A police cruiser signals a citizen's car to stop. Allegedly one of the car's headlights isn't working and, on top of that, allegedly, it's speeding. The car stops at a gas station. When the cop gets to the car he demands a driver's license and when the 18-year-old teenage girl takes more than about 10 seconds to try to find it from the glove compartment, or wherever it was, the cop gets angry, opens the car's door and demands that she get out of the car. She asks repeatedly what she did but the cop, like is so common in the United States, is so ego-driven that he refuses to tell her before she gets out of the car and shows ID. And when she takes more than 10 seconds or so to get out of the car, the cop violently grabs her and slams her on the ground.
You can see a video discussing this event here.
This incident is just the perfect chain of events that demonstrates how corrupt many cops are in the United States:
The cop is clearly extremely ego-driven, a "respect my authorita!" school bully who refuses to tell the driver why he stopped her and very quickly escalates the situation to physical violence for no good reason. The poor girl is lucky she got out of the situation alive and mostly uninjured.
The cop did not turn on his body cam until after he had arrested the girl. It's lucky that the gas station had a security camera that caught the event. Without it, undoubtedly the lies of the cop would have been much more egregious.
When the girl's father arrived at the scene, the cop tricked him into providing his ID with the excuse that the cop "needed to make sure he was actually the girl's father", and proceeded to immediately demonstrate why you shouldn't give your ID to a cop in the United States just because he asks you to, by running the ID with dispatch in order to check if he has any warrants.
This was a very clear violation of his 4th Amendment rights, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. Courts have repeatedly ruled that running the ID of someone who isn't suspected of any crime is a clear violation of that amendment. The father was not suspected of any crime, and thus running is ID was illegal and unconstitutional. But he was tricked by the cop into surrendering his rights, and he didn't even hesitate. That's exactly what they do.
An even more egregious violation of the 4th Amendment followed, when the cop searched the girl's car. Once again courts have ruled again and again that a traffic violation, or even getting arrested for not showing ID, is not reason enough to search a person's property. The police needs reasonable suspicion that there's something illegal in the car in order to have the right to search it; they can't just use an unrelated infraction as an excuse to violate people's 4th Amendment rights. The girl was not suspected of being in possession of anything illegal, and thus the search was illegal and unconstitutional.
But that's exactly what these cops do: They want to justify their illegal actions (such as physically assaulting the teenager for no good reason) by trying to pin anything on the victim. If the cop had happened to find something illegal in the car, that would have been seen as a vindication of his aggressive actions, and yet another charge on top of the rest. They literally do not care if doing such a search is illegal and a breach of constitutional rights.
The police precinct did nothing about this incident and stayed completely quiet about it, until the father published the video about it, causing public outrage. Obviously. American police forces look after their own and they very, very rarely police their own actions willingly. None of the other cops "ratted" this one cop to the higher-ups, none of the higher-ups took any action after reading the report and, possibly, watching the camera footage. Because why would they?
And what did the police precinct do after the public outrage? Defended their own, of course. Because that's what they usually do.
This incident is just like the epitome of all the ways in which American cops are corrupt in everyday encounters with the public.
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