Copyright Ó 2004, by Alec Rawls

Put yourself into this true story. You are police officer in Palo Alto California, on patrol in your cruiser. Dispatch relays a report from a resident that a man in a parked car is acting suspiciously, repeatedly disappearing below the dashboard. It might just be someone looking for something in his car. It could be someone lying in wait to commit a crime. It could be a fruitcake.

You approach the car and ask the man inside to identify himself. He refuses. You radio in the car’s plates and dispatch comes back with the name of the car’s owner: Albert Hopkins. The man confirms that that is him. For further confirmation, you ask for his driver’s license. He says he can’t find it.

A fellow officer arrives and together you go to find out more about what the man is doing and see if he can perhaps find his driver’s license. The man gets belligerent, angry that he is being questioned. You are continuing to engage him politely when he makes a furtive and strange movement with his hand. Alarmed, you order him out of the car and snatch the door open. Your fellow officer moves in quickly, grabbing the man’s arm to keep him from reaching for anything.

Hopkins pulls back hard, yanking your fellow officer into the car. If Hopkins has a weapon secreted in his vehicle, the situation could be extremely dangerous. The two of you pull the struggling man out of the car, striking him with your batons in an attempt to gain compliance. He continues to resist so you both douse him with pepper spray and take him into custody.[1] That turns out to be the easy part. The nightmare begins two weeks later when Santa Clara county Deputy District Attorney Peter Waite charges you and your fellow officer with felony assault.

Waite frames the case to the press: “A person who is minding their own business, sitting in a car on a public street, doesn’t have to identify themselves to police, and the police are not entitled to arrest them or to beat them.” [2]  Hopkins’ attorney, his brother Joe Hopkins, declares: “His only crime was sitting in a car while black.” [3]

That’s right. You knew that the suspicious man was black when you were questioning him. You just didn’t think it made any difference. The academy didn’t warn you to treat blacks differently, but your employers are sure teaching you now.

Palo Alto Mayor Dena Mossar makes her racial agenda perfectly clear: “This is shocking to us all, but we’ll deal with this and make things right, that’s our commitment. We take pride that we are a progressive community and our intention and goal is to support and honor diversity.” [4]

Palo Alto Police Chief Lynn Johnson also implies that you and your fellow officer were in the wrong. “They are trained to deal with situations without using force,” she says, “then they are taught about the escalation of force… but getting trained and real-life situations are different things.” [5]

Eve Agiewich, chair of Palo Alto’s Human Relations Commission, suggests that the next time a black man resists the police, the police should back off: “I hope they’ll use it as opportunity to try and assure the community they’ll take some steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” [6]

The Human Relations Commission vice chair, Lakiba Pittman, also weighs in on the side of the suspicious, belligerent, furtive, resistive man, explicitly because of his race: “I believe that when African Americans or other minorities hear a story like the one they’ve heard here, its not uncommon that we would tend to agree with the victim … because it’s happening across the U.S., California and the Bay Area.” [7]

Santa Clara County District Attorney George Kennedy has not mentioned race in the charges, but what other possible explanation is there for bringing charges? You followed your training to the letter. If Hopkins made furtive gestures while being questioned, you were absolutely right to attempt to bring him under control. When he resisted, you were right to escalate force in response until he was subdued. Logically, the only place you could have been in the wrong was in questioning Hopkins in the first place.

Are you being charged with felony assault for the crime of asking the man to identify himself? That is your lawyer’s impression: “Did the officers have the right to make contact? We absolutely believe that they did,” he tells the press. [8]

The law

It is an unsettled point of law whether a person who is sitting in a parked car is required to show a driver’s license, as a person who is pulled over while driving must. If the officers, Michael Kan and Craig Lee, had taken Hopkins under control because he refused to show his driver’s license then that distinction would be tested and the case would be interesting. But their demand for compliance was in response to alarming physical movements, a point which the District Attorney has not disputed, making the case a travesty.

When an officer’s perception of threat is in error, the legal course of action for a person who has aroused suspicion is to comply with the officer’s orders. If Hopkins had complied, he would not have been arrested unless a search of his car turned up evidence of crime. If such evidence were found, Hopkins could argue in court that he had not actually made any suspicious movement and that the search was illegal. These are the proper means of recourse when an officer misperceives threat.

Hopkins instead chose physical combat with Kan and Lee. That is against the law. According to California Penal Code Section 148.10, resistance is illegal if “the peace officer's action was reasonable based on the facts or circumstances confronting the officer at the time.” [9] District Attorney Kennedy ought to be charging Hopkins with resisting. To instead be charging the officers he must be intending to claim that to grab the arm of a belligerent person who makes a furtive gesture is not reasonable police behavior. Either that, or he is going to have to argue, as Kan and Lee’s lawyer suggests, that they never should have made contact in the first place. As soon as they saw that the suspicious man was black, they should have called dispatch back and said “I quit.”

