A young Utah woman’s heated yet unthreatening response to an officer’s treatment of her and a friend landed her in jail.
Nineteen-year-old Lauren Gibson and her friends were driving back to California from a camping trip in Panguitch, Utah, when the group was pulled over and ticketed for speeding before they made it out of the small town. After witnessing the allegedly aggressive behavior of the officer, Gibson was left feeling upset enough to want to “stand up” for her friend and try to “make her feel better.” However, in doing so, she ended up on the wrong side of the law.
In response to the officer’s treatment, Gibson pulled out an old “Back the Blue” sign that she’d picked up earlier in the day and waved it at the officer before stomping on it and throwing it in the trash, a gesture that the Garfield County Sheriff’s deputy perceived as “intimidating.”
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Shortly thereafter, Gibson was arrested and charged with “disorderly conduct and criminal mischief with a hate-crime enhancement for her attempt to ‘intimidate law enforcement,” according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast.
The affidavit goes into more detail of the officer’s account of what occurred, reporting that “Gibson stomped on the ‘Back the Blue’ sign, crumbled it up ‘in a destructive manner’ and threw it into a trash can—’all while smirking in an intimidating manner.’
Gibson feels that she was simply expressing her freedom of speech and her actions didn’t warrant such a serious response, noting that had she done the same thing to anyone of a different profession, the outcome would have been much different. “I don’t feel like I did anything wrong,” she said. “If it was a dentist’s sign or something and I just crushed a dentist sign or something in front of them, like, nothing would have happened. It’s the same thing. it’s just an occupation.”
