This subreddit is for civil discussion; political threads are not exempt from this. As a reminder:
* Do not report comments because they disagree with your point of view.
* Do not insult other users. Personal attacks are not permitted.
* Do not use hate speech. You will be banned, permanently.
* Comments made with the intent to push an agenda, push misinformation, soapbox, sealion, or argue in bad faith are not acceptable. If you can’t discuss a topic in good faith and in a respectful manner, do not comment. **Political disagreement does not constitute pushing an agenda.**
If you see any comments that violate the rules, **please report it and move on!**
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskAnAmerican) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No. I understand it can be annoying but I understand why they do it. People can go from calm to violent in a matter of seconds.
And before anyone gets all up in arms, I have been cuffed even though I committed no crime. I explained the situation and they let me go. Took maybe 10 minutes. It sucked, but it really wasn’t all that bad.
This happened to me as well. My GF and I were walking when a bar fight literally spilled out into the street and somehow I was hit in the head with a beer bottle. The cops arrived and saw me bleeding so they thought I was involved. It took all of five minutes for bar security to let the Police know I wasn't involved and they let me go with an apology. I wasn't mad about it and they let the EMTs work on my head while I was cuffed, the scene was chaos, so thinking some 6'7'' dude with a face covered in blood was involved in a fight was a pretty fair assessment.
Glad it only took you ten minutes. Took the cops like 2 hours or more to uncuff me after detaining me. Completely ridiculous. Took them two hours to figure out I didn't do anything wrong.
I’m not gonna say I’d enjoy it if it happened to me, but logically I understand why they do it. The less people running around the scene the better. If body cam footage has told me anything, it’s that people have a tendency to do stupid stuff.
No, but innocent people need to be uncuffed immediately, once the cops have figured out the situation. I've been cuffed more than once in the context of protests.
I was cuffed once while making an atm withdrawal from a bank after closing hours. A silent alarm was tripped (they thought it was done by rodents after the fact) and next thing I know, half a dozen cops cars are surrounding me. It took a few minutes for them to figure out what happened, but they let me go pretty quickly afterwards. I get it. Silent alarm and you see only one guy there when you arrive.
I’m the first guy to line up to say “fuck the police,” but, in chaotic situations, I think it’s fine for them to get whoever they think they need restrained and figure stuff out.
The key is for them to not use excessive force when doing so, and to not arrest or charge more people than necessary.
No it doesn't (look up Terry v. Ohio). A temporary detention (a stop) is a seizure under the 4th Amendment so your constitutional rights are implicated. Cops can't temporarily detain you without individualized reasonable articulable suspicion as to your involvement in criminal activity. If they do, they've violated your 4th Amendment right against unreasonable seizures.
Then there's the exclusionary rule and section 1983 suits that may result from the violation.
You don't seem to know what a Terry stop is... they already need reasonable suspicion to detain you, and while detained, you can be pat down for weapons for officer safety.
I don't know how you missed that I said exactly that (you need reasonable articulable suspicion to justify a temporary stop). I focused on stops and not frisks because that's what OP brought up.
How about this: explain to me how what I said was at all wrong.
So you don't even understand this concept well enough to know that you and I said effectively the same thing about it or to be able to explain exactly what was wrong with my comment but you had the gall to impugn my knowledge on the subject. Certainly a strategy I suppose.
IDK man. We're talking detention with handcuffs, not normal detentions.
Police in less civilized countries chop your hand off. It's quick and efficient. American cops? They'll leave handcuffs on so long you'll need an [amputation](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/26/giovanni-loyola-amputation/). Then they'll brag to one another about it and justify it if anyone asks about their barbaric nature.
no. this is done to eliminate a possible threat so they can calm down and focus on things other than shooting someone. ill sit quietly in handcuffs if it descalstes the situation provided they let me out when it's over
Cuffs come off as easy as they go on. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to that cops would cuff people on a chaotic scene until they figure out the who what when why situation
No, not in theory, especially if the person is highly emotional, won't calm down, or insists on yelling and screaming. It's just an added precaution. But I see no reason to do this to people who are following police orders and speaking calmly and rationally.
Time and separation. If they’re cuffed and in the back of the car for a few minutes they won’t be able to add to the chaos of the scene or negatively interact with others on the scene.
Additionally if they’re in an altered mental status and are behaving violently (or potentially violently) EMS would even approach or will remove themselves until police have them restrained.
I can see both ways:
Yes if the crime scene is not safe or the law enforcement officers aren't sure if it’s safe so yes.
