Government

Legal Blood

Years ago, when I was still a paramedic with the fire department, we would occasionally draw blood from patients and turn it over to the police. More than once, I drew a resisting patient’s blood while a police officer held a taser to their neck.

Why would I do that, you ask?

Florida has long had a specific statute, § 316.1933, covering crashes involving death or serious bodily injury. It provides that when an officer has probable cause to believe an impaired driver caused a death or serious bodily injury, the officer shall require a blood test. The statute also expressly authorizes the officer to use reasonable force if necessary, and it authorizes physicians, nurses, paramedics, and other qualified personnel to draw the blood at the officer’s request. It also grants immunity to those assisting with the draw when acting under the statute at the direction of a law enforcement officer.

For many years, the prevailing view, based largely on the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision in Schmerber v. California (1966), was that alcohol dissipating from the bloodstream created an exigency justifying a warrantless blood draw in many DUI cases. The person’s liver was literally destroying the evidence every minute, and the delay in obtaining a warrant was the difference between a DUI homicide and a drunk walking away.

I understood why the law was there, and I also disagreed with it. My favorite quote is “better 1,000 guilty go free than 1 innocent person be convicted.” The truth is that the DUI law changes have had no discernible effect on the rate of traffic fatalities. Of course, the fact that the government uses traffic offenses as a cash cow, with Florida making $100 million a year from traffic tickets has nothing to do with it. In California, it was discovered that 1,600 DUI checkpoints yielded only 3,200 DUI arrests (two per checkpoint), but resulted in $40 million in traffic tickets and 24,000 vehicle confiscations. Cops also won, being paid $30 million in overtime to staff the checkpoints.

That was the law when I retired from the fire department in 2011. Then in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Missouri v. McNeely. The Court held that the natural metabolization of alcohol by itself does not automatically create an exigency. Instead, officers generally need a warrant unless the facts of the particular case make obtaining one impractical.

After McNeely, Florida appellate courts repeatedly held that, despite § 316.1933, the State still had to show either:

  • a warrant,
  • valid consent,
  • or a recognized exception to the warrant requirement (such as genuine exigent circumstances).

By Divemedic, ago

SCOTUS and Flock

Some people misunderstand my problem with Flock and all of the other surveillance we have been talking about. The cameras aren’t the violation. It’s the infinite, searchable database that SCOTUS has held in regards to Geofencing and cellular location data that violates the 4th Amendment.

The moment a government agent can type in my plates or other identifying information into a query and get hits on everywhere I’ve traveled, that constitutes a search under the 4th amendment and requires a warrant. The Supreme Court agrees with me on this one.

The Supreme Court has already ruled on this in three different cases. SCOTUS ruled in Carpenter v. US (2018) that a person does not “surrender Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.”

The 2018 Supreme Court decision regarding the expectation of privacy is the landmark case Carpenter v. United States. In a 5-4 ruling, the Court held that individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their physical movements and location history, even when that data is collected and stored by third-party wireless carriers (Cell-Site Location Information, or CSLI). The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, determined that the government’s warrantless acquisition of historical CSLI constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and generally requires a warrant supported by probable cause.

United States v. Jones (2012) and Chatrie v. United States (2026) significantly limit law enforcement’s ability to use movement data without judicial oversight. In Jones, the Supreme Court held that attaching a GPS tracking device to a suspect’s vehicle and monitoring the vehicle’s movements constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, generally requiring a warrant. The Court recognized that prolonged electronic tracking reveals detailed information about a person’s private life and therefore implicates constitutional privacy protections.

Building on that principle, Chatrie held that police access to digital location data through a geofence warrant is also a Fourth Amendment search because individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information. The Court concluded that law enforcement cannot use broad geofence warrants to identify everyone present near a crime scene without satisfying the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity. Together, Jones and Chatrie establish that both physical GPS tracking and the collection of digital movement data generally require a warrant, reflecting the Court’s recognition that modern location-tracking technologies can reveal the “whole of a person’s physical movements” and therefore deserve strong constitutional protection.

The unlikely pairing of Alito and Sotomayor have both written how long term electronic monitoring and databases raise serious privacy concerns.

Following the line of reasoning in those three cases leads to the conclusion you can’t collect my cellphone location data without a warrant (Carpenter). You can’t collect my google location data without a warrant (Chatrie), and you can’t collect my OnStar or other GPS data without a warrant (Jones).

