The problem, of course, is that compliance is rarely enough to guarantee one's safety.
Case in point: Miami-Dade police slammed a 14-year-old boy to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave them "dehumanizing stares" and walked away from them, which the officers found unacceptable.
According to Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta, "His body language was that he was stiffening up and pulling away. When you have somebody resistant to them and pulling away and somebody clenching their fists and flailing their arms, that's a threat. Of course we have to neutralize the threat."
This mindset that any challenge to police authority is a threat that needs to be "neutralized" is a dangerous one that is part of a greater nationwide trend that sets the police beyond the reach of the First and Fourth Amendments.
When police officers are allowed to operate under the assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of disagreement or even question, that serves to destroy the First Amendment's assurances of free speech, free assembly and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Then again, this is what happens when you take a police recruit, hype him (or her) up on the power of the gun in his holster and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully ignorant of how to handle a situation without resorting to violence, drill him in military tactics but keep him in the dark about the Constitution, and never stress to him that he is to be a peacemaker and a peacekeeper, respectful of and subservient to the taxpayers, who are in fact his masters and employers.
The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is "not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it's that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone."
What we're dealing with today is a skewed shoot-to-kill mindset in which police, trained to view themselves as warriors or soldiers in a war, whether against drugs, or terror, or crime, must "get" the bad guys--i.e., anyone who is a potential target--before the bad guys get them.
Never mind that the fatality rate of on-duty police officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.
The result of this battlefield approach to domestic peacekeeping is a society in which police shoot first and ask questions later.
The message being drummed into our heads with every police shooting of an unarmed citizen is this: if you don't want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, don't say, do or even suggest anything that even hints of noncompliance.
This is the "thin blue line" over which you must not cross in interactions with police if you want to walk away with your life and freedoms intact.
If ever there were a time to scale back on the mindset adopted by cops that they are the law and should be revered, feared and obeyed, it's now.
It doesn't matter where you live--big city or small town--it's the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.
Americans as young as 4 years old are being leg shackled, handcuffed, tasered and held at gun point for not being quiet, not being orderly and just being childlike--i.e., not being compliant enough.
Americans as old as 95 are being beaten, shot and killed for questioning an order, hesitating in the face of a directive, and mistaking a policeman crashing through their door for a criminal breaking into their home--i.e., not being submissive enough.
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