Police have specific job duties, of which, one of the main reasons of having a police force is to successfully address criminal activities, as well as to provide the service of maintaining public safety – signifying that police are supposed to protect and to serve the general public. To the degree that these above duties are done in a professional and fair manner, all is to the good; however, not too surprisingly, in consideration that police officers are human beings, thereby subject to human frailties, this has led to some of those police officers succumbing far too easily to misjudgment and to the lures of the power that they possess of so being able to wrest freedom from those that they do not like, do not respect, have prejudice against, or simply because they as a police officer are intolerant.
Most citizens do not wish to voluntarily engage in a confrontation with any police officer, because they know that police officers have not only the power to arrest them, to handcuff them, and to mistreat them, but they are also quite capable of killing them. That said, though, each citizen of the United States, has exactly the same Constitutional rights as any other citizen, which presupposes that citizens should not and should never be compelled to behave in a manner in which they are intimidated or coerced into having to display respect to a police officer, while that police officer, need not show any sort of respect, in turn. That is to say, respect should always be a two-way street, and those that are disrespected by being treated as something akin to trash, or scum, or less than human, should not suffer the indignity of being arrested for disorderly conduct, especially when the police officer has been the primary instigator of such so occurring.
Police officers, have an absolute duty to show appropriate restraint to all those that they are sworn to protect and to serve, and those police officers that do not do so, are derelict in their duty. Sure, police officers are subject to stress and all of the common emotions and frustrations that life under trying circumstances so entails, but that does not excuse the fact that police officers are not entitled to be abusive to citizens and should not overstep their domain by taking the law into their own hands; for citizens are entitled to their right to stand for that which is right and to voice their viewpoint, so thereby to arrest those that police officers do not care for, with dubious charges such as disorderly conduct, is an abuse of power.
Anytime that the state sanctions the behavior of its policing arm to silence those that they find to be a nuisance or an inconvenience, or annoying, by arresting them through unjustified charges such as disorderly conduct and the like, so as to effectively put down the opposition, then they are upholding what is, in fact, a violation of Constitutional law. The truth of matter is that police officers, in general, get way more respect than they have rightfully earned, mainly because people are fearful of police officers; so then, those that have the courage or boldness to actually confront a police officer and to have a civil disagreement with such, should be able to have their fair say, or else, those citizens are not actually free.