Winter Borne said:
He gets mouthy with the cops as he feels he's the victim here.
I my younger, wilder days, I had a number of encounters with LEOs - mostly due to hitchhiking and partying. I was always very polite and non-argumentative, and was never arrested.
My theory was that if the officer was in the wrong, you weren't going to win that battle on the street - you win that kind of battle in court, or in administrative action, etc.
To be honest, I couldn't see how policing could work if the officer didn't act on their understanding of the law and the situation at the time that I encountered them. If they were wrong about the law, that could get settled later.
Maybe it was just because most of my enounters tended to be late at night on deserted roads, but I thought the officers had a pretty tough job, and I didn't have any good reason to antagonize them.
One time a Highway Patrol officer in Tennessee explained to me that when he stopped me late at night, he didn't know if I was a some harmless hippie, or a violent felon who had just broken out of prison 2 counties away. So he advised me to be polite, keep my hands visible, move slowly when asked, and explain what I was going to do before I did it.
I took his advice. In fact, I soon found that it worked better than expected. When an office asked me for ID, I'd say "My ID is in my wallet in the left rear pocket of my jeans. I am reaching for it with my left hand", and slowly pull out my wallet. That line always cracked up whoever had stopped me - they'sd ask, "Why did you say that?" I'd tell them what the Tennessee trooper told me, and they'd nod, run my license, and let me go on my merry way.
The truth is that I didn't mind being stopped. If there was some escaped felon on up the road, I'd rather have the troopers find him before I ran into him under some bridge abuttment!
This may be contraversial on the gun boards, but for policing to work, it seems to me that the officer's commands - during the time of an encounter on the street - have to be obeyed. If the officer is wrong, the matter can be taken up in court, or with a supervisor - in a quiet, well lit, controlled environment, where everyone's identites are known. In fact, the laws that I might have been breaking - vagrancy laws - were later found to be mostly unconstitutional. But I couldn't see how you could establish a practical police force if the police were obligated to enter legal argument with everyone they stopped. I figured that if I wanted to argue with them, they were likely to arrest me and let the judge sort it out.
So I never mouthed off or argued with officers on the street. I think that on some gun boards, folks would call me a "sheep." On the other hand, there were a number of times when the situation was more or less up the officer's discretion (Was I really a vagrant?), and I never spent the night in jail, and never had to come up with bail money.
Winter Borne said:
Mind you, this is his mothers version and I would expect that there are parts left out.
Any chance that he knew the perp, and there was a prior history between them?
The other thought is whether or not he shotgun was really inloaded at the time of the enconuter. Here's a potentail sequence:
- Nephew points loaded shotgun at perp.
- Perp runs off.
- Nephew decides that pointing the shotgun wasn't such a hot idea.
- Nephew disposes of shells.
- Police arrive.
If the prosecutor thought that evidence was tampered with, or that your nephew was lying to police, he might get real annoyed.
Mike
