Delaware State Police Pay $50,000 To Man Troopers Ticketed For Flipping Them Off
from the no-problem,-the-taxpayers-are-good-for-it dept
It should be pretty well established by now that you just can’t go around arresting people for expressing their displeasure with their fingers. It’s not like it’s a new issue or even an uncommon issue ([extremely laconic cowboy voice]: least not round these parts).
It’s something we’ve seen quite a bit of here at Techdirt.
Virginia court reaffirms the right to give cops the finger
Court denies immunity to cop who pulled over a man for flipping him off
North Carolina Supreme Court says flipping off cops isn’t a crime
Eighth Circuit Appeals Court denies immunity to cop who pulled over driver for giving her the finger
Police pay $4,000 to man they issued bogus tickets to after he flipped them off
Sixth Circuit Appeals Court affirms flipping off cops is protected by the First Amendment
What’s not quite as clear is whether or not warning other drivers of hidden cop cars is protected speech. (However, it is clear we’re interested in covering these discussions at this site.)
Federal court says flashing headlights to warn drivers of hidden cops MIGHT be protected speech
Judge says holding up a sign to tell people there are cops ahead is NOT protected speech
[Reversing the case above] Appeals Court says holding up a sign to tell people there are cops ahead IS protected speech
That’s the bibliography. Now, we can get to the details of this case. Jonathan Guessford was first confronted, then hassled, then pursued, then pulled over, and, finally, cited for a moving violation he didn’t commit by Delaware state troopers.
Guessford managed to attract the attention of Corporal Stephen Douglas, Trooper Nicholas Gallo, and Master Corporal Raiford Box by calling attention to a state police speed trap. As is detailed in Guessford’s lawsuit [PDF] (and captured on multiple cameras, including Guessford’s phone), the officers rolled up on Guessford armed with their attitudes and some convenient lies.
This is from the NBC report on the recent lawsuit settlement:
The cell phone video shows troopers approaching Guessford, who was standing in a grassy area next to the shoulder of Route 13 north of Dover. Douglas told Guessford that he was “disrupting traffic,” while Gallo, based on a witness report, said Guessford was “jumping into traffic.”
“You are a liar,” Guessford told Gallo.
“I’m on the side of the road, legally parked, with a sign which is protected by the First Amendment,” he told troopers.
Dascham video shows Douglas twice lunging at Guessford to prevent him from raising his sign. Gallo then ripped it from his hands and tore it up.
So, there’s that. That alone could possibly support a First Amendment retaliation claim. But that’s still in the unsettled area of the law where conveying a message that makes cops angry is somehow not considered expressive enough (according to some judges) to be considered protected speech.
But it didn’t end there. Guessford got back in car and drove off, waving goodbye to the troopers with his extended middle finger.
This is what happened next:
As Guessford drove away, he made an obscene hand gesture at the troopers. Dashcam video shows Douglas racing after him at speeds of more than 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour) in a 55 mph zone, followed closely by Gallo and Box.
Well, that seems unsafe. It was just a little disrespect, not a felony in progress.
Once stopped, Guessford was threatened by Trooper Box, who said he was going to charge Guessford with resisting arrest, tow his car, and call social services to pick up his son who was riding with him.
Fortunately, none of that happened. Instead, the troopers settled for (bogusly) citing Guessford for “using an improper hand turn signal.” What was caught by the dashcam recording following the stop showed the trooper knew the entire thing was bullshit.
Box’s dashcam audio also captures his subsequent phone call with a supervisor, Lt. Christopher Popp, in which Box acknowledges that citing Guessford for his hand gesture is “pushing it.”
“You can’t do that,” Popp tells Box. “That will be dropped.”
“Yeah, it’s gonna get dropped,” Box replies. “I told (Douglas) it’s definitely going to get thrown out. … I said, ‘Ah, that’s not really going to fly, buddy.’”
The final shot from the troopers?
Douglas is heard saying that even if the charge would be dropped, it at least “inconvenienced” Guessford.
Well, HAHAHA, guess who’s inconvenienced NOW?
Delaware State Police have agreed to pay $50,000 to resolve a federal lawsuit filed by a man who said troopers violated his constitutional rights by preventing him from warning motorists about a speed trap.
