Judging by the yt comments, you’re subscribed to a channel that caters heavily to racists, so I don’t have high hopes here.
Right, it’s clearly a channel that looks purely from the police’s POV. I watch other stuff from all kinds of different viewpoints. Audit the Audit is probably the most evenhanded one in terms of breaking down when the police did wrong, or when the citizen involved did something wrong, or both.
I definitely try not to come just from a purely “pro police” standpoint; to me what’s important is coming up with a system that works. I would be fully in support of:
More police accountability when they do something illegal
Better training, something like Verbal Judo and elements of psychology – i.e. help the cops not to antagonize people when they walk up to them, like this particular cop did in this particular interaction, and got the guy all amped up and then punished him for being amped up.
So with that all being said, I don’t feel like coming at things from a purely “anti-police” standpoint makes sense either. Maybe this dude has a warrant for some violent crime. He honestly gets pretty much no sympathy from me based on his behavior, because I suspect that he interacts with people this way in his personal life, too. He parks in the handicap space using someone else’s placard, he shouts over the cop and insists things that are clearly not accurate (“I’m not under arrest!”) and tries to bully his way to the cop accepting them. To be honest, for as much as I agree he was reacting out of fear, this whole interaction makes him seem like a POS that likes to throw his weight around and starts shouting if things aren’t exactly how he likes them. If I saw someone walk up to a cop and say something, and the cop reacted that way – which, yes, some cops do in some situations – I would make pretty much the exact same POS judgement about that cop based on what I observed. Just the fact that ultimately he got bullied, instead of being able to be the bully like he was trying to do, doesn’t change my assessment of how he acted at the outset.
Antagonism level of the suspect: 12/10,
Literally walked away to avoid conflict.
I get that both the cop and the big dude are basically just scared and reacting poorly out of fear.
Only one of them is armed with a lethal weapon and regularly assaults people. The cop is actively pursuing conflict, whereas the victim is avoiding it.
But that’s not the whole context! If I came up to your table in a restaurant, took your wallet, and then walked away and tried to leave, and screamed at you if you tried to follow me, I don’t get to blame you for “actively pursuing conflict.” There’s unresolved business we need to talk about, same as in this video.
Actual reasonable approach: follow the man in. Don’t keep making demands of him to stop, etc. Just keep up and explain to him that you’re going to ticket him for a broken break light, and if he accepts that you’ll be on your way. If he refuses, instruct him to get it fixed asap and take down his number plate so you can send the ticket in the mail. Cars usually have several brake lights. One of them being broken really isn’t a big deal.
If you want to change the system so the police can’t stop you for a brake light out, we can do that. There have already been some reforms after BLM, and some areas (e.g. cash bail) that clearly still need reform. But it needs to be, okay what’s a good whole system and how do we change things? Not just that we change them on the side of the road because someone’s shouting and if we counter-escalate in accordance with written law, that’ll wind up in a situation that’s bad for the shouting person.
Would you be in favor of changing the system so that what you’re describing is the prescribed behavior for cops in this situation? I.e. written law that if someone leaves a traffic stop for a minor infraction just shouts in your face for you to get the fuck outta here and leaves, you take down their plate number and deal with it via the mail?
Edit: And, just to throw my own answer in - how I think the cop should have reacted in this particular moment was somewhat similar to what you said, just without letting the guy bully his way out of the citation. I’ve actually seen a cop deescalate in a similar situation by using this general approach: Hey man, all I really need to you do is X, Y, Z. If you can do that, I’ll be out of your way and you can go about your night. If you don’t want to do that, then you are going to go to jail. But that’s not what I want to do. I want for you to do X, Y, Z so we can resolve our business and everything can be good. But I will take you to jail if you don’t do those things. Here’s what’s up, here’s the reason, and what I want to do is talk to you a little and then we can go on our way.
In the case I observed, it took a while (I think around 10 minutes) for the other person to calm down, and a whole lot of it has to do with the tone and body language involved. It is hard to do that, remain calm and steady and patient while someone bigger than you is screaming in your face. I actually can get why the cop here was rattled and reacted badly. But, that being said, him being calm and more understanding and less just repeating “Do X, Y, Z. Do X, Y, Z. Do X, Y, Z,” like he’s the boss and everyone’s supposed to obey, would have gone a long way on the cop’s side to making this have a better outcome.