Girl buys water, spends night in jail

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/uva-girl-water-beer-jail-181104442.html

by commanderj • 13 years ago

137 145 13 years ago

news.yahoo.com

hoi• 13 years ago

Why does "underage" alochol purchasing require law enforcement officers to draw a gun?

tome• 13 years ago

Because the law enforcement officers have to protect their own lives. This is America, where anyone could be carrying an implement that requires two seconds to kill.

rogerbraun2• 13 years ago

Is it really likely that a 20 year old girl with one box of beer will try to shoot 6 police officers?

Deestan• 13 years ago

Because the law enforcement officers have to protect their own lives.

Against a teenage girl who may have gasp bought some beer?

How about:

"Excuse me, miss. We suspect you have illegaly purchased alcohol. May we inspect your car, please?"

Scenario 1: "Oh! Ok." Car is inspected. "Oh it's just water. Sorry about the trouble, have a good day!"

Scenario 2: Girl tries to escape and drives off. Note personalia and license number. File charges as usual.

There is no realistic scenario in which they need to threaten her on her life and assault her car because of a suspected 12-pack of beer.

DanBC• 13 years ago

She had her arms full of a crate of water / "beer".

I think that if police are worried about being shot at when they approach under-age people buying alcohol the police might want to change their hyper-aggressive policing style.

Guns must be a measure of last resort. When you pull your weapon you must have the intent to kill someone. To have the intent to kill someone you must have reasonable fear that they pose a risk to you.

Under 21 year old girl buying "beer" doesn't feel to me like a deadly threat to my life.

piqufoh• 13 years ago

I love countries where guns are illegal for exactly this reason.

interpol_p• 13 years ago

Why did they have to jump on the front of the car, as the article says? That would completely terrify me if I was walking to my car at 10pm in the evening.

simonh3• 13 years ago

Isn't that what all Americans do when they meet a stranger? I think Heinlein said something about it being good manners, or the polite thing to do, or something. Can't say the quote made much sense when I read it. I'm a Brit though, so maybe it lost something in translation from American. Over here we used to raise our hats, be we don't have those anymore either.

Someone• 13 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_This_Horizon:

One sub-theme of the book is the carrying and use of firearms. In the novel being armed is part of being a man; otherwise he wears a brassard and is considered weak and inferior. Women are allowed but not expected to be armed. Duels, either deadly or survivable, may easily occur when someone feels that they have been wronged or insulted, a custom that keeps order and politeness. A defining quote from the book which is repeated throughout Heinlein's work is, "An armed society is a polite society," is very popular with those who support the personal right to keep and bear arms.

lucian1900• 13 years ago

Also, why the hell would it be illegal for someone underage to buy, have or drink alcohol? What kind of stupid law is that?

It should only ever be illegal to sell or (as someone overage) buy for someone underage.

qwerta2• 13 years ago

Usual stuff, she will have to plead guilty to get suspended sentence. Then permanent record and ruined life. Officers will get bonus points and salary increase. Justice always wins!

Update: apparently charges were dropped

Ultron• 13 years ago

It could possibly be worse. The typical response is something like yours, but there's the outside chance they'll pile on more charges for a longer prison sentence. That's good for the economy because the US has many privately run prisons to fill.

mherdeg• 13 years ago

According to the source article ( http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/bottled-water-purchase-lea... ), the prosecutor said that Ms. Daly's account was "factually consistent"; dropped the three felony charges; and defended the police's actions.

The fact that the prosecution isn't pushing harder suggests that the story here is essentially true — "a girl was assaulted by a disorderly armed mob on her way out of a grocery store and managed to escape them, but it turned out that they were plainclothes police who had mistaken her bottled water for beer and were trying to arrest her, so they put her in prison overnight and filed three felony charges (which have since been dropped)." Classy, guys.

You have to wonder whether anyone in the group who performed the arrest has any kind of remorse or has developed any sort of insight about whether they might have done things differently.

qwerta2• 13 years ago

You are right, charges were dropped. So she is probably going to be fine.

jonahx• 13 years ago

This story doesn't add up. Why would 7 undercover officers be staking out a local supermarket to take down 20 year old girls buying beer?