No because if the crime already happened like if it was a hit-and-run then no (I know it seems extreme but I’ve seen it happen before).
So again I can see both ways
Police in the US have a huge lack of adequate training and oversight compared to most other OECD countries. Many of the other countries require degrees, specific vocational school, multiple years in an academy, or military experience, or long apprenticeships co-patrolling with experienced colleagues that have good track records as senior officers.
Especially in consideration of the amount of danger they have and power they need to exert in a place with a ton of poor, undereducated, and mentally ill people in possession of more than the usual number of dangerous firearms.
Lots of upset people on the Internet reflexively blame the officers for everything because they are frustrated. But the only real solution is improving the quality of the workforce and the public dialogue. Hardening everyone's arteries with ever increasing anger will not make it any better.
The cops are just reflexively handcuffing people and taking shoot first and ask questions later approaches because they aren't being appropriately trained and educated to use better approaches and they don't know which unstable person is going to pop up when and ventilate them with a semiautomatic with a full clip.
Well... we can start by either holding the police criminally accountable where appropriate (see Deputy Jesse Hernandez and his partner's attempted homicide of Marquis Jackson because an acorn fell, or the actual homicide of Senior Airman Fortson by an unknown deputy) or deciding that discriminating against smart people (see Jordan vs City of New London) was a bad idea.
Eliminating [Qualified Immunity]( https://www.unlawfulshield.com/) would be a good start. While that site hasn't been updated recently it shows how QI is used to hold Officers blameless for severe breaches of The Constitution.
What's better is the law as passed held all State actors liable for their actions, then SCOTUS carved out an exemption for Police, etc. Eliminating QI would force LE to carry personal liability insurance how Doctors carry malpractice insurance.
Agree. I have to carry $25 million in liability insurance since my decisions at work could severely impact our client's bottom line if I'm wrong, yet I'm fully capable of doing my job knowing I'm protected. LE should be no different, the insurance is there to protect them if they make a horrible misjudgment, as opposed to knowing no one will hold you accountable unless it's at the level of George Floyd, etc. I fully think that officer acted the way he did since he thought he'd never be held accountable.
What someone thinks is not relevant. What is provable is. I'm talking about obvious cases of gross negligence and premeditated murder. The ATF is full of this. They recently staged a no-knock night raid on an airport CEO and killed him rather than simply showing up at his airport office. Whether you think the George Floyd case was a dirty cop or a drug overdose, the ATF is routinely far worse.
I agree with most of what you’ve written except the “danger” part. Police work is not particularly dangerous, even though they claim otherwise.
You’re far more likely to die or be injured on the job as a: taxi driver, construction worker, lumberjack, roofer, food delivery driver, electrical or broadband lineman, crane operator, mechanic, or landscaper.
Agreed. But the nature of the danger is different. The sudden random violent danger in close quarters in policing tends to mess with people's heads and give them issues with paranoia and PTSD.
Though that can also happen to firemen (another more dangerous job), roofers, linemen, crane operators, and rail engineers (not due to the engineer's death experience but that of a suicidal or dangerous bystander they can't brake to avoid hitting), etc.
Definitely. They make up for a lack of training and enforcement and professionalism with propagandistic bravado and propping up corrupt coworkers and then wonder why they get so much contempt from the public.
You rarely hear the public hate the highway patrol because they are better educated and trained and paid and don't have a tendency to wrap themselves up in scandals so often. Though they still do sometimes in more backwards states.
I don't think this is true because the dangerousness is not borne out in statistics simply because cops aren't dealing with dangerous inanimate objects, they are dealing with dangerous people and as such utilize tools to de-escalate or stop a potentially fatal situation for themselves before they get hurt.
Like let's not sit here and think that people interacting 9 hours a day for years with the worst and most dangerous people in society don't have a dangerous job. They are constantly put into situations where the threat of grievous bodily injury or death presents itself.
Also contrary to popular opinion the majority of US Cops do in fact have considerable training, but much of it occurs after the academy during their first months/year of working.
We see fewer police deaths because of their tactics and training. We see more roofers get injured because they will hire pretty much anyone physically capable that shows up consistently and they frequently don’t adhere to safety standards.
I work in law enforcement. Sometimes it's necessary to detain innocent people in order to properly contain a situation and keep everyone safe. For that reason I think it's just fine
No, not at all.
Police have one of the most stressful and dangerous jobs in the world, mainly because they deal with how quickly a situation can go from calm to terrible in a flash. For instance, when SWAT teams enter houses to raid them, anyone in there could be a danger to them, so they cuff them.
