Scholar “Knocked Down,” Arrested for “Disorderly Conduct”
A Tufts University history professor was knocked down and arrested for jaywalking while in the city for a convention.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was attending the American Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta last week when he was stopped by a plainclothes police officer after crossing a street in downtown Atlanta.
“Where I come from, jaywalking is not a crime,” said Fernandez-Armesto, who is British. “It did not occur to me that there was anything wrong with what I was doing.”
And the former Oxford professor, who has written 19 books, said the situation grew more tense when he did not immediately realize it was a police officer who was questioning him.
“When I questioned who he was he said something to the effect of ‘When I give you an order, you obey it,'” Fernandez-Armesto said. “I asked him what his authority was because I didn’t see a badge. Where I’m from, you don’t associate young gentlemen in bomber jackets with the police. But he was extremely upset I had questioned his bona fides.”
Fernandez-Armesto, 56, said he was unable to produce proper identification because he had left his green card in his hotel room.
At that point, he says the officer lost patience, kicked his legs from under him and held him down. Two other officers helped hold him down as he was arrested.
Fernandez-Armesto said he suffered a gash on his forehead and a bruise on his wrist as he tried to break his fall.
“It was the most violence I’ve ever experienced in my life,” he said. “And I was mugged once while at Oxford.”
Police confirmed the professor was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
Remember, this is the city where 92-year-old ladies have to worry about their doors being busted in by police.
Not that the rest of the country is much better. Remember, foreigners are more afraid to come to the U.S. than anywhere else.
Jailed Jaywalker. Charges were eventually dropped.
Just pathetic. Perhaps the Professor should file assault charges on the officer?
No, the officer is suffering now, I bet he’s stuck doing a shit-ton of paperwork
I’m scared to be in th US, too.
…and it starts
#4 – I hear you there. My father was a cop for 31 years in Milwaukee, and upon retirement, I noticed a huge change in his general demeanor. The stress is pretty high (as would be expected in cities like Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles), especially in a world with the Johnnie Cochrans out there putting good cops in the spotlight.
This isn’t an excuse for poor policework, but it’s time we look at our society and ourselves and how we respect authority. Let’s face it, cops don’t receive the same respect they once did 40 years ago.
I’m not afraid of the criminals in your country, I’m worried I might attract the attention of your police or government.
“I must say I didn’t get to experience the Southern hospitality I’d heard so much about,” he said.
That’s a shame. First impressions are important. I can imagine the stories he will tell when he returns home. Still what do you expect from the city that tries to re-brand itself by paying $4 million for a cRAP theme song with lyrics “Get em up, Get em up…” Yeah, that will attract tourists and new businesses to Atlanta.
#6, Let’s face it, cops don’t receive the same respect they once did 40 years ago.
Agreed. Let’s also face the fact that some cops don’t deserve that same respect either.
Where’s Rambo when you need him? 🙂
Who trained these thugs, the SS?
Young man in a leather jacket acting like a thug instead of simply showing his badge? Sounds like poor training or poor leadership, or both. Either could be corrected if the city gave a damn about its image, or wanted an image different from “unsafe to visit.”
Let’s face it, cops don’t receive the same respect they once did 40 years ago.
One earns my respect – you don’t automatically get it because you have a badge and a high school diploma.
Treat me respectfully and I’ll do the same to you.
People in my town complain when the police give out tickets for jaywalking. I guess we whould be thankful they don’t beat us up and put us in jail for it, like they do in Atlanta.
What’s not to understand, this was jaywalking…..JAYWALKING!!1
This cannot be tolerated or all laws come into question.
Right now, seat belt violations in this area are rampant. All kinds of hell break loose once you allow heinous crimes to go unpunished.
#12: True, but if it’s an officer of the law, I start out by giving them the benefit of the doubt. It’s always worked out for me.
And yes, I know there will always be exceptions, but maybe if we didn’t treat them like crap, we’d have less to worry about. My boss always said, “kill ’em with kindness.”
Now he can tell all his friends that he’s been mugged twice!
I just don’t understand why ANY foreigners still come here at all. The US has gone insane with paranoia and violence.
Good! let that be a lesson to all of you ‘dirty foreigners’!
They should have used the ‘water torture’ to extract a confession!
Or have a ‘community safety dog’ to bite him in the balls!
When are the dirt bag ‘non-US’ parasites going to learn to stay the hell out of the US?
#17
The US has gone insane with paranoia and violence?
Really?
Where?
There are isolated incidents, like there have always been… but where is the panic in the streets your hyperbolic screed would imply?
Talkin bout a revolution.
#19, I agree.
The very fact is they are isolated is why we are giving them our attention. The vast majority of cops in this country are very professional and deserve our respect. If there is ever a situation where I require a cop, I feel comfortable a professional will show up.
When they push a bunch of low class dumbasses through the Police Academy, this is what you get. Why can’t the police force attract a better and more moral class of people?
40 years ago most cops went there whole careers without pulling out there weapons. They used common sence and diplomacy to control situations. Now at the slightest thing it is “up against the wall”.
A common thread going through these shameful incidents is how often the cop is a plainclothesman. Sure, they don’t know how to behave, but they’re being over-used, and in inappropriate situations.
I live half a block from the city cop shop and the only interaction I have with them is that they wave to me and say “Hi!” (and I do likewise of course). And I jaywalk with abandon. Next country can seem a world away.
#26, I heard of a case in Toronto where a motorist successfully sued a pedestrian he hit. His argument was that he owned the lane he was driving in. The pedestrian crossed into his lane recklessly. The result is the same as if it was another car that crossed the center of the road or pulled out of a drive.
pedro, old pal, let’s see here –
Jaywalking is nothing more than crossing a street at a place other than where officially designated.
