US citizens do have rights, for sure, but provoking cops is never a good idea, especially in this day and age. One dad in Clio, Michigan, didn’t seem to understand that second part when, one day, the police randomly showed up at his door. The man was casually lying on his living room couch when two officers called him by name from outside a window. He got up to greet the cops, but refused to go outside when told to do so—big mistake.
Within seconds, one of the policemen “ripped my door open, stepped inside and yanked/manhandled the sh*t out of me acting like I had just threatened him or something,” the father recalled in horror. The front entrance was in chaos, with the two officers pinning down the man and handcuffing him while his 70-year-old mom screamed and his 6-year-old watched in terror. After all the violent grappling, he was eventually in the back of the police car, being taken away to the station. “It was such an extreme reaction to me saying we can talk through the door, and I’m just dumbfounded at this point,” he remarked.
The Michigan dad claims this incident happened about a year ago, but decided to bring it up on Reddit to see if the police’s actions were justified. Yet, it isn’t far into his story when Redditors realize the officers might have actually been in the right. Apparently, he had a “misdemeanor failure to appear warrant from driving while [his] license expired from 4 years earlier in 2020” that he “literally had zero idea existed.” He notes that the officers were from another county, but this still doesn’t quite help his case.
“If they had an arrest warrant for you that named your residence, then yes, they had the right to enter and grab you,” explains the top commenter of the man’s post. Even if the dad hadn’t come to the door, he identified himself when the police called his name, so they still would have been legally able to enter the open and arrest him if he hadn’t cooperated. “However, if they hadn’t had a warrant, this would have been 100% illegal,” the commenter concluded.
Others chimed in with similar answers. One person tells the Michigan dad, “If they had a valid warrant with your name and address, they were legally in the clear, even if it feels shady as hell. The whole thing still sounds traumatic, though, especially with how they handled it.” That being said, I wouldn’t blame him for being hesitant to open the door. With how ICE and police have been treating arrests across the country, it’s hard not to be scared of what any officer might do. Still, he probably should have known about his arrest warrant—a rather important detail, for sure.