Ygg22• 13 years ago

Budget cuts? Police did weirder things for bonus pay.

Like cause a man a heart attack, by goading him to a bet a large sum (over some federal minimum). Heart attack was caused by SWAT members assaulting his house.

EDIT: Note it's not a heart attack they shot him through the heart. It's from this article http://www.cracked.com/article_19450_6-laws-youve-broken-wit...

robeasthope• 13 years ago

Got a link for that story?

samolang3• 13 years ago

They work for the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. That is literally their job (as stupid as that might sound).

jcromartie• 13 years ago

Because they are power-tripping jackbooted thugs, with a paramilitary tendency, and a belief that they have ultimate authority and that citizens must comply with everything they say. An official ABC statement on the incident even says as much ("rather than comply with the officers requests...").

pfortuny• 13 years ago

"You don't know all the facts until you complete the investigation,".

Man, that is blind faith in so many untrustworthy sources (remember '41 shots?') that I am trying to recover from the shock. Poor girl.

Seven people. I say: seven. One, two three, four, five, six, seven. They would have scared everything out of me.

gutnor• 13 years ago

7 people with guns to pursue the buyer of 12 pack. It would at least a homicide to get that amount of police force around here.

mtgx• 13 years ago

She was lucky she wasn't male and black. Because if she were, they'd probably shoot him, and then say "they thought he was drawing a weapon...as he fled".

Not like it hasn't happen exactly like that before. There was even a video of it online. I think if more tourists knew stuff like this is happening in America, they'd stay the hell away from it.

cones6883• 13 years ago

Sometimes I think the lack of Armed Police in the UK is a benefit as they take arming an officer with a lethal weapon is a serious matter and requires specific training/psychoanalysis.

What possible requirement could the " Alcohol Beverage Control Division" need to be armed?! Does every Government Official get a weapon/carry/threaten permit when they join?!

anu_gupta• 13 years ago

Sometimes

Not sure I've ever thought that arming British police on a routine basis would be a good thing.

rtb2• 13 years ago

Massive +1 to this.

It seems to me that the UK police, since they are not armed, generally try to defuse situations. (Of course, they can call for armed backup if it is necessary.)

Time and again, I read of US police unnecessarily escalating situations. If your immediate response to any tension is to pull out a gun and start shouting, then things are very likely to get a lot worse in many cases.

Perhaps this is just confirmation bias though. I only get to read about the US cases where things have gone wrong.

tommypalm• 13 years ago

In Northern Ireland, all Police Officers are armed. I may be wrong in this but in recent years it hasn't led to many shots being fired mistakingly and I don't think there has been any deaths.

Even still, why would a unit that polices underage drinking need firearms?

vidarh• 13 years ago

As much as I agree, the US at some point passed a tipping point: Police and the population were armed, so criminals needed to be armed, so police needs to be armed etc. Rolling that back would be incredibly hard.

In UK and other countries where police are generally not armed, using a dangerous weapon often also adds substantial amounts of time to potential sentences, and there's either low levels of private ownership of guns (UK) or tight controls on storage and use (e.g. Norway has tons of firearms, but the law requires it to be separate into at least two non-functional parts that must be kept locked down separately, so your hunting rifle is not something you'll go fetch on a whim when you hear a weird sound), and so criminals know that not only are they unlikely to face an armed response if they don't arm themselves, but they're also likely to get off lighter if caught without weapons, and so there's very little incentive for criminals to arm themselves in most situations.

It's one of those things where de-escalation is nearly impossible because of the likely public response to news of dead cops, and how widely guns permeate the culture.

Uchikoma3• 13 years ago

I don't think this necessarily has to do with weapons. There are ten thousands of armed German police officers who (number went through the press) shot 85 bullets in 2011 and usually do not draw a weapon immediately.

walshemj• 13 years ago

Yes there was a case in the UK local to me where one of the armed response team put a magazine on the roof of the car and accidentally drove off - I think some one found the mag the next day

He was suspended from the team immediately - the UK police do take fire arms training very seriously.

sfall2• 13 years ago

typically they are cops on duty and conducting a normal assignment, like a DUI check point

flexie• 13 years ago

Surely you can't let a 20 year-old get away with what might be a beer.