The idea that law enforcement believes that in spite of these three rulings from SCOTUS, they can erect a network of camera surveillance to track the movements of everyone, everywhere, at all times and store it into database that they can search without a warrant is absurd and is antithetical to a free people.

By Divemedic, ago

Your Cars Are Snitches, Bitches

In a sign of things to come, a Waymo autonomous vehicle in California pulled into a parking lot, locked the passengers inside, and notified police when two 15 year old passengers were drinking alcohol and shooting nearby pedestrians with water guns.

There are those who would call me a criminal lover for being opposed to that. Consider where this is going- your car will monitor you for everything illegal and drive you to the cops when it detects lawbreaking behavior. Tore the tags off your mattress? Didn’t follow the instructions on that can of bug spray to the letter? I promise you that each and every one of us breaks the law each and every day.

  1. If you are using a household cleaner, and the label tells you to mix a cap full of the cleaner with a gallon of water, and you only mix it with 3.5 quarts of water, you have just used a labeled product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. Felony.
  2. In Texas, it is a felony to own more than 4 sex toys (chapter 43). 11 of the 2,324 acts that the Texas Legislature thinks are worthy of being called felonies, have to do with acts that you can commit with or to an oyster.
  3. In Montana It is a felony for a wife to open her husband’s mail.
  4. In Florida, it is a felony to access WiFi without permission. There was a man who was convicted in 2005 of using the WiFi of a restaurant that advertised free WiFi for customers, because he was using the access from the parking lot while the establishment was closed. Since it was advertised as free WiFi for customers, and he could not be a customer while the business was closed, hello felony.
  5. It’s a felony to have a raffle in Georgia, unless you are registered as a non-profit organization with the state.
  6. In Michigan, it is a felony for a man to seduce an unmarried woman, punishable by 5 years in prison. Adultery is also a felony in Michigan, but only if the spouse being cheated on is the one who complained.
  7. In Mississippi, if you promise to marry a woman, have sex with her, and then decide not to marry, you are guilty of a felony punishable by ten years in prison.

Soon, your television, car, cell phone, and everything else you own will be monitoring you to ensure you are following the rules. All of them, even those that no sane person would consider to be a crime. Again, the only power a government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Making more criminals makes the government, and those who are employed by it, more powerful.

Of course, not everyone will be tossed in jail. Instead, you will be used as a confidential informant to help convict your friends and acquaintances. Being an informant means getting away with continuing your criminal career, but with protection from the cops. My brother found that out firsthand when a couple of meth users who were CIs for the local cops tried to rob him at his place of business, and he was the one arrested when the criminals escaped and then called their cop handlers.

I don’t know how I got on this dystopian timeline, but I really wish I were in a different one.

By Divemedic, ago

Another Level of Control

John over at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise puts up a post that is right in with what I have been saying about Surveillance: you are being watched. Everything you own from your computer to you car is spying on you. Everything your neighbors own is spying on you. Complain about this, and there are plenty on the right who will accuse you of hating cops and supporting criminals. Just this week, I had a guy call me a commie Democrat cop hater who supports criminals because I am against all of this surveillance.

The fact of all this is simple, as John points out-

If you’ve been good, you’re fine.  And if you’re Hillary Clinton or Jeff Epstein, all the data will be lost.

We’ve all seen videos posted on social media of a bunch of nigg- well, gang members, grasping Glocks that have switches installed. Faces and crimes visible for all the world to see, yet no arrests. We know the power that be have the ability, they have facial recognition. I don’t even have to show my passport to enter the country- I walk up to a camera, and as soon as it recognizes my face, a green light comes on, and the government has a record of where I was and when I entered the country.

If these cameras were truly being used to fight crime and catch criminals, the shootings in Chicago and Detroit each weekend would be solved. Atlanta has:

  • A large network that integrates city-owned cameras, businesses’ cameras, schools, transit systems, police body cameras, and voluntarily shared private cameras through programs such as Connect Atlanta.
  • Over 60,000 cameras connected or accessible to law enforcement.
  • More than 120 cameras per 1,000 residents, making it the highest among major U.S. cities.
  • Atlanta says its Connect Atlanta/Fusus network allows investigators to access tens of thousands of public and private cameras and has expanded dramatically since 2022. The city says this helps with both real-time response and investigations, but it does not report how many cases were solved specifically because of camera footage.

