NorthHawk wrote:For sure.
Do we know if the Officer was being a jerk thus creating that type of response?
Unless he thought he was much closer to the limit, it doesn't seem reasonable.
No, we don't know if the arresting officer was being a jerk, only that he had a justifiable suspicion that Geno had been drinking and that under those circumstances, police protocol requires him to make an arrest.
The reports are that multiple people tried to de-escalate the situation on a number of occasions but were unsuccessful.
It's a little off topic, but there were two occasions back in the mid 70's, one when I wasn't even 21, when I had been drinking and got pulled over but released. One officer told me to go to a McDonald's and if I came out within an hour, he'd arrest me. Police used to have a lot of latitude when making an arrest. Sometimes they'd just tell the sober passenger to drive. But that latitude was subject to lots of abuse. I know of a city councilman's son, drunk on his ass, that got released, but if you were a black or Hispanic in the same situation, you got arrested.
But not anymore. When a cop determines that he/she has a DUI suspect, they immediately call for a backup, and if any of them feel that the suspect has been drinking, the suspect gets cuffed and taken to headquarters. If you see two or more cop cars at a traffic stop, you know that it's a DUI call and that the arresting officer needs witnesses. That I know from friends of mine that are LE officers.
Beginning in the early 80's, police departments started getting sued over suspects they had detained but released only to get involved in a fatal accident. The organization "MADD", Mothers Against Drunk Driving, was very successful at getting tough DUI legislation passed. The federal government used the threat of withdrawing highway funds if states didn't reduce their thresholds to .08 (.10 used to be the commonly accepted standards). Oregon even had a proposal to reduce their threshold to .04. There for a while, it was a game of one upmanship for politicians, who could be the toughest on drunk driving, to the point where they might as well have re-instated prohibition.
In any event, my take here is that this incident was 100% on Geno. I see no evidence whatsoever that the police did anything out of the ordinary.