abaduck

Mr. Fiorino was going about his lawful business, carrying openly, when the Sgt. initiated an encounter with him. The open carry was clearly the only issue; he wasn't suspected of any crime. Mr. Fiorino declared at the very outset that he was lawfully carrying and offered to show his permit. This was refused and he was ordered to kneel in the dirt. Things went downhill from there. As I said to lad12derff, if the 'price' you pay for exercising your right to open carry is to be required to kneel in the dirt on a semi-regular basis, then the right becomes entirely theoretical; and in my view the legality of those orders becomes dubious to say the least. Posts I've read in other fora, describing encounters in other states, or even other parts of PA, where open carry is legal, describe encounters that are polite, of the 'keep your hands where I can see them while I check your permit' variety, and in a couple of minutes it's 'have a nice day'. If the Philly Sgt. had conducted himself in the same manner we wouldn't be having this conversation. *edit* I'll add a thought; I appreciate that if the Philly Sgt. had conducted himself in the 'polite' manner with the wrong guy, he might be dead. It's difficult. How to set the balance right? Dead cops are a bad thing. Hassling legal gun owner so much they give up is a bad thing; it makes an a** of the open carry law. What to do? I DO see both sides. But - correct me if I'm wrong - very few bad guys open carry. And it was obvious as soon as this guy opened his mouth that he was intelligent and articulate. The guys in Seattle sounded like, and were, gang members. This guy didn't. He sounded like a geek. He sounded a bit of a smartass, but that ain't a crime. Mike

There's a backstory to this you may not be aware of; the guy had been hassled on previous occasions, for open carry. On one occasion his pistol was confiscated for five months for no good reason I'm aware of. He decided to record any future encounters with cops, and frankly I don't blame him. Either open carry is legal, or it isn't. If it's legal, and cops think it shouldn't be, the way to go is to lobby to change the law, not invent restrictions that don't exist, and hassle people who open carry until it becomes a purely theoretical 'right' that no-one actually dares exercise anymore. Mike.

There are two sides to every approach. When a cop, who is supposed to protect and serve and treat respectful citizens politely, instead lets loose with a bunch of profanity, they're effectively saying 'I know I shouldn't talk to you like this but guess what, I don't care, I don't give an *expletive* about PR-friendly polices, they don't apply to ME or YOU and I'm going to drop f-bombs until you realise that, and I want your submission'; it's a form of intimidation. That's the expanded version of your 'means business'. I'm not a cop, I don't have your job, I don't deal with what you have to deal with on the streets, I accept that, Sometimes that language might be justified to get the job done, I agree. Other times it isn't. The situation posted in this thread sounds dumb, I agree. Here's another example to counterbalance, and this is the only reason I'm posting to this thread. Have you heard of Mark Fiorino, and what happened to him when he exercised his legal right to open carry in Philly? He was walking down the street, he was nothing but law-abiding, polite and respectful, and he got a lot of aggression and f-bombs in response: I found this rather disturbing. Mike

'other than in the performance of his or her duties...' - I can see arguments developing there. What about the helmet cams some guys wear? Are they saying it's a crime to take purely personal photos during downtime, rehab, whatever? Does 'performance... duties' only cover photos you're taking under orders, or also those you haven't been specifically ordered to take but grab when you have a free moment in case they're useful for training purposes or whatever? To some extent it's simply codifying common sense - 'career or volunteer, you're here to WORK, not piss around taking photos'. But I'm uneasy about using the criminal law for such purposes; this should be a department disciplinary matter, not a criminal offence with jail time. Mike

Crime Cop, you're correct in what you say, and most cases are as clear-cut as you describe; I don't want my post to be misinterpreted as disagreeing with that. But as I said in my post, I think it's in the hard cases where things are less clear-cut than the neighbourhood crack house that things will get legally sticky. (I'm a Brit by birth, and the UK legal system has no concept whatever of 'fruit of the poisonous tree'; you can be convicted on the basis of ANY evidence there, no matter how many laws were broken in getting it - so it's an issue I take some interest in) Mike

I'm entirely sympathetic to the problem, but if an agency tried to suspend me on that basis - simply that I was one of the people who had been there in a certain time window - I would resign forthwith. You do NOT punish the innocent to get the guilty. In school I once had a teacher try to give me a punishment, as part of a class collective punishment, for something I had not done. I refused point-blank, and I both taught & learned a lesson about justice, and standing up for yourself when you know you're in the right. Sorry, but this is a subject I've always felt strongly about. Mike