Law enforcement showed great mercy in dropping charges against this girl. In fact she should consider herself lucky they spared her life. But I fear other disobedient subjects may think they too can get away with no consequences for their reckless actions.

perlpimp2• 13 years ago

Reckless were the officers, that did not have properly recognizable badges. They should've called in Police to stop the car.

As a team they showed tremendous lapse in judgment and should be fired for endangering a group of teens.

For all it was - tour de force by people who had nothing better to do. There are safe way to do things and there are stupid ways that might make them feel empowered.

theklub• 13 years ago

Yeah, pulling a gun on an underage buyer of alcohol seems like it shouldn't even be an option. You're essentially pulling a gun on a child. Not to mention the huge waste of money to have that many agents staked out to catch some petty criminal.

Tichy3• 13 years ago

I have to admit that stories like that definitely factor into my travel decisions. From the outside, the US looks like a very scary place. Perhaps it is all just overblown media stuff? But for the time being there are also other nice places to visit...

ry0ohki2• 13 years ago

With over 300 million people, extreme things can happen to .0001% of the people any day, and that's still 300 people affected. 300 stories to choose from a day makes for lots of sensational news.

pezh0re6• 13 years ago

On average, it's not that bad. Yes, there are assholes everywhere (police and otherwise), but for the most part the stuff you read about is few and far between.

That being said, knowing the proper way to deal with people in authority positions is incredibly important. In this case, she should have asked for ID (yelling at them through the window if necessary). If they kept insisting that she roll the window down - and for some reason her car is unlike every other car out there, requiring the engine to be on, she should have tried to explain that through the window.

(Seriously, what cars require the engine to be running for the windows to roll down?)

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that stories like these are pretty rare and the US is a big place. Even if the police in the US were generally as good as you'd hope any police were there would still be the occasional story of someone abusing their power or making egregious mistakes just due to the sheer size of the US. That's not an excuse, it's just a reminder that you need to temper your judgment of a place that you might have formed based on stories of the most freakish and abnormal events in that place (like, say, imagining that Pakistan is full of terrorists or some such).

Additionally, for various reasons you don't hear reports of equivalent stories like this happening in, for example, Europe, though such things are not exactly significantly less common there.

MichaelApproved• 13 years ago

shoot him, and then say "they thought he was drawing a weapon...as he fled".

Its worse than that. They wouldn't need to have worried about a gun to open fire. A vehicle is a deadly weapon. I think that if the agents thought the car was going to hit them, they'd be justified in shooting.

joe51504• 13 years ago

A teenager in (again) Virginia was shot and killed by an off-duty cop working as a security guard who thought he (the teen) would hit him with a car after the kid stole pancakes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02...

malandrew• 13 years ago

I'm honestly surprised that we don't have the Russian dashcam phenomenon in the US. If I were a black male, I would most certainly have a GoPro or something similar in my car running at all times.

As a bicyclist, I'm just about ready to purchase a GoPro for when drivers are reckless and endanger me.

I cannot wait for the day when you can purchase a small recording device like a GoPro and have it stream continuously over wifi or cell phone signals. When that happens, citizens will be able to record the aggressions of police officers (especially during riots) without any fear that the device and it's contents will mysteriously "go missing".

andypants• 13 years ago

Are police even allowed to do this if they're not in uniform?

I completely understand their reaction to get away when a group of people suddenly draw their guns and try to force you to get out of the car...

tjomk• 13 years ago

Happens only in US. The government gets more and more paranoid

caf• 13 years ago

In what sense was pulling a gun justified even if she was holding a 12-pack of beer? "Alcohol Beverage Control" agents? Is this a repost from 1927?

workbench2• 13 years ago

haha wow… America is absolutely hilarious. The fact she was 20 years old is a great punchline

Gigablah• 13 years ago

This is why I will never visit Saudi Arabia.

