At the risk of inflaming the thread, there is a massive difference between glaring at a person, and having shifty non eye contact.
And it seems ever so slightly disingenous to label it thus:
Don’t look at cops, but don’t NOT look either
Now I’m not saying this justifies police brutality etc, but the way it’s presented in your post @sillhouette strikes me as a bit odd.
about eye contact, well it’s all situational. No hard rules.
If in a confrontational situation, as seems to be what is happening in the first picture, then aggressive eye contact is likely to inflame the situation.
And look at the facial expressions of the 2 involved. Not happy people.
I have no idea what happened in the 2nd photo, so will refrain from comment, but given the apparent pattern of blacks being disproportionately targeted, I’m not inclined to give the cop the benefit of the doubt here, whereas I am in the 1st picture.
The only way I can see the defence in #2 being at all possible is if the defendant is an acknowledged body language expert, like this FBI agent and he can credibly state that there were several factors, lack of eye contact in a context where it would be expected being one, that led him to suspect something was awry.
But if that’s your defence…well even then it is flimsy. There’d usually need to be:
he avoided looking at me, and reached for a knife.
Not:
he didn’t look at me.
tldr: 1st photo = aggression, probably not a good stance to be taking.
2nd photo = flimsy excuse.