Another story about Japanese Police and foreigners...

Maciamo said:

I think the misunderstanding comes from the different types of legislation we are used to. According to Wikipedia :"Assault is a crime of violence against another person. In some jurisdictions, assault is used to refer to the actual violence, while in other jurisdictions (e.g. some in the United States, England and Wales), assault refers only to the threat of violence, while the actual violence is battery."
In most Western European jurisdictions, assault is considered as the actual violence (including verbal one).

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Interestingly (or maybe not), probably most Americans have the same idea about assault meaning actual violence and not merely causing another to feel in danger of physical harm. It's interesting because we have has become a sort of set phrase in American English, "assault and battery" (as a criminal charge). You'd think with the two terms being used together, folks would guess that there must be two different crimes being charged in a single attack....but most Americans never clue in to that.

How about the crime referred to in America as "ADW" (assault with a deadly weapon)? An attack need not occur for that to be charged; no actual violence need occur. Does the Western European model for simple unarmed assault that you mentioned translate over to situations in which the person is armed? If so, then threatening someone with a knife or a club would not be assault, would it? One could go about threatening people with knives the livelong day with total impunity, so long as one didn't actually cut anyone.

It's difficult to speak for all Western European countries as the systems (and languages !) are different in almost every country. However, Roman Law and Napoleonic Law have greatly influenced the legal systems in Italy, France, Spain and the Benelux, so there are clear similarities. The British and American legal system come from the old English common law, so it's a different system. The German, Austrian and Portuguese systems are yet another one. I think that the Japanese legal system was based on the German one.

While the Anglo-Saxon common law gives more power to the judges to decide, Roman law are more codified, with specific examples of crimes and predetermined punishments for each of them. Napoleonic Law is somewhere in between. Inside Europe, the Italian codes of law are reputedly the biggest in volume, while the British is the smallest. In other words, Italian judges just have to find the case in their piles of books and apply what is written, while British judges (or juries) have a lot of freedom of decision in every regard.

In Belgian or French law, one of the most important concepts is that "suspects are presumed to be innocent until they had been declared to be guilty". When I see how suspects are treated in the US and in Japan, I strongly feel that this is not the case.

The way suspects are treated in Japan and the US are so very different that I don't see how you can possibly include them together.

In Japan they arrest you politely then simmer you for 3 weeks in a much less nice way. In the US they treat you like a criminal from the start, but the custody doesn't last as long as in Japan. So both ways are different, but they seem so similar compared to how it is done here : treat you nicely, get out quickly and people still complain !

Maciamo said:

Maybe that's also a cultural thing. I know that American cops typically ask people to keep their hands in the air, turn around, get a body check, etc. sometimes just for speeding on an exprressway. I often see on TV people being handcuffed for very minor offences.

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When an officer pulls over a vehicle for an infraction or whatever, he doesn't know if the person inside is just a regular Joe or a desperate criminal primed and ready to blow the officer's head off!

Handcuffing of suspects is basically for the officer's safety. Quite often, an offer will cuff someone and do a background check and if the background check (for warrants, etc.) turns up blank, the handcuffs are removed and the suspect is sent on his way.

One funny story: I worked for a while as an armed private patrol officer in the Hollywood/Beverly Hills area. One night I was headed down Sunset Blvd. en route to Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills when I passed a few men seated in front of a nightclub on the curb in handcuffs with police standing around them. About 3 minutes later, while I was in Beverly Hills, I got pulled over by a motorcycle officer. I thought, "Now what did I do?" Turns out, he was with that group in front of the nightclub and none of the officers' handcuff keys would work on the handcuffs to release the suspects. He asked me if they can use mine. I gave him my key and followed him back to the nightclub. My key was the only one that worked!

He could have solved the problem(s) easily if he had read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

Josh