He asked her nicely if she could put out her cigarette for his benefit. She in return started ranting about how it was her car etc.
I don't care if she has the right to remain smoking in her car or not. Someone asked kindly for her to put it out, and she went full rant in return.
I'm sure statistically speaking, if someone is a complete asshole and "resists" any attempt to be nice to the police, they're likely to be breaking other laws - carrying drugs, no car insurance, etc etc.
If you get pulled over by the police, starting an argument and forcing them to escalate things isn't the best idea.
If you get (illegally) pulled over by the (racist) police, what should you do? Submit to their power trip instead?
Given that there's a lot of questions about the audio in general, I'm not sure how nicely he really asked - the entire veracity of the audio stream is under question here: the video skips around but the audio doesn't. That certainly lends credence to the "he was being nice" argument, except for the part where the "nice" could well have been added in post-processing.
Ultimately, a racist institution staffed by racists most likely murdered a woman whose only crimes were (a) not signaling to pull over after the officer signaled her to pull over, for some other reason, and (b) not being polite to the officer in question.
Until and unless you show me that police deserve politeness, the only reason to be polite to them is "because otherwise they may kill you". That is not only f'd up, it's literally terrorism. As in: these acts make us terrified and we are less likely to resist their authority. So, yeah.
" the only reason to be polite to them is "because otherwise they may kill you". "
Spot on. Everyone saying "she should have been nicer" are effectively saying that you should submit to the police or they'll kill you. Nobody is saying "he deserved politeness and she was rude" because it's very obvious that he was not polite to her. "How are you doing? You seem upset?" Well she just got pulled over and is getting a ticket bozo, what do you think?
I'm not sure if this is the place to engage meaningfully around common-sense misconceptions about race, class, and so forth in the US.
That said: "the majority of crime is committed by Black people" is something that I'd like to call out. Can you provide sources? How do you define crime? For example: white people are far more likely to deal drugs, but Black people are far more likely to get arrested for dealing drugs. [0]. The same article, and its cited bits, digs further into the old "black people do more criming" canard.
Your re-exercising of the "black on black" meme is also pretty tired. First of all: there's a lot of people doing a lot of stuff to improve that (c.f., My Brother's Keeper [1], an initiative that President Obama started and the right conveniently forgets every time they blow their dog whistles about the President and black-on-black crime). Secondly: not relevant to the discussion about the fact that Police seem to kill Black people every day, for reasons that we would be screaming about to the rafters if those victims of homicide were White.
Finally, can we at least agree on the statistics? Actually, not really: Law Enforcement in the US is really reluctant (one can only wonder why) about how many people they kill every day. Some crowd-sourced attempts to stitch together local reports into a national database [2] indicate that in 2014, the number works out to be about three people per day killed by LEO. That number is ridiculously high. The vast majority of these people are not white. LEO in many other "western" countries don't do this - in the UK in 2014 police killed one person, total. In Germany: none.
So, should we be distracted by your handwavy "black people deserve killing by police" narrative (because that's what you're actually saying), or could we at least agree that the police seem to be a direct and active threat to the lives and safety of People of Color in this country? It's not like this is a surprise - it hasn't been that long since the 1960s, and you see what we did back then. It's just nowadays people get offended when you point out that our national institutions are largely racist, just ever so slightly less overt about it than before.
She responded just as politely as he asked. "I'm in my car why do I have to put out my cigarette?" To which he responded "Well you can step on out now" instead of anything about why she should put it out, such as it being for his benefit. After that is when the ranting about it being her car started.
While I agree knowing her rights certainly didn't work to her advantage in this situation. Your interpretation of events is not what I consider correct, and mine may not be either. I would encourage other people to watch it and determine for themselves what was ranting and what was polite.
"Someone asked kindly for her to put it out, and she went full rant in return."
Which is not illegal. If she has the right to smoke, he has the right to ask her to stop and she has the right to say no.
"If you get pulled over by the police, starting an argument and forcing them to escalate things isn't the best idea."
Yeah, much better to let them do what they want, bully you and find something to arrest you and meet their quotas.
One should not get arrested for being rude, being rude is a fucking right, period.
I really don't understand the absolute lack of respect some people have for the law and other humans. Is it that hard to be civil?