Students should be taught that police can arrest them for petty offenses, like Sandra Bland's failure-to-signal-a-lane change, at the officer's discretion, even when the law envisions no jail time as punishment for the offense. (Gov. Rick Perry vetoed legislation in 2001 to limit such arrests, but Republican state Sen. Konni Burton, who is on Chairman Whitmire's Criminal Justice Committee, has vowed to carry a newer, beefed up version in 2017. So if that passed, students could be informed in the new curriculum that they cannot be arrested for Class C misdemeanors, or whatever the rule turns out to be.)
It's true the safest time to take up an officer's misbehavior is after the fact; confronting it at the time could get you tazed, beaten, or shot. But will students be taught how seldom officers are held accountable after citizen complaints, even when there's video? In Austin, for example, "Less than 5 percent of the complaints from the public resulted in officer discipline,"
an audit found. The Statesman's recent look at DPS showed
none of the racial profiling complaints from the public were found to be justified by the agency, even though video posted by the Statesman showed drivers being treated with open disrespect. We shouldn't advise people to complain without also telling them complaints tend to be fruitless. The purpose here should be to educate students, not propagandize them.
A curriculum which taught students the legal limits of their personal rights when interacting with police might be useful, but only if it empowers students to END interactions with police as soon as possible and explains why that's
always in their personal best interests when being questioned without a lawyer. Teaching them to "comply" cannot mean "comply with questioning." Drivers must submit to short-term detention if they're pulled over but they're under no obligation to explain where they're coming from, where they're going, what they're doing, consent to a search, etc.. If the curriculum does not acknowledge those limitations on officers' ability to enforce compliance and ignores drivers' civil liberties in favor of emphasizing cops' authority, it won't solve the problem and may make it worse.