General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The Starbucks thing... [View all]ExciteBike66
(2,424 posts)"And there you have the problem. Manufacturing a "crime of trespassing" out of a simple statement that she made. "
I cannot emphasize enough how much this distinction doesn't matter in any legal sense. Now I want you to go back and re-read my last sentence, because I really cannot emphasize this enough.
If you walk up to a police officer and claim someone had sex without you without consent, they would treat the matter as a "rape" even though you didn't use that specific word. If you call the cops and say someone is in your home after you told them to leave, the cops wouldn't ask you if that person was "trespassing", they would just assume it from your description.
'And what you just described was an escalation that did not reflect what was going on there."
You might be right. It might have been overkill to call in backup. That said, I believe (and I could be wrong), there were two cops initially, and two men "trespassing". The cops like to have numerical superiority, it might even be a policy, thus the call for backup might have actually been routine and a non-issue. I cannot say for sure, though.
"There was no effort whatsoever to get more info from the caller."
That's because the called had already stated a set of actions that constitute a crime. In any event, the dispatcher knows that the cops will be the ones getting the info once they get there. I am not sure, but there might even be a policy that the cops MUST respond to any 911 call that is not obviously a prank.
"You have tried to define "a disturbance" and the police apparently have some mental image of what that means that resulted in an almost APB for 6-7 cops to show up. Yet nothing that justified that type of response was going on. "
I agree, except I believe the cops were using the word "disturbance" in a technical sense, not in the normal sense you and I would use. The police probably use this word to cover a variety of routine, non-violent situations. Anyway, think of this from the point of view of the property owner: if someone refuses to leave their property, then it would definitely be "disturbing" to the property owner.