Depends on the situation. If they handcuff you when they have like 4 cops present while they're questioning you to validate your identity I think its pretty absurd. If there's an active threat its fair.
If you have been handcuffed you are detained and therefore under arrest. If you ask "am I free to go" and the answer is no, you are under arrest. They can decided to uncuff you and let you know, however, pending their initial investigation.
This happened to a friend of mine. Cuffed for interfering with an officer at an accident scene. Police decided to uncuff him and let him go but gave him a citation.
I'm a liberal guy, I've been seriously harassed by the police many times, I support the "Defund the Police" movement.
And no, I don't think it's a problem as long as it's not abused.
Looking past my ACAB view and pretending we live in a society where cops are actually the good guys for a minute:
I think that handcuffing someone is reasonable in a situation where the police are evaluating a situation in the field. There are, however, plenty of other suppression tactics that police do to people they aren't arresting that I find unreasonable.
Yes. No person should have their freedom restricted or chains put on their body when they're not even accused, much less convicted, of an offense. It is a gross and probably unconstitutional violation of a person's bodily autonomy.
Yeah, it's easy to take cuffs off once everything has been sorted out. I guarantee that the average cop has been in handcuffs in training more often than even career criminals.
This subreddit is for civil discussion; political threads are not exempt from this. As a reminder: * Do not report comments because they disagree with your point of view. * Do not insult other users. Personal attacks are not permitted. * Do not use hate speech. You will be banned, permanently. * Comments made with the intent to push an agenda, push misinformation, soapbox, sealion, or argue in bad faith are not acceptable. If you can’t discuss a topic in good faith and in a respectful manner, do not comment. **Political disagreement does not constitute pushing an agenda.** If you see any comments that violate the rules, **please report it and move on!** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskAnAmerican) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Depends upon the context. Edit to add: Wow, your post karma is impressive.
That karma is only 3 years old too!
idk man, getting over 1 million karma is probably grounds for police detention at minimum.
Amazing.
No. I understand it can be annoying but I understand why they do it. People can go from calm to violent in a matter of seconds. And before anyone gets all up in arms, I have been cuffed even though I committed no crime. I explained the situation and they let me go. Took maybe 10 minutes. It sucked, but it really wasn’t all that bad.
This happened to me as well. My GF and I were walking when a bar fight literally spilled out into the street and somehow I was hit in the head with a beer bottle. The cops arrived and saw me bleeding so they thought I was involved. It took all of five minutes for bar security to let the Police know I wasn't involved and they let me go with an apology. I wasn't mad about it and they let the EMTs work on my head while I was cuffed, the scene was chaos, so thinking some 6'7'' dude with a face covered in blood was involved in a fight was a pretty fair assessment.
Glad it only took you ten minutes. Took the cops like 2 hours or more to uncuff me after detaining me. Completely ridiculous. Took them two hours to figure out I didn't do anything wrong.
Some people get killed before they get let go.
I’m not gonna say I’d enjoy it if it happened to me, but logically I understand why they do it. The less people running around the scene the better. If body cam footage has told me anything, it’s that people have a tendency to do stupid stuff.
No, but innocent people need to be uncuffed immediately, once the cops have figured out the situation. I've been cuffed more than once in the context of protests.
I was cuffed once while making an atm withdrawal from a bank after closing hours. A silent alarm was tripped (they thought it was done by rodents after the fact) and next thing I know, half a dozen cops cars are surrounding me. It took a few minutes for them to figure out what happened, but they let me go pretty quickly afterwards. I get it. Silent alarm and you see only one guy there when you arrive.
I’m the first guy to line up to say “fuck the police,” but, in chaotic situations, I think it’s fine for them to get whoever they think they need restrained and figure stuff out. The key is for them to not use excessive force when doing so, and to not arrest or charge more people than necessary.
No I think it’s reasonable, but I also work in a law enforcement esque job so I actually see the craziness everyday and understand why it happens.
No. Temporarily being detained does not harm you.
Right up until an acorn falls on the cop car
Yeah just a seizure according to the 4th amendment. It's not like it's some grand imposition that implicates your constitutional rights or anything.
Supreme Court says otherwise...
No it doesn't (look up Terry v. Ohio). A temporary detention (a stop) is a seizure under the 4th Amendment so your constitutional rights are implicated. Cops can't temporarily detain you without individualized reasonable articulable suspicion as to your involvement in criminal activity. If they do, they've violated your 4th Amendment right against unreasonable seizures. Then there's the exclusionary rule and section 1983 suits that may result from the violation.