Oh, wait. The joke’s on us. Or, more particularly, the taxpaying residents of Delaware. These troopers aren’t going to pass their iconic hats to ensure Guessford gets paid. Nope, they’ve already collected the paychecks they “earned” for this dumbass stunt and they’re going to continue to collect paychecks in the future. The settlement will be paid by taxpayers, ensuring no one involved learns anything from this asinine string of events. All we can hope for is that the lawsuit generated enough courtroom discussion of the issues, the next settlement for something this stupid will arrive much, much faster.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, delaware, delaware state police, free speech, giving police the finger, jonathan guessford, middle finger, nicholas gallo, police, raiford box, stephen douglas
Comments on “Delaware State Police Pay $50,000 To Man Troopers Ticketed For Flipping Them Off”
She seems nice & like she should have a weapon & the right to claim they were scared as to why they emptied the clip into a granny with a walker.
So bottomline, trooper Box and his his inept supervisor suffered no personal consequences for malicious criminal behavior… and are free to repeat it.
Fellow cops note that too, and correctly recognize that they can freely abuse the public and the law.
Future ‘court discussions’ will certainly not even slightly change this dominant cop culture.
As far as speed trap warnings go, Trapster was the best.
And since they were not in the United Stats, US laws could not be enforced against them.
The problem with Trapster was that it was a resource hog on all but the most expensive phones.
Unfortunately, cops are becoming like the Gestapo, unlike my fathers time when cops were still respectable, and tools, like setting phone security settings to insane cop proof mode have a necessary evil, so they cannot get anything on your phone, so they cannot get anything to muscle you into a plea agreement by saying eihter you plead to this or we will charge you with that, I will never give them that chance.
America is becoming like Rome, or the Galactic Republic in star wars, and is becoming a dictatorship.
This case highlights a recurring issue: law enforcement’s overreaction to expressive gestures. While the $50,000 settlement is a step toward accountability, it’s taxpayers who foot the bill, not the officers responsible. Let’s hope this sparks a broader conversation about protecting citizens’ rights without burdening the public.
Besides the costs of these hijinks to taxpayers, it should be well known by now that the majority of uniformed bullies…I mean, cops…are pulling down around $150K per year, apiece. Then, come the “retirements” around age 50 or less, with annual lifetime pensions equaling or bettering the initial salary figures. Nice work if you can get it, great rewards for experience pushing other kids around on the playground, plus you get to wear a cool uniform with badges & fake medals & stuff. You probably even get a hep two-way radio to wear on your shoulder, while you hunt Black people. Just yesterday, I was telling someone about calls I was receiving a year or so ago, allegedly from “police-benefit” organizations, imploring me to cry tears of sympathy for overpaid cops who were at home on full-pay six-month vacations, nursing ingrown toenails and cases of middle-age acne. Their wholesale financial suffering was to be mourned and lamented, to the extent of opening my wallet (I am admittedly cheap by nature), and siphoning out the bucks for the collective well-being. I suppose the punch line was experienced when it was revealed that a large percentage of these cry-in-the-beer funds were actually funding ruses engineered by Republican PACs, fueling the noble cause of spreading Fascism among the great unwashed. So there; still it’s pretty tough for me to engender pity for someone pulling down three times or more of what I am in retirement. (Besides, if you’re not working, isn’t your actual dollar-per-dollar overhead going to go down??) And besides that, anyone signing up to become a (very-well) paid bully should know the inherent risks involved. If you want to avoid those, then get a gig as a milkman.
Re:
You would think with all those benefits, millions of people would be trying to become cops yet the opposite is true. Cops are quitting in droves either by retirement or resignation. Cities have lowered their standards, offered sign up bonuses, and raises yet they are still woefully understaffed. Many officers are making more than 150K because they are on mandatory overtime to try and fill in the gaps.
Cops are the only officers of the court that you can flip off. Try flipping off a judge or clerk or even a TSA agent and see what happens. Maybe that’s another reason nobody wants to be a cop.
BTW as a Vietnam era veteran I know you can flip off a soldier, but you might end up on your ass.
Re: Re:
You don’t see the connection here? In the last decades cops have behaved in a manner that have made the public averse in interacting with them, when that happens you have to pay an exorbitant salaries to attract people in general to a very unattractive profession. There of course the naïve who think they’ll make a difference but they are quickly taught that sticking out it a bad idea, then you have the people who actively try to get hired because they have the bully’s mentality and want some power. And the cops that aren’t actively bad, they leave because they can’t stand the toxicity.