This is interesting. I'm NOT liberal, and I foresee trouble ahead; I can see this, eventually, being reversed or made more restrictive in subsequent SC decisions, as less clear-cut cases come up. I'm concerned that this may give officers too much power to force entry and search... it's easy to say 'well we *thought* we smelled drugs', or 'well we heard noises that we *interpreted* as evidence being destroyed'... you see where I'm coming from? I don't like to say it but it's true; I'm certain there are a few officers out there who will misuse the 'cover' this decision gives them in an unreasonable manner... it's easy to say you thought you smelled or thought you heard, and hard to disprove. Was he destroying evidence or putting up shelves? Was she destroying evidence or did you just happen to knock when she was on the toilet? It could all get a bit tricky. Mike

No-one in my family has any connection to the fire service, to my knowledge. I guess I'm starting a new tradition. Mike

@ JFLYNN, Cogs, & 16fire5: I think the big lesson to take from the UK system is that they do 'more with less' on three fronts: 1. Big organisations: nothing smaller than a county, some cover several counties - hell, Strathclyde covers at least ten counties as far as I can remember, including the large city of Glasgow + suburbs. So you get significant economies of scale, and central planning and allocation of resources; I haven't counted number, but I get the strong impression they manage with a lot less apparatus per head of population than we do. That's probably the single biggest factor. 2. Less people: retained or wholetime, UK seems to run light by American standards. And yes there tend to be fewer retained members, as compared with American volunteers, but they do tend to be extremely active. 3. Less water! Yes they do still mount an interior attack with something strongly resembling a booster reel, but building construction plays a large part here; not much wood frame, traditional British houses tend to be what we would call ordinary construction. So a generally lower fire load, both in terms of structure and contents. UK tactics are big on what they call "quick water" - aiming to have water on the fire in well under a minute from arriving at the structure, and gas cooling tactics. I wouldn't make so much of the difference between retained & volunteer; in my view the huge organisational differences between UK & USA are the most important. If you see merit in the UK system, the first thing to do is consolidate at nothing smaller than the county level - then start thinking about terms of service. Mike

I'll bite, and tell you about the UK. The UK doesn't have fire departments; they have fire brigades, and a brigade doesn't cover an area smaller than a county. Some have amalgamated and cover more than one county. So, no local fire departments in the American sense. This has been the case for a very long time - certainly from the second world war, when all existing firefighting resources were, in effect, nationalized, and there was a single National Fire Service for the duration of the war. This big difference, that during the war the North American continent never came under direct attack, whilst the UK was bombed heavily, is mostly responsible for the organizational differences. Are there volunteers? Yes, there are a very few areas - mostly very remote rural areas with exceedingly low call volumes - in the brigades where 'first aid' fire cover is provided by pure volunteers. Usually they don't have apparatus or SCBA, perhaps just a trailer with basic equipment, maybe some buckets, a portable pump & hose etc. For the vast, vast majority of the country, the firefighters are not volunteers; they are 'wholetime' or 'retained'. 'Wholetime' means what we would call 'career' - exactly the same as here. 'Retained' firefighters operate a bit like our volunteers - they have day jobs and carry pagers. When the tones drop, they respond to the fire station and get the apparatus out. But they're paid. They're paid an annual bounty or 'retainer' - hence 'retained' - and they're paid at union hourly rates for time spent training and responding to calls. And they have specific duty hours when they're contractually obliged to respond to all calls; they 'clock in' and 'clock out' of their duty hours by cellphone or computer. They're more like part-time career firefighters, and they can and do join the union. Training is similar for both. So it's more than just 'paid per call'. Obviously big cities are staffed entirely by 'wholetime' firefighters, and 'retained' firefighters are in smaller towns and rural areas. As far as I know, there are no mixed crews of retained & wholetime firefighters on the same apparatus - so no combo departments as we would think of them. What you do sometimes get is a fire station with a wholetime dayshift and a retained nightshift, for instance. Oh, and UK firefighters do not do EMS; the ambulance/paramedic service is entirely separate, run by the NHS. Hope that helps. Mike

Very few people fail to show at court when it's required. Mostly it isn't. When they don't co-operate then yes they have to be picked up. Courts don't normally operate outside business hours. All I can say is it works in the UK, and I've seen the kind of problem that can occur in the US system at first hand. They suspended my wife and ignored the matter, for a trivial paperwork offence; that's bad and wrong. However I note your last paragraph; we're all entitled to an opinion but you base yours on a hell of a lot of experience so perhaps I should listen to it Mike