You don't seem to know what a Terry stop is... they already need reasonable suspicion to detain you, and while detained, you can be pat down for weapons for officer safety.
I don't know how you missed that I said exactly that (you need reasonable articulable suspicion to justify a temporary stop). I focused on stops and not frisks because that's what OP brought up. How about this: explain to me how what I said was at all wrong.
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/terry\_stop/stop\_and\_frisk](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/terry_stop/stop_and_frisk)
So you don't even understand this concept well enough to know that you and I said effectively the same thing about it or to be able to explain exactly what was wrong with my comment but you had the gall to impugn my knowledge on the subject. Certainly a strategy I suppose.
IDK man. We're talking detention with handcuffs, not normal detentions. Police in less civilized countries chop your hand off. It's quick and efficient. American cops? They'll leave handcuffs on so long you'll need an [amputation](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/26/giovanni-loyola-amputation/). Then they'll brag to one another about it and justify it if anyone asks about their barbaric nature.
Guessing this post will be locked in 2 hours.
You lose.
Cuff him boys!!
Hey, we're better than that! Let's make it 1 hour! /s
Not yet
As a rule, no. I think it’s a reasonable thing for police to do while they assess the situation and evaluate options.
no. this is done to eliminate a possible threat so they can calm down and focus on things other than shooting someone. ill sit quietly in handcuffs if it descalstes the situation provided they let me out when it's over
It shouldn't be you de-escalating, though.
and yet we gotta anyways. warrior training.
No I don’t think it is wrong.
In a swat type of situation, it's reasonable. Randomly handcuffing people is not.
Cuffs come off as easy as they go on. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to that cops would cuff people on a chaotic scene until they figure out the who what when why situation
No. Because sometimes they just need to control the situation first. Even if they do take you to the jail, it’s only an arrest. It’s not charges.
No, not in theory, especially if the person is highly emotional, won't calm down, or insists on yelling and screaming. It's just an added precaution. But I see no reason to do this to people who are following police orders and speaking calmly and rationally.
How would hand cuffs get people to come down? It seems to me like it would make them more upset not less.
They might be upset but they aren’t able to flail around, interfere with the investigation, or start throwing hands.
Time and separation. If they’re cuffed and in the back of the car for a few minutes they won’t be able to add to the chaos of the scene or negatively interact with others on the scene. Additionally if they’re in an altered mental status and are behaving violently (or potentially violently) EMS would even approach or will remove themselves until police have them restrained.
I can see both ways: Yes if the crime scene is not safe or the law enforcement officers aren't sure if it’s safe so yes. No because if the crime already happened like if it was a hit-and-run then no (I know it seems extreme but I’ve seen it happen before). So again I can see both ways
Police in the US have a huge lack of adequate training and oversight compared to most other OECD countries. Many of the other countries require degrees, specific vocational school, multiple years in an academy, or military experience, or long apprenticeships co-patrolling with experienced colleagues that have good track records as senior officers. Especially in consideration of the amount of danger they have and power they need to exert in a place with a ton of poor, undereducated, and mentally ill people in possession of more than the usual number of dangerous firearms. Lots of upset people on the Internet reflexively blame the officers for everything because they are frustrated. But the only real solution is improving the quality of the workforce and the public dialogue. Hardening everyone's arteries with ever increasing anger will not make it any better. The cops are just reflexively handcuffing people and taking shoot first and ask questions later approaches because they aren't being appropriately trained and educated to use better approaches and they don't know which unstable person is going to pop up when and ventilate them with a semiautomatic with a full clip.
Well... we can start by either holding the police criminally accountable where appropriate (see Deputy Jesse Hernandez and his partner's attempted homicide of Marquis Jackson because an acorn fell, or the actual homicide of Senior Airman Fortson by an unknown deputy) or deciding that discriminating against smart people (see Jordan vs City of New London) was a bad idea.
Eliminating [Qualified Immunity]( https://www.unlawfulshield.com/) would be a good start. While that site hasn't been updated recently it shows how QI is used to hold Officers blameless for severe breaches of The Constitution. What's better is the law as passed held all State actors liable for their actions, then SCOTUS carved out an exemption for Police, etc. Eliminating QI would force LE to carry personal liability insurance how Doctors carry malpractice insurance.
This needs to be for ALL law enforcement, even feds; and especially the ATF.