Wait, where did this happen again?

muyuu• 13 years ago

People still flock to the US and Dubai for some reason.

Not me though.

EliRivers• 13 years ago

I know so many ex-pats who moved to Dubai and constantly told me what a great pace it was to live, but as soon as they had a child moved (back) to the West; many of them not the country they came from, but just somewhere in the West.

aidos• 13 years ago

I'm always a little amazed that the age for buying booze in the states is 21.

Wait, am I understanding this correctly? At the age of 20 she's not allowed to buy alcohol but could have already owned a gun for 2 years?

The world is a funny old place.

camus• 13 years ago

Yeah , the country of freedom when you're not even free to buy alcohol at 18 like in most western countries ... what a joke... and they think they are free...

aray• 13 years ago

The biggest thing for me has been that you're old enough to die for your country -- required enlistment for the armed forces selective service ("the draft") -- but not old enough to buy a beer.

Tichy3• 13 years ago

Can you at least drink beer once you are in the army? I can only imagine being in the army without beer could be very, very difficult.

bliker• 13 years ago

it is funny that you can buy the same beer when you are 16 in Denmark.

ry0ohki2• 13 years ago

Also drive a car (16), sign legal contracts, get yourself in tens of thousands of dollars in debt...

pezh0re6• 13 years ago

Don't forget, you can enlist in a military branch at 18 - so its conceivable you could fight and die for your country before being able to legally enjoy a cold pint at the local pub.

robin_reala• 13 years ago

To be fair, that’s the case in the UK as well. General age for drinking is 18 (with a few exceptions[1]), you can enlist at 16.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

You can pretty much blame MADD for that. Originally it started out as an organization with the best intentions but over time it's turned into more or less a modern temperance movement.

The key was figuring out that if you pressure the federal government enough you can get states to fall in line. The federal government doesn't have the ability to set a blanket drinking age for every state. But it does have the ability to withhold federal highway funds from states that refuse to set their minimum drinking age at 21.

gizmo686• 13 years ago

That still doesn't explain the age of 21. Couldn't the federal government just as easily had required states set the age at 18 in order to recieve highway funds.

samolang3• 13 years ago

I had no idea there were age limits on gun ownership in America. Looks like you're right though (except in Vermont the age limit is 16).

elmuchoprez• 13 years ago

Interesting note:

"Contrary to popular belief, since the act (that set the drinking age at 21) went into law, only a few states prohibit minors and young adults from consuming alcohol in private settings. As of January 1, 2010, 15 states and the District of Columbia ban underage consumption outright, 17 states do not ban underage consumption, and the remaining 18 states have family member and/or location exceptions to their underage consumption laws."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age#Americas

xhrpost• 13 years ago

Usually you can own a rifle or shotgun at 18 but you can't own a handgun until you're 21. Might vary based on the state too.

esschul• 13 years ago

You silly Americans, you.

mosselman• 13 years ago

Greatest nation.

Uchikoma3• 13 years ago

Wow, funny country.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

To every innocent action there is brutal police overreaction. Newton's long lost fourth law of physics.

Nursie6• 13 years ago

> "undercover agents from the state's Alcohol Beverage Control"
> " One jumped on the hood of her SUV; another pulled out a gun"

What The F*ck America?

disputin• 13 years ago

Indeed. And seven agents for a case of beer? Green card applications dropping much?

perlpimp2• 13 years ago

honestly it is fark.com grade material :)

Nursie6• 13 years ago

Actually I think I saw this on fark a couple of days ago...

aaron695• 13 years ago

Important as these stories are to get out, really they are handled by other news outlets quite well.

Exactly what one learns from one incident, in one state, in one country is hard to say.

The story has no round up of a greater meaning other than the one incident which leads the reader without any cause and effect.

Is this American budgets cuts? Is this the problem with counties having to much power? Is this the militarisation of the police force? What is the trend here if any?