No, you wouldn't spend any time in jail. Happened to a mate of mine. Serious speeding offence for which he could possibly have had his license suspended as punishment, which means he didn't get the option to pay a fixed penalty, he HAD to go to court to be sentenced by a judge, even if he was pleading guilty. He mixed up his court date and didn't attend. Warrant issued, next night police came to his house, picked him up, took him to the station, processed him, bailed him to appear on another date, he was home within the hour. That's how it works - being arrested and bailed on a written promise to appear is a wake-up call for anyone who pisses around. 99% of people don't piss around. If you fail to answer a simple traffic ticket, i.e. fail to pay a fixed penalty OR contest it in court, it gets recorded as a default judgement against you and enforced in the same manner as a civil penalty or tax arrears; it'll go to collections, and ultimately if you still don't pay you'll have bailiffs at your door seizing your goods. You don't get arrested and you can't have your license suspended, but you pay - plus you pay a lot of costs if you arse around. It's not really germane, but by the way I take a different view to you on driving; I regard driving as a right, not a privilege. Freedom of movement is a hallmark of a free society, whether on foot or on horseback or behind the wheel. As a society we have, perfectly sensibly, taken the stance that, like the right to bear arms, it's a right which needs to be regulated to a degree by the state - so we make drivers pass a test (far too easy in my view but that's another story) before they're allowed to drive, for instance. But driving remains a right, not a privilege - not a privilege to be doled out, or withheld, by the state for any reason it thinks fit. Mike

Mike

1. You don't get away with anything; if you fail to appear in court (and haven't contacted the court to explain yourself or have it rescheduled) you get arrested. 2. The system works perfectly well in other countries; as I explained, in the UK it's not possible to suspend or revoke a license in absentia, and it's only possible to suspend a license as a punishment, not for failing to pay a fixed penalty. Mike

Hmmm. I used to work in a village just outside the small market town of Royston, England. Very nice sleepy little market town, not much crime. The police there recently announced they had been approved for a pilot project; Royston is to be the first town entirely ringed by cameras. Automatic plate recognition cameras on every single road in and out of the town. All vehicle movements to be logged in a database. They actually said in the local paper they were proud and pleased that the movements of every car would be monitored and logged, and no-one would be able to enter or leave town without them knowing about it and recording it. It's called the 'database state'. Be VERY careful where this road leads to. It's hugely controversial in the UK, where surveillance has gone considerably further than in the USA. http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2011/03/britains-first-town-with-nowhere-to-hide.html As I said when I heard about the Royston situation... '1984' was a WARNING, not a bloody INSTRUCTION MANUAL! Mike

If that was directed at my wife's situation, the answer is that she sent in a guilty plea & cheque immediately. Unknown what their final fate was but it appears that the cheque wasn't cashed; maybe it's still in a pile in the basement of the courthouse. That IS someone else's fault. Mike

Does suspension get the accused into court? It certainly didn't in my wife's case, because there was no notification. At the very least there should be some automatic escalation in cases where a license is suspended in absentia, so that if a suspension isn't resolved in, say, two weeks, a reminder is issued, another two weeks a demand to surrender the license to DMV is issued by registered mail, another two weeks a warrant for arrest. As it is, Scarsdale claimed they 'should have' sent ONE letter by regular mail - which we absolutely did not receive - and they then ignored it for two years until we found out by chance. So she had been driving suspended, illegally but entirely innocently, she could have been arrested for that, it probably voided her insurance, it would definitely have caused a big problem at her citizenship interview (due in a few weeks) and if she *had* been arrested it would have caused an even bigger problem there. She works in a position of trust in the financial industry, and ANY record of arrest would take a lot of explaining and could be career-limiting. There is NO excuse for a system which permits such mistakes to happen and such serious problems to arise. I like the UK system; for any situation for which a suspension of license is possible, the accused is *required* to appear in court, in person, with their license. The license is then physically taken off them in court, so the situation that affected my wife could never arise. If they don't show in court, a warrant for arrest is issued, and the police will pick them up and hold them or bail them to another date. If it's a minor administrative offence, like expired registration or inspection, for which suspension can't be imposed as a punishment, it can't be imposed for failing to pay the fine either; it's collected as a civil debt. Mike