First you liken jaywalking to public urination. That implies that crossing a street is as offensive and unsanitary as pissing in that same street. That’s fairly idiotic.
But that got no traction, so now you suggest that people who cross streets should be run over, then sued. Now that’s not just idiotic, it’s also vicious.
I’m betting your next post will suggest lethal injection for this heinous crime. On second thought, you might not make jaywalking a capital offense unless there were aggravating circumstances, like carrying an Apple product while jaywalking. Then I suppose you’d suggest a sentence of life in the electric chair.
If you’re actually affronted by the sight of someone merely walking across a street, you have issues; when you fantasize about hitting them with cars – and suing them! – well, all I can tell you is, put down that crack pipe.
Really, lotta anger there. d00d, you need to get a grip.
#28 – I’m with Pedro on this one. If we drivers could simply run down pedestrians and then sue them for being in the way, it would be more like a video game and a lot more fun to drive. Next logical step would be to make sidewalks legal alternative traffic lanes. I don’t know why the world needs so many pedestrians anyway.
Too early in the morning. Suffering from caffeine withdrawal here.
“That the cop did wrong was already stablished by all long ago. My point is that so did this guy.”
But the ‘wrong’ that the guy did is nothing compared to the ‘wrong’ that the cop did.
Jaywalking is the most trivial of offenses – that’s what makes the cop’s actions so objectionable.
There’s a Constitutional prohibition against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ which means, among other things, that the severity of punishment is determined by the severity of the offense. And despite what you say, the only person at risk from jaywalking is the jaywalker. If you enjoy life in the nanny state, and feel like you need to be protected from yourself, then fine. But I’ve lived in big cities for a looong time and I have yet to ever hear of any collateral damage to either the driver or to bystanders in any accident involving jaywalkers.
We have had a couple pedestrian fatalities here recently, but both of them were hit by buses – while legally using the crosswalk.
Bottom line: cops have no Goddamned business abusing their police powers to take it out on someone who they mistakenly think isn’t being sufficiently worshipful of their exalted persons. Using a pretext (like “disorderly conduct”) to arrest someone for a non-arrestable offense, which jaywalking is, is an unlawful and immoral abuse of power. And that’s the point of this whole whoop-de-doo.
If the guy had pissed on the cop, then the cop’s action would still have been wrong, but it would have been a lot more justifiable.
“When I give you an order you obey it” and knocking the guys legs out from under him and piling on – all that might be justified if this guy was, f’rinstance, an armed robber who’d been fleeing – but here it’s just another authoritarian clown drunk with power.
For the most part Atlanta cops are polite and helpful, with two exceptions, around Hartsfield-Jackson and the Convention Centers (what better places to station worst of breed?). In those two areas some of them are are just simply rude aggressive a-holes looking for a reason to go “Homeland” on the first person who isn’t one hundred percent compliant. I would imagine that pulling duty at one of those locations is the APD equivalent of being “sent to the Russian Front” or Police Academy hazing. As for the rest of the area, if someone decided to do some non-stop jay-walking there, they would most likely be run down by a Suburban driven by a multi-tasking Buckhead soccer mom trying to gift wrap a chandillier on the passenger seat while on a cell phone, long before they were noticed, let alone stopped by the police.
We had a problem with a guy posing as a plainclothes officer and pulling over women on roads that aren’t busy for some violation and raping and killing them…
I have also seen cops merge into peoples lanes, and then pull them over when they sped up to get out of the way or slamming on the brakes. The charge was either speeding, or blocking the flow of traffic.
There are so many dirty tricks for cops to use when their in a bad mood its sick. Then you have to worry about some thug setting up a car to “pull people over”, kill them and steal their car. I have called 911 and gotten verification that the person behind me was a cop before I pulled over, the cop was pissed but couldn’t do shit since his commanding officer told him to not hold it against me.
pedro, granting what you say, remember that the guy had no idea he’d broken any law.
Now anyone, from anywhere, with half a functioning brain can and does figure that most of the laws in the place they’re visiting are gonna be a lot like the laws at home – but where he comes from, they don’t have such a law, and that’s not the kind of activity that a reasonable person would automatically assume is against the law, since it really put no one at risk besides the actor.
When you don’t know you’ve done something illegal, you aren’t going to assume that the next person you encounter is a police officer. And if that officer doesn’t appear to be one, that’s not his fault either.
Nope. The cop was outta line. Like I say, a badge carries too much authority to be conferred on individuals with power (and maturity) issues.
____
T.D. – Lately here we have a whoop-de-doo about Houston cops shooting unarmed suspects. In one of these cases, the incident was precipitated by a traffic stop. The general public assumes that the stop was legitimate, but anyone familiar with the dirty tricks you mentioned there would be sure to notice the pretext for the stop – the tried and true ‘defective turn signal’ ploy. The cops with the “cops versus everyone else” mentality – AND their bosses – don’t see anything wrong in twisting the intent of the law in order to do what they want to do, Constitution be damned.
There’s no doubt that plenty of bad guys have been nailed after stopping their cars for bogus “equipment violation”s or unprovable claims like “failure to drive in single lane” – but that doesn’t mean shit. The law is the law and, despite what far too many Texan cops think, wearing a badge doesn’t exempt you from the law that the rest of us have to follow. Because bending the rules in a good cause inevitably leads to bending the rules for no good cause – and then the cops become criminals with immunity. Good formula for a police state.
Fuck the system’s “zero tolerance” for drugs; what’s infinitely more important is zero tolerance for misconduct by members of the justice system. THAT’ll get the respect that’s so important to ’em.
#31 – Actually, a guy urinating in public can thereby kill himself–if he urinates on the live rail of a train or subway. It has happened!