As per news is bad for you, I think this is one of them. High stress, low information.

icantthinkofone• 13 years ago

My son's a cop. He said what I was thinking. There is far more going on here than what the story states and the reporter is not asking the right questions or the agents can't say. In either case, the girl got caught up in something bigger than the writer says by mistake.

Nothing to see here. Move on.

demallien• 13 years ago

Unless you're suggesting that the girl actually was up to something nefarious, there absolutely is something to see here. Police should not be drawing weapons for anything other than an imminate danger to human life.

Watching the police in action is the one negative experience that I have had in the US. You guys really need to calm your (oversized) police force down - they're thugs in uniform.

Nursie6• 13 years ago

So maybe there was some sort of bust going down on the place she bought the water, after a suspected chain of underage sales.

You still don't pull guns on people you suspect may be carrying a case of beer, then lock them up and file felony charges when it turns out they haven't done anything more than get scared by your paramilitary tactics and try to escape from unknown, out of uniform assailants.

muuck2• 13 years ago

You know this how? You're son isn't more familiar with this case than we are is he? The fact that the charges are dropped is somewhat telling.

samolang3• 13 years ago

I don't think so. They work for the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. This is about as exciting as their job gets.

joe51504• 13 years ago

"[S]omething bigger..." eh? That's conveniently non-specific.

All I can do is echo the other comments, that regardless of whether or not something "bigger" is going on, the response is absolutely disproportionate, and also remind you that Virginia does have actual police to handle "bigger" problems than busting underage alcohol possession.

forgotAgain• 13 years ago

That's just bs. If the cops could say anything in their defense there would have been an "anonymous source without permission to speak to the media" who would have delivered the excuse.

Vivtek2• 13 years ago

Sure. I'll buy that - and in that case, when the cops saw that she was not part of the bigger something, then the professional thing to do would have been to apologize for the inconvenience, explain what had happened, and send her on her way.

Instead, they applied maximum governmental force in order to show her her true place in society - to bow to armed thugs.

I hope your son has better training. But there is most definitely something to be seen here, and moving on is not the appropriate response of a civil society.

jgoewert• 13 years ago

icantthinkofone: You have just committed a federal felony by using a fake name on the internet. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030)

When the FBI kicks down your door, shoots your dog, smashes every bit of technology that you own, takes all your hard drives and removable media to search for more evidence (It is way hard to distinguish that picture your mom sent you of you flopping in the pool naked to porn.), please understand that them doing this is not a mistake and there would be nothing to see here, so do not post. Move on and accept a life in prison.

muuck2• 13 years ago

Isn't pulling a gun on a supermarket customer a bit of an overkill?

alex_doom• 13 years ago

To serve and annoy. Thanks for keeping our city safe from the dangerous and out of control 20 year-old college females. They are quite the scourge on our modern surburbias.

VLM4• 13 years ago

"Thanks for keeping our city safe from the dangerous and out of control 20 year-old college females. They are quite the scourge on our modern surburbias."

I'm sure there's a "girls gone wild" joke in there somewhere.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Freedom, hey?

All a bit Sharia, no?

dsego2• 13 years ago

I've had a similar thing happen to me (I live in Croatia). It happened a few years back so some details are hazy now. It was a rainy evening and I was picking up my brother and we were to drive home for the weekend. His girlfriend was also with him. So, I pick them up and drive to this small parking space to turn the car around. The moment I circled the car around the parking, an unmarked Octavia reverses in front of me, with two bald guys in sport jackets running towards me. I didn't know how to react, in a second or two all sorts of scenarios went thorough my mind. Were they robbers? Then I saw them moving their hands towards their hips. Going for guns? Should I put the car in reverse and try to escape? They pulled out what looked like badges and started yelling to turn off the engine and step out. I still believe t was a leap of faith on my part, trusting them to be the police and I'm afraid of what might've happened if I acted differently. They asked us to empty our pockets, patted us, searched the car and just left, no explanation, no sorry, nothing. They didn't search the girl, I guess it's against the law or something. My brother jokes how one of the officers persistently asked him if he had something in his pants, and all he thought was "yeah, shit, because I almost shat myself". I suppose they were on a stakeout, probably looking for narcotics dealers or something, who knows. It wasn't a pleasant experience at all.

etherael• 13 years ago

These days, as an anarcho capitalist, I just feel like the entire world is continuously handing me ammunition to justify my position, and I have had plenty for years.