To make that case Kennedy will have to start with the presumption that a person who is not driving is not required to show a driver’s license, then try to deduce that the police are therefore not allowed to ask for it, which logic would imply that police aren’t allowed to ask anyone’s name either. Yup, they had just better quit and go home, but only if the suspicious person is black. Nobody wants policing to stop entirely.

This is all very feel-good to Palo Alto’s multi-culturalist, pro-racial-preferences, power structure. This cadre of weepy women just loves to cry together about imagined injustices to black people, like feminists commiserating about their failed relationships. It’s all the man’s fault, and you know who Da Man is. In this instance, it just happens to be a couple of friendly and courageous police officers, both of Asian descent, who followed their training to a tee.

Remember their names. They could be you. If you ever have an employment or rental dispute with a black person; if you ever have to defend yourself against a black person; if you ever have to arrest a black person, pray to God it is not in Palo Alto, or any other locality where racial favoritism is politically correct. Don’t think being black will protect you either.

Two years ago, black New York Supreme Court Justice Donna Mill’s was arrested for drunkenly trying to bash her way out of a parking space. At her drunk driving trial she charged that the pair of black and Hispanic arresting officers only arrested her because of her race.[10] In P.C. New York, the race-baiting judge was just acquitted by an all minority jury, even though her own drinking companion testified that she was stinking drunk.[11] The officers are just darned lucky they didn’t have to use force. 

A planned racial scam?

Last spring Palo Alto released data on traffic stops and searches by race. When Palo Alto politicians Dena Mossar, Eve Agiewich et. al. saw that minorities are stopped and  searched more often than whites, the competed with each other in decrying the town’s “racial profiling.” But the data showed no such thing. 85% of searches were of people who the police had just arrested for committing a crime. Of the other 15%, almost half were on probation or parole and were required by law to submit to searches.[12] Far from racially profiling anyone, the startling fact is, Palo Alto police conduct almost no discretionary searches at all!

I warned at the time (“The Rawls Report,” Stanford Review, 5/8/03) that by filling up the newspapers with self-indulgent admissions of racial bias, Palo Alto was inviting racial scam artists to file lawsuits.[13] It was only two months later that the above incident occurred, where Albert Hopkins resisted reasonable police commands and fought with the officers involved. Albert’s brother/lawyer Joe makes his living suing police departments. [14] Did Albert and Joe Hopkins plan how to set up the Palo Alto Police Department for a lawsuit, knowing that the eagerness of Palo Alto officials to admit racism would make it easy to win a large settlement?

This is certainly a possible explanation for Albert’s bizarre behavior. Who stops to sleep in front of someone’s house, then gets belligerent about it? If it was a plan, it worked perfectly. The city of Palo Alto eagerly rolled over to the Hopkins brothers, paying out a quarter million dollars, and it continues to express a strong desire to mollify black opinion. Police Chief Johnson’s stated goal is for “people of color to, for the most part, not feel that they are treated differently by police officers in Palo Alto.”[15] [Emphasis added.]

Of course there did not have to be any explicit plan by the Hopkins brothers. Albert could just be a racially paranoid civil-libertarian who, instead of respecting the duty of the police to investigate his suspicious behavior, walks around with a chip on his shoulder and is always ready to self-centeredly see himself as a racial victim. Palo Alto’s loud public misinterpretation of its stop and search data feeds this kind of paranoia, and the further step of arresting officers for doing their duty just caters to it.

Is it really doing blacks a favor to pretend that they have special leeway to resist the police? Everyone has a right to remain silent. No one has a right to fight with a police officer. Any night on T.V. you can watch a half-hour of idiots resisting C.O.P.S. In tony Palo Alto this moronic behavior may win a lottery ticket, if you are black, but don’t expect the rest of the country to follow suit. Black activists want racial preferences in policing as in everything else, but there is no bigger political loser in America than racial favoritism. Palo Alto is not ahead of its time, it is a hundred years behind.

The trial of officers Kan and Lee is just starting. The worst plausible outcome is a mistrial, if a couple of couple of racists happen to get on the jury and insist on conviction. Most likely it is only Kan and Lee’s careers that will be ruined, but that is bad enough. Racially motivated prosecution is an evil that should not be tolerated. Aren’t there any Asian advocacy groups that are willing to stand up when two of their own are placed on the chopping block as a sop to black racial bigotry?

It is too late to influence the politics that have created this racist assault, but it is not too late to insist that when Kan and Lee are acquitted, as they most likely will be, they get reinstated with no harm to their careers. Given how Palo Alto leaders love to grovel, an apology might also be extracted, but how about something much more valuable: a promise that deference to racial sensitivities will never again motivate an unwarranted prosecution.

This article was originally published in The Stanford Review, 1/29/2004.

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Endnotes