It wasn't me! It was the one-armed man!

There is a video floating around of a recent police / citizen encounter.  

Woman gets pulled over.  Cop informs her she was stopped for holding her cellular device in her right hand.  She holds up her left arm - no hand at the end.  Just a nub.

Let's discuss how to go with the flow of the investigation instead of deciding immediately what happened and going with that, and the pitfalls of failure to adjust.

-LEO

PS - video will be shared on "That LEO Guy" IG, FB, TikTok.

Transcript

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Good morning. It's Leo. Happy Saturday, June 6th. Hope you all have a great weekend. And today I'm going to do kind of a commentary on a video that I've seen going around. I've had a few people ask me to do commentaries on videos. I've generally avoided it. There's a million people that are doing things like this, going through analyzing it frame by frame, et cetera, et cetera. I don't really want to do this generally, but this one was pretty funny, and it also illustrates a good point, which is the whole point of that Leo guy show. So the one I'm talking about, if you can't, if you haven't seen it, it's very easy to find. It's a lady with one arm. She's missing her right arm. And the cop pulls her over and says very clearly, I'm pulling you over because you had a cellular device in your right hand. And she just like, really? And she holds up her nub of her right arm. And that's fine. That happens. Maybe she was using her left hand. Maybe you thought you saw something you didn't and made a mistake. That's okay. We're going to talk about next action. It's a phrase my one of my kids' sports coaches uses that I love because it just, you know, it like the Ted Lasso thing of have the mind of a goldfish, have the 10-second memory of a goldfish. Basically forget the past because it's never coming back and you can't change it. Obviously, this is much easier said than done in a lot of ways. We're humans with emotions and issues and all this crap. But when you're wearing the uniform and using your authority, you need to be thinking next action and not thinking with your ego about proving yourself right and what already happened. So I say all that to say the lady wasn't disrespectful. She was kind of just laughing, like, it's because it's funny. The cop, man, I ain't trying to hate on you if you're a listener, but you got to shut off RoboCop mode. And he just kind of was like, well, that's what I saw. That's what I think I saw. And just kept going on. And so what is your next action at the point you realize she has one arm? She was not using that hand. You just said the phone was in your right hand. She doesn't have a right hand. You're objectively wrong. There's a lot of situations like this that happen throughout law enforcement. And I think most cops have a feeling that if I admit I'm wrong, they're going to complain. Or if I got in a fight with the wrong guy, you know, case of mistaken identity, or, you know, I just need to do a cover-up. Like they need to go to jail for obstruction based on this. And for those of you that are civilians and don't know what I'm talking about, you know, these First Amendment auditors, people that get right in cops' face and take video, sometimes things can escalate. Like if you put a cell phone one inch from my nose and follow me around, I mean, I don't want to slap the phone, but I might slap the phone. Like get out of my face and stop touching my face with this cell phone, right? Things do happen. And what do you do next after that? What is your next action? Is it arrest them for obstruction, even if it doesn't fit the code because you got a CYA? Hopefully not. So yeah, I just I thought this was a fun incident because, you know, the way I've always looked at it, and when I was supervising, I would tell my officers this same thing. What happens next matters, not just in what you do, but in what they do. So let's let's run a hypothetical. And it's it's a realistic hypothetical. Let's say this lady who has one arm wasn't quite as nice. Let's say she laughed the first time. She just kind of laughed throughout the incident, like this is effing ridiculous. Uh, but let's say she wasn't. Let's say she gets frustrated. She's got somewhere to be. Her kid is homesick and she needs to be there, and she's getting stopped for something she didn't do. And it's been proven, and this dude is still, you know, fighting her on it. Let's say she decided to speed off and she says, I didn't do anything wrong, and drives away. Well, it's already been proven on the side of the road. I mean, it's not supposed to be kangaroo cord out there, but it's been proven that she didn't do a violation, pretty much. So let's say she had driven off the second or third time she held up her nub and he said, I saw what I saw, she speeds away. Now we're in a different situation. And this is what I always wanted to get through, not just to people that worked for me, but people that worked with me, is if you're in violation of the Fourth Amendment, such as I would argue, continuing to detain somebody after, you know, you're wrong. And this can happen in any of a million different hypothetical scenarios, but you're continuing the stop. The stop's been proven false. You didn't go, you know what? You're right. Have a great day, nubs. Ride off. Like have a laugh with her, or whatever. And she speeds away, and you chase her, because that's what we do. If something runs, we chase it. And it escalates. I mean, it