Would you stand on your head if a police officer told you to?

I try to keep my rants at a minimum, but this story just tugs at me today so I'm going to blog about it. To give credit where credit is due, I got the majority of my information about this issue from http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/228029/4/ so feel free to go there and view the original article.

In a nutshell, this is about a 70 year old woman who'd never been in any trouble with the law and found herself injured by a police officer when she balked at being interrogated over watering her lawn. Maybe she should have been more forthcoming, maybe not, but I see more and more stories like this in the news these days and it is starting to weigh on my mind. This woman was approached by an officer that was hired by some sort of neighborhood association, and he was annoyed that her lawn was brown and patchy. She was apparently freaked out about being closely questioned by a cop, so she asked if she could call her son to come over. The officer wanted to know her name, and she didn't give her name, wanting to call her son first. So, when she didn't volunteer her name, the officer tried to cuff her. She'd never been arrested and was frightened and freaked out some more, so this younger male officer got rough with her. She ended up getting hit in the nose with handcuffs, falling to the ground, injuring her leg and just generally getting banged up. She was taken to jail without receiving medical attention. When a supervisor at the jail realized that the situation might have been better handled without an arrest, the woman was released and went to the hospital for treatment. Her physical injuries were minor, but its likely the she will be afraid of and never trust a police officer again. And, I quote what she says she learned from this:

"If the policeman tells you to stand on your head, do it," she said.

Before I get into anything else about this particular case, I want to mention that I've also recently heard of a number of cases where individuals personating officers actually tried to harm people. Here is one of the worst examples:

"On a cold January night in Fort Collins, a murderer impersonated a police officer. He caused Lacy Miller, a 20-year-old young woman, to pull her car over. She thought it was a traffic stop. This coward preyed on her trust. And he brutally murdered her."

When I hear cases like these on the news, I often hear that the local police department recommends that if you have any reason to be concerned about a situation involving an officer or possible officer, ask the officer to follow you to the nearest police station where you will cooperate with further questions. Okay - so - this Ms. Perry from Orem, Utah suggests instead that if a policeman asks you to stand on your head, do it. And she has good reason to suggest that, obviously, since her encounter with an officer (and it's also more shameful that he was a real officer) led to her being injured and jailed, all for wanting to call her son for some help in a frightening situation and wanting to cease to have any conversation with the officer until she could do that.

What would you do? Would you stand on your head, if told to by a cop? If not, would you risk being roughly arrested and injured, possibly jailed - or - possibly have worse done to you by an impersonator or a rogue?

Sometimes, it's a scary world.