I'm Not Dude!

[newGuy12]

We've always held police officers to be 'servants of the people' not just there to uphold the law but to help people. it's for the protection of the weak as much as persecution of the criminals. It's only in recent times that the status of poilcie officers has fallen somewhat. They were and probably still are expected to set an example in behaviour not just for teens but for everyone. yes it's very hard when being abused to hold ones temper and reply politely but it's what you do because you have to be above the behaviour that you are trying to curtail.
A police officer should behave respectfully towards everyone because he is the representative of the law, they have to be seen to impartial and just. It doesn't mean kowtowing to yobs or being weak. It means being strong, moral and not giving into having tantrums.
Why behave respectfully to career criminals, murderers, gobby teenagers etc? Because it makes you the bigger person, above their standards and it makes you right!

I have said this before, and I will say it again. The MAIN reason we have a police department is to keep normal people from being hurt by BAD PEOPLE. Yes, there are some people who are just BAD. They wish to do us harm!

Now, We have heard from one user of this board already who knows this man personally, and vouches that he has done good work in very rough areas. That is the important part. You see, if some guy has a bomb and is threatening people who do you call?

THE POLICE

Why? Because they will break out the hardware and do what has to be done. No more thinking, get in there and take that bad person down! No joking, this is serious.

Now, on the other hand, you have these kids skateboarding, maybe they chip off some concrete with their skateboards, they may run into someone and knock them down, they are a nuisance. So, the police have to stop them.

Now, IDEALLY, you would have some "tourist friendly" police officers handle this in a more gentile way. Ideally. But this is a messed up world, right? You need tough, riot-ready, cock-strong people on the police force, no joke, for when the REAL BAD stuff goes down. The guy we see here, he would be the kind of guy you wish to be on task when someone is held hostage or some such of thing, because he has the personality of aggression that would be useful here.

I personally think that its a lost cause to try to have police held to too high of a standard. When things like this happen, as we see here, there is a public outcry and it will all work out, no problem. But, it is too difficult to ask people to be all things to all people all of the time. No one would then work in the field. It would be too difficult.

This kind of thing happens all of the time, it is the nature of trying to keep a police force. This is not really news. It has been brought to light, and will blow over (in due time).

There are things going on in the world that are FAR WORSE than this guy getting too strong with these kids, that's all that I am saying. It only surprises me that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. What kind of folks do you get to do this job? Tough people, people who are not adverse to being in a freaking fire fight. They may not be the most "nice" people. That's okay, they have to be effective under very hazardous conditions sometimes, that is what is important.

 

[Tez3]

Yes you can have a force that is all things to all people. I'm off to work now to do just that so will have to post more when I get back after my shift. The main reason for a police force is not just to get the bad people,there's far more to it than that.

 

[Tez3]

Just a quick PS. Don't ever mistake treating people respectfully for being soft. You can reprimand people quite severely and still treat them respectfully. it's samantics perhaps but it's very important that the words we use accurately portray what we mean. I'm not advocating being soft on people who break the law but there are ways of behaving that are right and wrong.

 

[arnisador]

One thing I'm curious about is the terminology used here. In my country and in Europe we have 'police officers' in the States you have 'law enforcement officers' and I'm curious to know what differences people see between them as I think it has bearing on this thread.

A police officer usually means someone with local authority: A town or city police officer, and maybe county sheriffs and police/state troopers (though one might distinguish them from police officers). A LEO is a more general term that includes those cases as well as federal law enforcement officials with arrest powers such as FBI special agents, Border Patrol agents, etc.

 

[Andrew Green]

We've always held police officers to be 'servants of the people' not just there to uphold the law but to help people. it's for the protection of the weak as much as persecution of the criminals. It's only in recent times that the status of poilcie officers has fallen somewhat. They were and probably still are expected to set an example in behaviour not just for teens but for everyone. yes it's very hard when being abused to hold ones temper and reply politely but it's what you do because you have to be above the behaviour that you are trying to curtail.

"Protect and Serve" not "Intimidate and Punish" should definitely be the goal of the police department. While Canadian Police are far from perfect, I also find looking at some of the US counterparts to be quite amazing. Guys like Joe Arpaio, that gets elected over and over again, but I look at and think he should be in jail, kind of amaze me.