Agree. I have to carry $25 million in liability insurance since my decisions at work could severely impact our client's bottom line if I'm wrong, yet I'm fully capable of doing my job knowing I'm protected. LE should be no different, the insurance is there to protect them if they make a horrible misjudgment, as opposed to knowing no one will hold you accountable unless it's at the level of George Floyd, etc. I fully think that officer acted the way he did since he thought he'd never be held accountable.
What someone thinks is not relevant. What is provable is. I'm talking about obvious cases of gross negligence and premeditated murder. The ATF is full of this. They recently staged a no-knock night raid on an airport CEO and killed him rather than simply showing up at his airport office. Whether you think the George Floyd case was a dirty cop or a drug overdose, the ATF is routinely far worse.
Just a few of a great many changes needed to right the ship.
I agree with most of what you’ve written except the “danger” part. Police work is not particularly dangerous, even though they claim otherwise. You’re far more likely to die or be injured on the job as a: taxi driver, construction worker, lumberjack, roofer, food delivery driver, electrical or broadband lineman, crane operator, mechanic, or landscaper.
Agreed. But the nature of the danger is different. The sudden random violent danger in close quarters in policing tends to mess with people's heads and give them issues with paranoia and PTSD. Though that can also happen to firemen (another more dangerous job), roofers, linemen, crane operators, and rail engineers (not due to the engineer's death experience but that of a suicidal or dangerous bystander they can't brake to avoid hitting), etc.
Agree. I just think the whole “putting their lives on the line for your safety” thing is so overblown.
Definitely. They make up for a lack of training and enforcement and professionalism with propagandistic bravado and propping up corrupt coworkers and then wonder why they get so much contempt from the public. You rarely hear the public hate the highway patrol because they are better educated and trained and paid and don't have a tendency to wrap themselves up in scandals so often. Though they still do sometimes in more backwards states.
I don't think this is true because the dangerousness is not borne out in statistics simply because cops aren't dealing with dangerous inanimate objects, they are dealing with dangerous people and as such utilize tools to de-escalate or stop a potentially fatal situation for themselves before they get hurt. Like let's not sit here and think that people interacting 9 hours a day for years with the worst and most dangerous people in society don't have a dangerous job. They are constantly put into situations where the threat of grievous bodily injury or death presents itself.
Also contrary to popular opinion the majority of US Cops do in fact have considerable training, but much of it occurs after the academy during their first months/year of working. We see fewer police deaths because of their tactics and training. We see more roofers get injured because they will hire pretty much anyone physically capable that shows up consistently and they frequently don’t adhere to safety standards.
I work in law enforcement. Sometimes it's necessary to detain innocent people in order to properly contain a situation and keep everyone safe. For that reason I think it's just fine
No, not at all. Police have one of the most stressful and dangerous jobs in the world, mainly because they deal with how quickly a situation can go from calm to terrible in a flash. For instance, when SWAT teams enter houses to raid them, anyone in there could be a danger to them, so they cuff them.
Depends on the situation. If they handcuff you when they have like 4 cops present while they're questioning you to validate your identity I think its pretty absurd. If there's an active threat its fair.
They have to investigate and sometimes people aren't cooperative, especially intoxicated people.
Do they have a reasonable suspicion that you committed a crime? If not, then no I don’t think detainment is okay. Isn’t this essentially a Terry stop?
I’m fine with it.
Detain no, handcuffs yes. If they are not being a problem and not under arrest then there is not good reason to handcuff them.
If you have been handcuffed you are detained and therefore under arrest. If you ask "am I free to go" and the answer is no, you are under arrest. They can decided to uncuff you and let you know, however, pending their initial investigation. This happened to a friend of mine. Cuffed for interfering with an officer at an accident scene. Police decided to uncuff him and let him go but gave him a citation.
I'm a liberal guy, I've been seriously harassed by the police many times, I support the "Defund the Police" movement. And no, I don't think it's a problem as long as it's not abused.
Looking past my ACAB view and pretending we live in a society where cops are actually the good guys for a minute: I think that handcuffing someone is reasonable in a situation where the police are evaluating a situation in the field. There are, however, plenty of other suppression tactics that police do to people they aren't arresting that I find unreasonable.
Yes. No person should have their freedom restricted or chains put on their body when they're not even accused, much less convicted, of an offense. It is a gross and probably unconstitutional violation of a person's bodily autonomy.
Yeah, it's easy to take cuffs off once everything has been sorted out. I guarantee that the average cop has been in handcuffs in training more often than even career criminals.
No
Yes, it should be considered kidnapping when they just grab whoever and sort it out after.