already has escalated at this point. You're in a vehicle pursuit, but you put it in the ditch. You know, she pulls out a gun with her left hand. She obviously wasn't going to do any of this stuff. But had she, and you knew at this point, or reasonably should have known, you might not know because you're in the zone. But what will a court say? That's how we always got to look at it, unfortunately. Is it reasonable to think that she should still be detained? And I've had a very similar one. I mean, this is the one that comes right to the top of my head. An officer who tried to get somebody's ID on a domestic, they wouldn't give it an anonymous call, no real evidence of violence. They wouldn't open the door, et cetera, et cetera, you know, given giving the cops a hard time, but no evidence a crime had been committed besides an anonymous caller saying they heard arguing. And they were kind of wanting to boot the door in and stuff and go in and get that ID. And it's a very similar situation. Like, would you be justified when it escalates? Because you're going into their house, you're infringing upon their Fourth Amendment. Why? So what's your next action going to be? Okay. The point being, everything's already in the past. It's it's perfect for sports because you don't want, you know, some kid missing a shot or shooting a basket and throwing up three bricks in a row and they quit shooting for the game, right? What are you going to do next, as opposed to what already happened? And it's very similar in law enforcement. It's kind of a check your ego thing at the same time. That's that's largely what next action is. It's your ego doesn't matter. You know, what does Ryan Holiday say? Ego is the enemy. So if your ego is going to get you, you know, handcuffing and ticketing people that didn't do stuff, you need to really evaluate how you're doing it because you can get in real trouble doing this stuff. Not only can you violate rights, which isn't great, but you're just you're opening a can of worms. And there's lots of other examples through history, through military history, where had somebody looked at what was going on and gone, does this make any sense? And then chosen a different next action, tragedies would have been averted, massacres wouldn't have happened, genocides would have stopped. But instead, people just went with it because, well, it's what we're already doing, and I'm on this path. And I guess that's the main moral, not only of this regarding specific acute actions, such as a traffic stop on the one-armed woman and you were wrong, but also with investigations. So if you're patrol and you're going into investigations of some sort, what is your next action? What your road is going to change. You're not in a straight river when you're doing any kind of investigation, whether that's an investigation into using a mobile device while driving or speeding or DUI or a wreck, or if it's a homicide or robbery investigation, or some major crime investigation, or shooting, or domestic violence, any of these, it might not be a straight line. And you may, we're humans, you may get an early conceived notion of what took place. You may get to the domestic and she's got a big black eye and he's large and angry. And you're like, you're in the back in your head, you're like, he punched her. He punched her right in the face. And then you find out two minutes later that she got in a car accident yesterday and hit her face on the steering wheel. And if you are not capable of changing gears at that point and going, oh, he still could have punched her, but the evidence is no longer nearly as strong. And it's more frustrating in bigger investigations to have to change your next action based on the information you now have. It can really suck if you've already made an arrest in a murder. I've talked to Alan and Rob on here quite a bit. And then somebody calls you, you make an arrest on a murder, and a tipster calls in and says, Hey, y'all got the wrong guy. I saw the guy you got in the newspaper, it was this other guy. Or gives an alibi. This happens all the time. Hey, it couldn't have been Johnny. He was with me. And there are plenty of investigators who will discard that. And it will bite your ass off at trial because the defense not only has the ability to create smoke and mirrors with it, a lot of time the alibis are BS, but you have to run it down. They don't just have the ability to create smoke and mirrors. They could be right and it could be a not guilty person. You owe it to the investigation, to the integrity of the case, to go and follow that lead, even though it feels like backtracking, double work. If you've worked homicides, you've heard like, we got him. We got our guy. You got facts that point to him. So all that to say, just be ready. You know, if you're going down the river and there's suddenly a big rock in the river, don't keep going straight in your boat and hit that rock. You're gonna have to turn with the flow of the water and adjust. The rock in this case was one arm, and he just ran his boat right into that rock. So I encourage you to turn when circumstances change. This job is all about flexibility and changing as needed as the circumstances change. And you're not gonna change what already happened if you already got there and said, I saw you with your phone in your right hand. Real tough. I saw you with your phone, you're being cited for it. And she shows you no right hand, you got to adjust fire. Please be flexible. Thank you. Have a great Saturday. Bye.