El Rojo, I take from your posts that you are a prison guard here in California. That means your base pay is somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000, for GUARDING PRISONERS, as the result of several sweetheart deals your union made with the disgraced former governor Gray Davis.
Thank you RileyMC, you help prove my main point in this discussion. People are making assumptions and jumping to conclusions without knowing all of the facts or listening to only one side of the story. No, I do not work for the State of California. I work for a private contractor who runs a federal prison. I am not a correctional officer, I am a teacher. I make $34,000 a year, not a 185 day public school contract. I have no union. That was a nice attempt to try and move the focus of this discussion to the possibility that I make $80,000 a year to GUARD PRISONERS and somehow discredit me because of it, but it failed miserably. Even though security is everyone's concern in corrections, I don't make half that much money and I don't guard prisoners. I teach them.
You cannot logically draw an analogy between prison guards and inmates, and street police and private citizens.
I believe my relationship was drawn between dishonest people in prison and dishonest people not in prison. If an inmate is capable of lying and embelishing his story to make him look more like a victim with the intent of gaining some sort of monetary reward or special priviledge, I think a free citizen can do the same. I also think I stated that if I work with inmates anywhere from 18 to 75+ years old, I believe a 71 year old lady can make up a good story just as well as anyone else. I think those were the points I was trying to make by relating my prison experience to this case where we have two different stories. It appears to me that many people here have swallowed this woman's story hook, line, and sinker.
Edward. The context of my statement about complying revolves around fighting law enforcement in a physical encounter. Anyone who fights with the police is going to lose eventually. Sure you might kick the officer's butt or even kill him, but he has back up and they aren't going to concern themselves that their fellow officer was in the wrong or violated your civil rights. My statment that it is better to comply with an officers very specific orders concerning "officer safety" and then sue the heck out of them later is valid. If you want to refuse to a search or you want to refuse to move from the back of the trailer you are looking for your red wagon in, fine, do that. However, when the officer comes up to arrest you, don't fight! You will lose. The lady in this incident discovered that. She was OCed and tasered. Eventually in court she earned $145,000 for her side of the story. Had she not resisted and tried to bite the officers, she might have made more, assuming they would have still OCed and tasered her and assuming that she really didn't know the officers were there and she was just scared for her own safety. Again assumptions we must make because we were not there and we do not know what really happened. For some reason I still think if the events of the story were exactly as she described them and the officers initiated contact by stepping on her foot and then moments later spraying her and tasing her, she could have made a lot more than $145,000 out of this deal, but more importantly she would have demanded more justice than a mere $145,000. At least that is what I think and it appears a lot of you would not have aquised so easily come lawsuit time.
Junyo. Very good points about police expediancy. It seems that in most cases when you call the cops, you want them to come out and solve the situation as soon as possible. Yet in this case some of us expect them to just take their sweet time and let the situation resolve itself. Unfortunately there are no simple answers for this. That is why I seem to give cops a break sometimes, there is no easy way out of the situation. Either they take their time and let granny do what she wants and someone a few blocks away files a complaint because the cops didn't arrive in time or you hurry and resolve the granny episode and get busted for your expediance. There really is no way for them to win. A cop will get in trouble for not enforcing the law quick enough, enforcing the law too quickly, or not enforcing the law at all. What a horrible thankless job.
offence in most jurisdictions. Not a statutory crime but a real street crime for which punishment is always meted out promptly (as here). 