A lot of it probably is words, "Law Enforcement Officer" does carry a different message then "Police Officer", and a even bigger difference with "Public servant." "War on Drugs" certainly doesn't help the matter. Wording does effect the perception of the persons function, and likely behaviour of those the description is used towards.

 

[BlackCatBonz]

ok, after rereading the posts of those who are sticking up for officer Rivieri i change my mind.
attacking that kid wasnt enough!!! i heard that these teenagers roughly fit the description of thousands and thousands of other kids their age, and some of them are criminals :xtrmshock: we should convict them now BEFORE they have a chance to prove they might be unlike us!

we should get the next MT meet and greet scheduled to be held in the same place that officer Rivieri likes mistreating people who are minding their own business *oops i mean enforcing his ego *OOPS!! i mean enforcing the law!!
this way we can let him make us just like him, bring some advil cuz i bet everyones ears will be hurting after not too long.

...wait a minute he might not be working there anymore because he was so far out of line he doesnt remember that there ever was a line. oh well, nevermind continue with M&G as scheduled i spose. darn

OR!!!! those who think that the government and its officials should be able to do what they want to whomever they want to, there happen to be places on this planet that currently will give you what you want. thats right!! you dont even need to finish that time machine youve been working on in the garage to go back 70 years and enjoy the previous Reich you can be oppressed and mistreated in a number of countries in the 21st century :highfive:!!! so if being surrounded by people that arent forced to be the same as you just doesnt cut it, MOVE!

but dont try and turn my America into the land of the helpless, and the home of the oppressed.

:soapbox:

he hardly mistreated that whiny kid....c'mon dude, gimme a break....get real.....

Maybe we should just let kids do whatever the hell they want......

 

[Sukerkin]

"Maybe we should just let kids do whatever the hell they want......"

I take your point entirely. Just look where doing that's gotten us ...

 

[Fiendlover]

NO WAY! im sorry but that kid didnt deserve that. my forensic teacher is an ex cop and he talks about videos like these and situations were we wonder if the cop is over reacting so he tells us to put us in his shoes and i am doing the for "officer Riveri" and i disagree with what he did. he completely overreacted. the kid plainly said that he didnt hear him cuz of the ipod and whats with "if u show some respect you'll live longer"? was that a threat? that kid is 14 years old and dude was not meant to disrespect him in anyway and the officer shouldve understood that. no i think that he had to right to even come close to going that far. :rpo::ticked::321:

 

[Sukerkin]

I think perhaps our disperate ages are colouring our perceptions of the same scene.

"Dude" is no way to address a policeman. Over here (in England), when I was the age of the skater-boiz in the video, such behaviour in context would see you down the station, with a call to your parents to come for a 'chat'. That call would see you in a much greater world of hurt than we've seen here.

Trust me, I speak from experience.

 

[MJS]

Maybe we should just let kids do whatever the hell they want......

I don't think that kids should be allowed to do whatever they want, but there is a way to get your point across without having to act like the officer in the clip did.

 

[arnisador]

"Dude" is no way to address a policeman. Over here (in England), when I was the age of the skater-boiz in the video, such behaviour in context would see you down the station, with a call to your parents to come for a 'chat'.

We see it as a Freedom of Speech issue over here, and as you know we have a more liberal interpretation of that. You may see it as politeness or social order at issue, but on this side of the pond he has the freedom to (unwisely) address a LEO as 'dude'.

If it was my kid, I'd want him hauled down to the station and would want them to call me. But as a rule, you can be disrespectful to authorities over here. After all, if we hadn't been disrespectful to authority, we'd still be speaking English! (Er, well, you know what I mean.)

 

[LuzRD]

he hardly mistreated that whiny kid....c'mon dude, gimme a break....get real.....

Maybe we should just let kids do whatever the hell they want......

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mistreat
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/whine

"c'mon dude" :jaw-dropping: really?

give yourself a break.

maybe we should let police do whatever the hell THEY want.......

