By this point I have watched literally hundreds and hundreds of videos of American cops doing a traffic stop (footage coming from either the cop's bodycam, a citizen's camera, or both.) One pattern almost always repeats, and I will never, ever understand it. Just consider these situations:
If the car has invalid license plates, fake license plates, or no plates at all, they do not consider the driver an extremely dangerous armed-to-the-teeth criminal. They just approach the car and speak to the driver with no worries in the world.
If the car was eg. speeding, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous.
If the car has windows that are so heavily tinted that you literally can't see anything inside, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous.
If the driver has no valid driver's license or outright refuses to provide one, and refuses all forms of identification, they don't consider him armed and dangerous.
If the driver starts arguing with the cops and refuses to obey their lawful commands, they don't consider him armed and dangerous.
If the driver refuses to exit the car when commanded to do so, they don't consider him armed and dangerous.
If the driver is so argumentative and so uncooperative, and refuses to follow repeated commands so much so that the cops need to break his window and extract him from the car by force, they still don't consider him armed and dangerous (in the vast, vast majority of these situations they don't draw their guns. At the very most, in some cases, they may take out their tasers, but not their guns.)
Even if the driver physically resists them when being forcefully extracted, using full physical force to try to remain inside the car, and even outside still resisting being handcuffed, they still don't consider him armed and dangerous (I have seen literally dozens and dozens such videos, but not a single one where firearms are drawn. Not one.)
Heck, and I kid you not, even if the driver informs the police officer at the beginning of the traffic stop that he has a firearm in is glove department, the cop will still not consider him dangerous. (I have seen several examples of this. Because of the 2nd Amendment, people can legally have guns in their cars, and most cops are completely OK with that, not making a fuss about it. At most they will order the driver not to reach for it.)
Yet... if after having been stopped the driver starts the car and drives just a few meters and then stops again, suddenly pretty much every single American cop goes completely berserk and treats the situation like the driver is an extremely dangerous heavily armed wanted fugitive who is escaping from a shooting spree where he killed 10 civilians and 20 cops. Pretty much every single time.
Heck, sometimes the driver doesn't even need to start moving the car after having been stopped. Sometimes it's enough for him to not stop quickly enough for the cops to treat him like that. (And not as in the driver takes 15 minutes to stop while being constantly signaled and ordered to do so. Sometimes if it takes him more than 10 seconds to stop, it will trigger the cop into full berserk mode. I'm not exaggerating one iota.)
Cops will in these situations draw their guns and start shouting at the driver like insane asylum lunatics on a fit of psychosis-fueled rage. Most often the cops will have the driver go through the typical humiliation ritual of exiting the car and doing the typical dance routine of walking backwards with hands raised, going down on the ground and yada yada yada. Quite often the orders shouted at the top of the cop's lungs will be confusing and contradictory, making the driver completely confused about what exactly he should be doing because different commands repeated over and over seem to completely contradict each other.
Yes, the cops literally treat such drivers as if they were heavily armed and threatening to shoot the cops, even though the cops have literally zero evidence that he has any kind of firearms at all. They literally approach this situation as if they would do in some kind of armed robbery or hostage situation, where an armed criminal is surrendering.
And the thing is, they don't do this in any of the other situations I listed above. They do this only if the citizen drives away after the stop. And it doesn't matter if he drives tens of kilometers or just one meter, they still approach the situation in the exact same way. And this even though the cops have zero evidence that any guns are involved in the situation.
That in itself would be a bit strange but not really worthy of extreme criticism. Sure, they might have a bit of a strange policy in this regard, and they might scare the shit out of some citizens in this manner, but no harm no foul?
Except that this is not the worst part of it. The worst part is how the cops behave after the situation is under control.
And that's the strangest part of it: The vast, vast majority of cops in this kind of situation go into full retaliatory mode, sometimes even to the point of going into a murderous rampage. They will literally take "revenge" on the citizen, completely unlawfully, for having driven a couple of meters after having been stopped, and causing all this hulabaloo.
Sometimes the cops will just berate the driver very aggressively. Sometimes they will physically torture him. Sometimes several of them will beat the driver to a pulp, with kicks, punches and batons. Sometimes they will just go to the driver and outright execute him in Mafia style. Just like that: Go to the driver (who is completely under control), kick him in the stomach, take out gun, and shoot him in the chest in a cold-blooded murder. I'm not even exaggerating. Yes, that has absolutely happened!
And in most cases they do that well after it has been clearly established that the driver is not armed and not dangerous in any way, and who has been subdued and handcuffed and doesn't possess even any theoretical danger to the cops.
Why? I have no idea. My best hypothesis is that their egos get hurt because they feel like the driver didn't respect their authority. (But why only in this one case and not the others? I have no idea.)
Some examples of this here.
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