SO? You are free to express yourself in public in almost any manner you want. I can flip off a cop, a judge or a TSA agent in public with impunity. If they want to retaliate for me doing it, that tells me they don’t actually want to uphold the law or the constitution when they see fit.
And stop the fucking crocodile tears about how bad the cops have it, because anyone who had the misfortune to come across a vindictive asshole of a cop can attest to that it’s hell.
So you have poor impulse-control and a fragile ego? That seems to track, just like how most cops behave.
Re: Re: Re:
I see the connection and I hope you see the connection between what police are going through today and what Vietnam era military went through. In both cases you have a vast, vast majority of people doing their job with honor and dignity only to be demonized and demoralized for their effort. Then along comes something like 9/11 and suddenly it’s “thank you for your service”.
As crime rises, many cities are experiencing “9/11” moments and even the most anti-police cities are begging for their return, but no one wants to do the job anymore. (Certainly no one in this forum). My son said he used to love his job and would have done it for free, but not anymore. He retires in 8 months.
Re: Re: Re:2
And here’s the problem with your thinking, the police is essentially waging a war on some level with the populace it’s supposed to protect and serve, the Vietnam war was as war. Now, how was the military personnel treated by the VC and the locals after they shot them up, dropped some napalm on them and dusted them with agent orange?
What you fail to see here is that an honest and upstanding individual belonging to an organization that does shitty stuff will be splashed with all the nefarious and criminal shit going on. You complain about how cops don’t deserve any of the scorn they get while defending every shitty thing they do because “it’s hard being a cop”. Do you also defend those soldiers that ended up in military court for various crimes they did in Vietnam, like William Laws Calley Jr for example? And what about all those soldiers who killed innocent villagers because they felt they needed some revenge on the VC? Where they doing their job with honor and dignity?
If you refuse to speak up about the shit one can only conclude you support it, the alternative is that you are a worthless coward that will do anything to avoid the truth.
You son is your son, learn to fucking understand anecdotal evidence.
Re: Re: Re:
How’s the boot’s taste, soyboy?
Re: Re: Re:2
You Anonymous Cowards are all alike. I didn’t know what a soyboy was so I looked it up. I’m sure you are very familiar with the term.
Re: Re: not officers of the court
Actually, no. Cops are not officers of the court. They may be witnesses in court, and the term ``testilying” comes to mind, but they are not officers of the court and owe essentially no duty to it beyond not lying on the witness stand.
Re: Re: others not immune
Actually, no. You are free to flip off attorneys, who actually are officers of the court. It may be considered rude, but there you are. You are still morally better than a cop pulling someone over for a bogus ticket.
If it's not coming out of your wallet why care about the amount?
So long as the guilty cops involved aren’t paying the penalties they could end up with fines in the literal billions range consistently across thousands of cases and nothing would change, because what do they care about a check someone else has to write?
If courts and politicians actually wanted to do something about police corruption and abuse of power(or for something they might care about reducing the frequency and amount of settlements paid out) step one would be making any fines personal, paid out not by the department but by individual officers whether directly or via mandatory insurance required for the job. Do even just that and not only would the amount of police corruption drop like a rock overnight but the fine amounts could be fractions of what they currently are and still be exponentially more effective as punishments and deterrents.
Re:
It’s worse than that. Not only are they not paying the financial penalties, many don’t face any penalty at all. If I worked at a convenience store and cost the owner $50,000 by selling cigarettes to minors, I don’t imagine I’d get to keep working there. We wouldn’t even be talking about insurance; I’d be out of work before the thing went to trial.
No consequences for police
You there’s an issue with not caring about the consequences if the police are caught talking about how they don’t have any evidence and that the case against the person won’t stick, yet they pull someone over to inconvenience them.
Heck, by ticketing this person, these cops may have gotten one ticket closer to their monthly quota.
And if it’s a bad ticket? It gets dismissed later or the tax payers will pay the fines.
So then why shouldn’t cops just pull everyone over and deal with the fallout later?
Cops don’t give a shit because they know taxpayers will pay the settlement.
If such settlements all had to come out of the police operating budget or police pension fund, their behavior would change overnight.
nice
Fifty grand for flipping off police? Hmm, I think I have a new profession!