You know how many kids I see crossing against the light and telling the drivers that slam on the breaks for them to go f themselves......too many in my eyes.

This is the same kid that slashed a cops throat in my little town a few years ago, these are the same kids that rob the local gas station at both knife and gunpoint while a husband and wife are trying to make a living running it.

Too many times we just pass it off as kids being kids.
I don't know about a lot of you guys.....but my parents would have made sure that I was fined, or punished to the full extent of the law if I chose to break it.
Tough bananas for these kids and kudos to the cops......
My Father-in-law was a prison guard and saw the result of a lack of discipline in a prison full of 18 year old gangstas.

Lord of the flies...........

youve seen THESE kids crossing against the light and telling drivers to f' themselves? slash someones throat?? committing armed robbery??? i find that kind of hard to believe.
your assuming that everyone in their age group is a dangerous criminal? well thats certainly not the case. theres a word for forming oppinions about people or groups without reason. should i link the definition for prejudice or can you figure that one out?

kids being kids? yes they were kids being kids actually.
and kids their age are sometimes skateboarders which means that they like to skateboard and thats all it means. anything more than that generalizes all skateboarders as being the same.

expecting a child to be responsible for their actions is a great maturity builder in my oppinion. however how would your family feel if you were attacked by a cop for riding a bicycle across a large open public place just because you werent "supposed to"? id personally would be furious if someone thought it was ok to manhandle a child of mine for ANY reason let alone no reason at all. there is no way to call it acceptable!
(i changed skateboard to bicycle incase some people dont realize they are pretty much the same in this context. and see if it changes anything)

i agree with everyone who thinks that the kid in question shouldve acted more maturely and respectful, however answering someones question in a way that they dont like is not an excuse to put your hands on them or verbally assault them!


"I'll smack you upside the head"

"Your parents don't put a foot in your butt quite enough"

are people forgetting that they are defending someone who clearly thinks violence solves lifes little problems??

 

[BlackCatBonz]

You really think that kid was manhandled?

If my child came home and said a cop yelled at her for riding her bike somewhere she wasn't supposed to be riding it.....I would ask her what else she did to make the cop yell at her.

I don't understand this feeling sorry for the kids business.........I'm sure the police have nothing better to do then harass dopey teenage kids obeying the law.

 

[LuzRD]

by definition, yes.
was the kid beaten or harmed? no. but that doesnt change the fact that officer Rivieri wrestled the skateboard from the boy and shoved him back to the ground when he tried to get up. he didnt tell the kid to give him the board until he was already wrestling for it, and he told the kid to sit down AS he was throwing him on the ground.
none of it seems reasonable to me in the least.

i COMPLETLY agree with you about a cop yelling at a child! and if this was a video showing officer Rivieri yelling at the kid in question with NO PERSONAL ATTACKS and not getting physical i would have zero problem with it.
i feel sorry for anyone who is mistreated by anyone, and when it happens to be a cop that steps over the line alot of people see it as "theres nothing i can do about it". if there wasnt a video would you believe these kids if they told you that an officer started yelling at them and shoved one to the ground and in general flipped out simply because they were on skateboards and one of them wasnt respectful enough?

 

[BlackCatBonz]

I don't think that kids should be allowed to do whatever they want, but there is a way to get your point across without having to act like the officer in the clip did.

I agree with you.....and maybe i sound like I am being a jerk.
BUT
Sometimes you gotta slap a person across the face to wake em up.

 

[jks9199]

One thing I'm curious about is the terminology used here. In my country and in Europe we have 'police officers' in the States you have 'law enforcement officers' and I'm curious to know what differences people see between them as I think it has bearing on this thread.
We've always held police officers to be 'servants of the people' not just there to uphold the law but to help people. it's for the protection of the weak as much as persecution of the criminals. It's only in recent times that the status of poilcie officers has fallen somewhat. They were and probably still are expected to set an example in behaviour not just for teens but for everyone. yes it's very hard when being abused to hold ones temper and reply politely but it's what you do because you have to be above the behaviour that you are trying to curtail.
A police officer should behave respectfully towards everyone because he is the representative of the law, they have to be seen to impartial and just. It doesn't mean kowtowing to yobs or being weak. It means being strong, moral and not giving into having tantrums.
Why behave respectfully to career criminals, murderers, gobby teenagers etc? Because it makes you the bigger person, above their standards and it makes you right!

