An investigative article in today’s San Jose Mercury News [LINK] details how San Jose policing of street crimes has led to allegations of excessive force, false arrests and racial profiling. Specifically, the paper examined what it calls the high number of cases in which police charge people with resisting arrest, without a more serious charge. It found two things: these cases often involve force and frequently start with something innocuous, like police stopping a bicyclist traveling at night without a light. [LINK]
Around the nation, many departments closely monitor cases of resisting arrest because of a concern that the loosely defined crime is a "cover charge" used by errant cops to justify unnecessary force. San Jose police officials last month said, in response to Mercury News questions, that they were instituting a policy to begin tracking such arrests.
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Your discussion has a lot of logic to it: Why should police charge someone with "resisting arrest" if they have no underlying reason to arrest the person in the first place? That's why police often charge members of the public with "assaulting an officer" and "resisting arrest."
ReplyDeleteThe "assaulting an officer" occurs when the member of the public smashes his own nose into the police officer's fist or billy club, and then "resisting arrest" occurs when the member of the public begins to bleed, which is a form of resistance, since it compels police to put on rubber gloves before they can arrest the "subject".
I agree that a stand-alone resisting arrest charge is inherently suspect.
The Police Brutality Blog