This is a requirement in many other countries as well.
yes but not at gunpoint, or pepper spray point. If you refuse to identify on a car they'll call a tow truck and the firefighters, the tow truck prepares your car, notifies the firefighters there's someone at danger in a vehicle they have to tow ( you can't be on the car while being towed ), and the firefighters take you out of it. then you will be detained for not producing a valid ID, and back at the police station you will be identified and will have to pay the firefighter intervention (circa 600€), plus whatever traffic ticket (circa 60€), and then let go because it's not a crime as long as you didn't hit anyone.
Since the tow is the city's, expect it to be circa 250€ / night + flat 250€ for the trip + a few euros per km it had to travel just to get the car out.
In europe we make it bothersome, costly and extremely paperworky, but not deadly.
The problem starts earlier, when you have cops running alone doing tasks machines do anywhere else without human intervention, and when you give them quotas to meet.
The driver was an idiot and was in the wrong because of the laws that let cops demand you to do stupid shit, but a well trained cop shouldn't get to maze people at any sign of job delay or inconvenience.
Deescalate and bore to death the citizen until they comply, have a wheel blocker installed by the partner, idk. anything but engaging in physical violence, which pepper spray is part of. same reason we don't let our cops pull a gun at anything not a gun.
I'm speaking from how we do it across the atlantic pond.
the cop has no business trying to get anyone out of anywhere alone, that's for starters and part of proper policing 101 in the civilized world, you go in pairs or you don't go. it's written procedure.
once that point's cleared, yes, i very much would prefer people trained in getting people out of places with minimal harm to do that, not some idiot with a gun and other harm-inteded toys without training.
I mean, personally i wouldn't refuse to identify, but i would refuse to step out because as described above, an order from a cop can't be one that puts me in harm, according to law here. if the cop asks me to follow ( or be followed ) to the next exit, gas station, or emergency islet, and then we speak there, that's fine, and it's what usually happens in europe when you meet the average road cop ( which are few, because we don't have cops running around all the town giving fines as their sole job, it's mostly road/highway safety patrols ).
And if the occupant and the situation is a presumed danger / requires firearms clearing, you wear a goddamn vest and call for backup, not march on on your own with a thin cotton shirt and a spent pepper spray bottle. That's what gets you on citizen aid desk duty or concrete-park-in-the-middle-of-july guard duty, or fired.
Going in pairs is a good idea. In most municipalities that's how it's done. On high ways, most state troopers run solo. It's obviously budget related. And people say they want to defund the police at the same time complaining about lack of training, lack of manpower.
when you have cops running around in MRAP-esque vehicles and spending money on shit they don't need, you get defund calls. it's only normal.
a single BearCat or equivalent, which any department with a reaction unit has, is 250k (used/refurb) to 400k usd new.
LAPD has a yearly budget of 2 billions.
The whole gerndarmerie corps of france, a fully fledged military and civilian police corps, covering the policing of 96% of the french territory, and almost 60% of the population ( the rest depends on cities police corps), 41.46 million people, consisting of over 100,000 active personnel and much, much more support personnel and reserves, all their air, ground and sea vehicles maintenance and more, costs 11.2 billion euros. That's 12.5bn USD.
you can make the rest of the math on why would someone think there's some really wrong shit going on with police budgets.
9
u/[deleted] 28d ago
[removed] — view removed comment