It's kind of interchangeable..Police Officers are refered to as Law Enforcement Officers or LEO's..It can get real confusing especially when you throw the Deputy Sheriffs into the mix..I call my buddy that works for Cuyahoga County Sheriffs Department "A Dep"...The one that works for the Highway Patrol "A Statie"..If you work in the jail you're "a C.O."...Confusing ain't it????

It's important to remember that there are some HUGE differences between US law enforcement and British law enforcement (and, in fact, government). In the US, the basic unit of government is NOT the nation; it's the state or even, in some ways, the locality. For a law enforcement perspective, that means that the law enforcement body with the most day-to-day interaction with people is from the smallest body of government, the municipality or county (if there is no municipality). State law enforcement agencies often have full authority anywhere in the state, but only to enforce the state code. Federal bodies only have authority for violations of federal laws, which often means they only have authority if the offense somehow is seen to cross state lines. (And I'm actually over-simplifying all of this!) Each force also has it's own name for it's actual law enforcers: municipalities often have "police" and "police officers, counties typically have "sheriff's offices" and sometimes police, state bodies typically are either highway patrols or police departments (both often titled officers)... and federal LEOs are typically "agents" or "special agents."

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2004 there were more than 800,000 LEOs in approximately in more than 18,000 agencies in the US, including state, local, special jurisdictions, and federal law enforcement agencies. The numbers are almost certainly similar today. Most US law enforcement agencies are small, numbering less than 40 officers (and many are in teens or single digits).

 

[MJS]

You really think that kid was manhandled?

Actually yes, I do. What reason did he have for doing what he did? To take the skate board away? Why did he need to do that? Did he take all of the boards? IMO, he had no control over that situation.

If my child came home and said a cop yelled at her for riding her bike somewhere she wasn't supposed to be riding it.....I would ask her what else she did to make the cop yell at her.

Why did he have to yell? To instill some sort of fear into these kids? And then people wonder why there is such disrespect for the cops. Perhaps talking like a normal person, would have been a better approach.

 

[MJS]

I agree with you.....and maybe i sound like I am being a jerk.
BUT
Sometimes you gotta slap a person across the face to wake em up.

No, I don't think you're being a jerk. You're voicing your opinion, I'm voicing mine, and others are doing the same. Some are agreeing and some disagreeing.

I think that being firm and yelling are 2 different things. This guy was saying things that IMO were not proper.

 

[Ninjamom]

"Don't get defensive with me, son, or you'll spend some time in Juvenile"
Possibly inflamatory, but not over the line.

"You give that attitude to your father - I'm not your father."
Insulting and unnecessary.

"You give that attitude to me, I'll smack you upside the head."
Illegal.

Yelling: "Shut your mouth, I'm talking"
Unprofessional

He went from slightly inflamatory to simple assault in less than 35 seconds.

The kid was being an obnoxious twit. But there is no way Officer Rivieri's actions are in any sense defensible, and I am apalled that a large percentage of people are excusing it. I hope he gets fired, and I am sure he will get sued.

I made each of my children watch this video, several times. We analyzed it together. I had to tell them about the respect they must have for authority, whether the individual holder of that authority is behaving correctly or not. I had to go over this officer's bad example and explain why they need to trust other authorities to handle it later (parent, other police officials, etc.), when any authority figure gets out of line - their responsiblity is still to respect the authority. I had to force the conversation back to the behavior of the kids, who were roughly the same age as two of mine.

I made a point of how the conversation opens with one of the skateboarders saying, "Yes sir," and how that skateboarder is left alone and never even questioned again for the rest of the encounter. It actually was a big help for my youngest son, who is high-functioning on the autism spectrum. He was able to grasp the concept that, sometimes, the best thing to do in a situation is just shut up.

All-in-all, it was very helpful for my kids to see that video clip, however much I wish the incident had never happened.

 

[LuzRD]

Ninjamom that is great that you were able to use this video in a positive way for your own kids!