How many points was that?
Did the tickets count towards the quota of tickets they need to give for their bonuses and raises? It would be interesting to find out.
“The only thing worse than winning a war is losing a war.”
In Vietnam those protesting the war were warned about what would happen if South Vietnam fell and they didn’t believe it. Not until they started to see the hundreds of thousands of “Boat People” and the “killing fields of Cambodia” and then for the first time in more than a decade, they were silent.
There was a war on drugs. We lost it and the result is hundreds of thousands dying of drug overdose.
There was a war on crime and we are losing it.
My son reflects the feelings of hundreds of thousands of police officers. They don’t want to fight a losing war. When they have to tell actual victims of crime that there is nothing they can do because the DA won’t prosecute, they know they are losing. When they see an officer like Kim Potter sent to jail, they know they are losing. When they see the criminal back out on the street before they can finish the arresting paperwork, they know they are losing. Their choosing to no longer do the job has nothing to do with money.
Re:
Vietnam was more or less a lost cause from the beginning, it had jack shit to do with the antiwar sentiment. VC had motivation out the wazoo to kick the US out of Vietnam, most US soldiers only did one tour and refused to reup because they had zero motivation to fight anymore after sticking their hand into that meatgrinder.
Learn history. Cambodia was toast the moment Sihanouk vacillated on how deal with the Chinese, Nord Vietnam and the US when he finally signed on with Soviet and China in ’65, sealing the fate of his country and just a year later had to accept VC and PAVN bases in his country. That had also nothing to do with any antiwar sentiments in the US because the first protests began the same year Sihanouk made his fateful decision.
Just like Vietnam, if you alienate the populace by robbing them, destroying their livelihood, beating them up and killing them they wont support you. Only the most egregious cases ends up in court with some justice served to those who suffered.
Most cops in US seems incapable of reflecting on how their behavior actually makes their job impossible in the end. Treat the general public as if they are the enemy and they will become the enemy. A practice you have vociferously defended with some lame ass excuses that cops must be allowed to break the law.
Seems to me that they were never cut out to be police officers tasked with upholding the law then.
I don’t want to turn this into a debate about Vietnam but having grown up, lived through, discussed, analyzed, and participated in those times, trust me, I know far more about Vietnam than you. Anything you want to know about Vietnam I can tell you. I also know the Vietnamese that hate and blame America are not the ones we bombed; they are the ones we turned our backs on.
My point in bringing up Vietnam is to point out the similarity of the anti-war movement and the anti-police movement. The anti-war movement wrote songs blaming the soldiers for the war. Every victory from Tet to Khe Sanh was reported as a defeat. Every night on the news they reported how many Americans were killed. Hanoi Jane and Donald Sutherland started an “anti-USO” troupe to counter Bob Hope called FTA (fuck the army). The soldiers of WW2 who we referred to as “our boys” and now their sons were being spat on. They were racist and criminal.
The US lost more than 58 thousand, but the South Vietnamese lost more than a quarter million. American politicians forced the South into accepting a peace agreement with NVA troops on its soil base on promises of air support and resupply. When the North made its move in 1975, the South stopped them in many places and asked the US for its promised air support and resupply and we just turned our backs. The result was the humanitarian catastrophes of the Boat People, the killing fields of Cambodia and the tragedies in Laos. The anti-war’s response was silence.
The campaign against the police is very similar but with a potentially worse outcome. We don’t want people arrested for drugs and the result is 100s of thousand deaths by drug overdose. We don’t want people arrested for petty theft (less than $950 per day) so billions are being stolen, stores are closing and employees are being attacked. The police know how to stop it but policies have been put in place to prevent them.
Sounds like you’re not from the US. Probably UK?
Police chiefs fear mass firearms walkout without greater legal cover (msn.com)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/police-chiefs-fear-mass-firearms-walkout-without-greater-legal-cover/ar-AA1hfhhF?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=4aad17d9fb664f12b6fa973bdcb04f97&ei=94
I don’t want cops to break the law. I want them to be trained to act within the law and protected by following their training. Mistakes made by the medical profession in the US kill 250 times more people than the police do. If we prosecuted and vilified doctors and nurses for their mistakes like we did with Kim Potter, then no one would join the medical profession.