Radley Balko: Serve and Protect
What Radley Balko said:
The Agitator » Blog Archive » Response to Patterico and Jack Dunphy: The LAPD officer who writes under the pseudonym Jack Dunphy and blogger and prosecutor Patterico have each put up posts taking issue with my Reason colleague Brian Doherty’s and my criticism of one of Dunphy’s posts at National Review Online. Doherty and I... say that Dunphy believes the lesson from the Henry Louis Gates affair is that anyone who asserts his constitutional rights when confronted by a cop risks being shot. Patterico and Dunphy both say Doherty and I misread Dunphy. If Dunphy didn’t intend for that to be the point of the post, he should retract it. Because it’s difficult to interpret it any other way. Here is the meat of Dunphy’s post:
And now we are told, in a further attempt at damage control, that the Gates arrest can serve to educate all those mouth-breathing cops out there who may yet stumble into an unpleasant encounter with some other Ivy Leaguer. It’s our hope, said Gibbs, invoking that insufferable locution that one hopes will soon fade from common usage, that the Gates arrest can be “part of a teachable moment.” So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals.... You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing.... [T]he officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it.... And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own....
Patterico and Dunphy argue that Dunphy’s “lesson” here applies only to the specifics of his hypothetical—that the only time he meant to imply that you risk getting shot for asserting your rights is in the limited circumstance that an officer is looking for an armed, dangerous felon, and you happen to fit the very specific description of said felon given to police. I can’t speak for Doherty, but I stand by my original characterization of Dunphy’s post....
First, if this was Dunphy’s point, it’s unclear why he would invoke it in response to the Gates case, where there was no armed robbery, no getaway car, and no specific description.... Either he meant for his “lesson” to be applied more broadly, or his entire post was a red herring.
Second... Dunphy explicitly sets up the hypothetical by stating that its lesson should be taken to heart by “anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer.”...
Third, Dunphy was responding negatively to the idea that the “teachable moment” in all of this ought to be for the police to be more cognizant of our rights....
Fourth... the innocent driver of the Hupmobile has no idea why he has been pulled over.... This is precisely Dunphy’s point. He’s arguing that you can’t possibly know what’s going on in a police officer’s head when he stops you or confronts you.... So you’d best just shut up and submit, even he asks you to do something that you aren’t obligated to do.... Dunphy’s using his unlikely hypothetical to plant the threat that any noncompliance with an officer’s demands may end with him shooting you... giving lip about your rights may well endanger your life.
Finally, I’d add that I, Doherty, and L.A. Times editor Paul Thornton (also mentioned in Patterico’s post) were hardly the only ones who interpreted Dunphy’s post this way...