With all of that technology, you would think that no crimes go unsolved, but that isn’t the case. Crime is still high, because those cameras aren’t there to eliminate crime. Remember the Rand quote: “The only power a government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.”

Consider what Cape Coral, Florida is about to do- they want to put AI driven cameras on city vehicles, including garbage trucks, to scan people’s homes for evidence that the law is being broken as the vehicle drives by.

No, these cameras are there to clamp down on those who would threaten the powers of the ones in charge. This is why I think we need to do away with property taxes. Government with less money is government that can’t afford shit like this.

Want to hate Flock more? They have a little-known “public safety data platform” called Nova, which combines their mass-surveilled footage with YOUR PERSONAL INFO from people search sites that are commonly used to dox & SWAT people. It was discovered by 404 Media that Flock was ALSO using personal info gathered from data breaches. They are not only mass surveilling you, they are using illegally-obtained data to build “profiles,” then providing that information (either directly or indirectly) to those who would use it illegally, and washing their hands of it by saying they aren’t the ones using the data illegally. All they do is compile it and provide that data.

By Divemedic, ago

Luck of the Draw

A judge in Wisconsin was arrested and charged with obstruction for helping an illegal immigrant escape ICE. The felony conviction resulted in a slap on the wrist, despite the fact that the woman remained unrepentant, claiming it was the right thing to do.

“This is a situation where an otherwise good person upset by immigration enforcement in this country, a sentiment widely shared, made a bad decision in the moment,”

My yardstick is the amount of time spent in jail by those who simply walked through the Capitol after the police let them in, and this woman got no jail time for using her official position to aid a criminal act. Why? The judge who heard the case was the most liberal in the district, and one lawyer said:

Talk about luck of the draw! Following indictment, the Dugan prosecution was randomly assigned to Judge Lynn Adelman. Judge Adelman, age 85, is the most liberal judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and maybe one of the more liberal judges in the US.

But is it really? It seems like every time the left has a case that is important to them, it gets assigned “randomly” to a friendly, liberal judge. Or in this case, do you think it was just judges protecting their own?

By Divemedic, ago

Fraud

I’m believing that more than half of money spent by government is fraud, and half of what is left is unnecessary crap. A million bucks for 30 square feet of sidewalk? For climate change?

By Divemedic, ago

Working on It

A Mexican national in the US illegally was being taken into custody by ICE and tried to run over the officers with his car. ICE agents shot and killed him. The man’s son released this:

My father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a hardworking Mexican man, was the man killed this morning by ICE in the East End. My father has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother. He was in the process of obtaining his work permit through the legal process. He was on his way to work, picking up his workers. My father did not deserve this. Please respect my family’s privacy during this time. There are a lot of videos and pictures out there of my father’s final moments that I do not wish to see. For more information, I will be speaking at a press conference, with the support of LULAC Tomorrow, Wednesday, July 8 at 10AM at The Greater Coalition for Justice – 150 West Parker Rd Houston, TX, 5th floor.

I note:

  • How have you been “in the process of obtaining” a work permit for nearly 4 decades?
  • If you want your privacy respected, the best way to do that is not have a press conference
  • Pictures show him to be 52 years old, he illegally immigrated here at the age of 17.

On thing I do agree with is the need for an investigation. All law enforcement shootings should be investigated, just as citizen self defense shootings are. However, when and if the investigation discovers that the man’s wife is also illegal, she should be immediately deported. Of course, the sons are citizens and can’t be, but mom’s got to go.

Local politicians say:

We need answers, and Congress must act with meaningful immigration reform that reduces unlawful border crossings, addresses the backlog of asylum cases, and creates a pathway to legal status. 

There is only one way to do that. If you create a pathway for illegals to become legal, you will simply get more unlawful crossings. The only way to do that is for Congress to throw open the borders and make everyone who comes in legal. You cannot have open borders and a welfare state. It is impossible for the two to coexist.

The illegal immigration ship has sailed. Too many people want the borders open. Our nation is about to fall. Keep prepping. It’s going to get ugly.

By Divemedic, ago

You’ve Heard of Free Speech?

I guess the cops that read here will call this “more anti cop bullshit” but I still call them like I see them, and this is unconstitutional as hell:

Saying someone will be arrested for calling a tranny “sir” is a violation of the First Amendment. End. Full stop.

EDITED TO ADD: This isnt one Ft Worth cop. Its apparently department policy.

By Divemedic, ago