Now it's a "Crime" to Give a Cop a Dirty Look?

Will Grigg’
Jun. 03, 2013

Tremaine McMillian, a 14-year-old from Miami, was roughhousing with friends on a beach not far from his home when police officers arrived on ATVs and told him that he would have to stop. One of the officers asked Tremaine where his parents were.

The teenager, wanting to avoid contact with the police, started to walk away. One officer attempted to restrain the teenager, who responded by pulling away while saying, “Man, don’t touch me like I did something.” That was a lawful order from a citizen the officer was required to obey. Instead, they needlessly – and criminally – escalated the encounter by grabbing the kid, throwing him to the ground, and applying a choke hold – actions that constituted aggravated armed assault and attempted homicide.

The assailants then charged the victim with “resisting arrest with violence” by supposedly clenching his fists and giving the officers what was described as a “dehumanizing stare.” According to Miami-Dade Detective Alvaro Zabaleta, the violence in question consisted of McMillian pulling away from the armed stranger, an action that supposedly made him a “threat to the officer” that had to be “neutralized.”

If it’s considered a crime of violence to give a police officer a dirty look, we’d be safer without their supposed services.