encounters,” explained one of them.
Italics added.
Is anyone struck dumb by the topsy-turvy irony of it?
Nationally, cops killed an estimated 1,029 people last year (see hereand here). Far more than in any European country or indeed, all of Europe combined. More than in communist China – a country that also has four times the population.
No one knows the precise number of “officer involved” killings in the U.S. because there is no single reporting standard at the national level and because many of these are effectively swept under the rug. But the long and short of it is that American cops are ventilating civilians in the low four figures annually, at least. Statistically – and realistically – speaking, you are far more likely to find yourself dead at the hands of a cop than at the hands of an ululating “terrorist.” Have anyof you reading this ever been accosted by a “radical Muslim”? Almost all of us, on the other hand, have been menaced at least once by these armed-and-dangerous strangers known as police. Who literally wield life-and-death authority over us. And seem to know it.
Meanwhile, how many cops would you guess have been killed by citizens?
About 114 (see here).