Both amusing and sad.

monsterix• 13 years ago

I don't know if there is a study or theory to support this, but it seems that the longer any two opposing sides (like the police and criminals) face each other, the stronger is the influence of one over the other.

To a point when both sides have picked up significant good/bad behavior from each other. And then the very same police looks both aggressive and distasteful to the rest of us - i.e those who were not in the loop ever.

Wait, quantum entanglement?

chris_wot2• 13 years ago

Looks like they have been deluged with complaints. They have posted something on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/virginia-department-of-alcoho...

pezh0re6• 13 years ago

It sounds like something else is at play here. You wouldn't typically send a full assault team to grab underage drinkers.

If you were looking for a known fugitive/dangerous suspect that happens to frequent a grocery store for beer on the other hand...

chris_wot2• 13 years ago

There's something very odd about the Virginian Department of Alcohol Beverage Control. They seem to arrest people for carrying water, but they hold alcohol tasting sessions in their government owned liquor shops.

brianbreslin• 13 years ago

As someone who went to UVA, this isn't entirely surprising, but it still saddens me. The cops there are largely bored, and they put too much emphasis on the state sanctioned ABC monopoly over liquor.

muriithi• 13 years ago

What about being arrested for filming the police and getting your dog shot dead after getting out of the car and lunging at an officer?

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/01/get-cuffed-for-filming-pol...

killercup• 13 years ago

So, when I was 17, I bought some cases of beer. When I came out of the supermarket (with the beer visible in my cart), I walked by some (uniformed and probably armed) police officers. I greeted them and they wished me a nice weekend. Because in Germany, police officers are usually quite polite.

dsego2• 13 years ago

And in Germany drinking beer is like drinking water ;) (I have one uncle in Nuremberg and another in Pforzheim).

Vivtek2• 13 years ago

http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/bottled-water-purchase-lea...

There's the original article - that hasn't been edited by deleting text and making later references to it nonsensical.

vfclists• 13 years ago

When are Americans going to see this as essentially an infringement of their rights as adults? Yes their are adults.

At the age of 20 Americans are old enough to join the army and engage in combat duty, drive, run bank accounts, be tried as adults and even be sentenced to death. And yet drinking at the age 20 is perceived as an imprisonable offence, and law enforcement officers consider it reason to arrest adults because of that?

Frankly Americans tolerate too much nonsense from their corrupt and hypocritical law makers.

It seems to be one the laws retained to enable their fascist state to criminalize their citizens so they can have something to hold over them.

wallawe• 13 years ago

Board members: http://www.abc.virginia.gov/admin/board.html

fmavituna• 13 years ago

The whole situation is ridiculous but I'm especially interested in this bit:

"They were showing unidentifiable badges after they approached us, but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform"

This happened to me when I was travelling in Europe, a cop without a uniform approached to me on the train somewhere between Netherlands and Germany and asked me for my ID. I asked for his ID, he flashed something (obviously I had no freaking idea whether it was legit, no idea what was even written on it since I don't know the language).

What do you do in this case? Do you obey or challenge more? Isn't that dangerous as anyone can flash some random / fake badge and cause you to go with them, gather private information or worse?

sfall2• 13 years ago

maybe you don't file charges until you complete an investigation

shirro• 13 years ago

It will be nice to take my son down the pub on his 18th, buy him a nice cold beer, congratulate him on reaching adulthood and give thanks that we don't live in a backwood shithole like the USA.

happywolf• 13 years ago

"One jumped on the hood of her SUV; another pulled out a gun": Do the girls deserve such treatment just because the police suspected they possess alcohol? Do you need firearms to handle such situation? US looks more and more like a police state.

Girl buys water, spends night in jail

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