"A DMV spokesman said the traffic tickets never expire, and the town can still proceed with suspending people's licenses, even if the violations are years old." Now that ain't justice; how in hell can anyone be expected to remember or contest a ticket from 1993?! If the town let the ball drop for so long I think they're on a hiding to nothing. Better systems need to be put in place. My wife recently thought she had lost her license (I found it in the washing machine!) and went on the DMV website to request a replacement. It said 'no dice, your license is suspended'. WHAT?! Turns out she had had a ticket for something trivial - expired registration or something - and the town (Scarsdale) had never cashed the check, and promptly had her license suspended instead. She was NEVER notified of any of this and had unknowingly been driving on a suspended license for two years. It should absolutely NOT be possible to suspend a license without a court appearance; that's bad and wrong. Only by a judge, and only in person. Mike

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_128520830557463 Mike

I should damn well hope 'sealed' means only against casual inquiry. If it's a sensitive/trusted position - such as firefighter, cop, CIA, NSA etc. etc. - nothing is (or certainly nothing should be) sealed; a background check for such positions will get everything. Mike

I read the previous poster's comment as referring to the... shall we say, undisciplined... discussion board on the *LoHud* site. It could certainly benefit from some adult supervision. At worst, it's an ambiguous comment and we should refrain from attack until the PP clarifies whether he/she referred to LoHud or EMTBravo. Mike

You're totally right Tom, but... I would have a LOT more sympathy for arguments along those lines if it wasn't for the bloody bridges. Permit me to rant briefly. I came back from PA late one night recently. Journey went like this: PA - start of tailback for GWB: 120 miles, 2 hours. Approach to GWB: 2 miles, 2 hours. GWB tolls - home: 15 miles, 20 mins. To put it bluntly, who gives a flying f*** about us closing lanes for safety when bridge authority haven't the slightest problem causing huge tailbacks purely for profit? And this kind of delay is pretty routine, judging by reports I hear on traffic news. The usual complaint seems to be not enough cash lanes. Fair enough. There should absolutely be a law stating that, any time the delays exceed, say, 15 mins, they have to open the barriers on all lanes and cease charging tolls until the delays are cleared. I'm astonished there isn't such a law already; it would be VERY popular, and very right. In what universe is a two hour delay to pay a f****** toll considered to be acceptable? Mike

Ahhh now the slightly more specific example I can agree 100% with. I had in mind more a situation where, for instance, a member was instructed to perform a quick primary search for civilians, nothing else, and get the hell out. If they then went rummaging in a bag... did they expect to find a casualty there?! That's freelancing and disobeying specific orders; I can't see how the officer who gave the order and/or the IC running the incident can be liable for that. The scenario you describe is worse than freelancing, IMHO, it's freelancing with the implied consent of the IC. How can an IC expect to maintain authority and accountability if they let that happen? I'm bloody sure any of my Chiefs would have pulled me up sharply if they had seen me doing such a thing. I've seen a member at an incident head towards the rear of the structure. Chief sees this and calls them back... 'where he hell were you going?'... 'I thought I should do a 360'.... 'good thought, but did I order you to do it? No? Then stay right here...'. Yes, in your scenario, IMHO they should be held liable, and I can see how I made your case Would the law hold them liable? I dunno, I'm a fireman not a lawyer. Mike

That's a bit too general Tom... it would depend how the call was dispatched and what orders the member was given. Were they supposed to be in offensive or defensive mode? The way you state 'goes rummaging through' makes it sound more like they were freelancing or at least acting beyond the scope of their orders (and/or scope of training)... in which case I can't see any liability attaching to IC or SO. I don't recall the 'rummaging' technique being part of hazmat tech training... and I don't recall getting up close and personal with a known hazmat situation being part of defensive mode hazmat ops training... In general though yes, you do have a point... if an IC orders a member to do something they *know or should have known* is beyond their training or qualification, that sounds to me like something for which they could well be liable. Mike

Very well said. It's time for some plain speaking: I dare say Henry was a basically nice kid and a good guy. But he made a series of bad to disastrous decisions that night and, to be blunt, he died an a$$hole. The family are going to have to deal with that sooner or later. Yes - and I'm not thinking of Officer Hess; the Henrys and their lawyer are making more enemies in more places than anyone could or should, however much money they have: this could get even more ugly for them, if they continue on this road. Mike