This video is truly terrifying. I found it while researching an entirely different and unrelated post. This cop is the scariest one I have seen. Listen to the way he talks. He is treating that man like a THING, an object. I have literally met serial killers, and he sounds just like one of them, IMO. Imagine for a moment, being his prisoner. You are in his power, he can do whatever he wants with you, and judging by the behavior of the other cops, he will get away with it. Now think about how you would act towards him while you were in his custody. You bet your ass you would do what it took to survive. Yes, sir, no, sir, I’m sorry sir. Otherwise, there is a pretty good chance that he will kill you.
I know the video is a bit long, but it’s worth your time. Truly chilling.
As one of the comments to the video said, “Cops don’t become psychopaths, but there are plenty of psychopaths who become cops.”
In this case, the FBI actually investigated and prosecuted him. I don’t know why, because I don’t have access to the trial, but a jury found the cop not guilty of wrongdoing.
The other thing that really disturbs me, is that the other cops (both at the scene and in the jail) just stood there as this guy did this. As far as I am concerned, that makes each and every one of them “bad cops.” If anyone wants to tell me that I shouldn’t say that since the jury found him not guilty, then I don’t want to hear a word when some criminal walks on a technicality or because a jury found them not guilty.
I saw the video shot by the police officers’ own body cams, and I can judge for myself when I see wrongdoing. I don’t need a jury to tell me it’s OK.
When I was in the military, I once had a commanding officer (Captain, O-6 type) who told us that if he had 100 enlisted men with 100 video cameras who said a junior officer had committed a criminal act, but the officer denied it, the Captain would have no choice but to trust in his officer and assume that the enlisted men and their video recordings were wrong.
I disagreed with that statement then, and I disagreed with it in 2023.
In August of ’23, a handful of coworkers and I watched as a cop tortured one of the patients in our emergency room. After we jointly filed a complaint, we were all told that the supervisor had investigated, and the officer involved said that it didn’t happen that way. All of us, we were told, must have misunderstood what we all saw, because we don’t understand police procedure. Besides, the dude who was tortured was not a nice guy, even though he was in jail for a misdemeanor and had an otherwise spotless record. I was so disturbed by this, that I wrote a post about it.
That’s how cops investigate. Cops investigate themselves and find they committed no wrongdoing. It happens all of the time. I have seen it on more than one occasion. In my profession, I meet and see a lot of cops, a lot of scummy people, and a Venn diagram of the two groups would have a good amount of overlap. The prosecutors, judges, and the rest of the legal system need cops in order to keep their jobs. My guess is that the entire system is playing team politics: half of them on one side, half on the other. Justice is lost somewhere in the middle.
I don’t know why the jury let him walk. Maybe they didn’t see the video. Maybe it was heavily redacted. Maybe the prosecutor deliberately tanked the case, I don’t know. I do know what I saw.
I know that some cops try to go right. I also know that, put on the spot, a cop will nearly always side with other cops, even over and above their own families. That makes all of them bad to one extent or another. I get it- you can’t expect a cop to arrest his mother or wife, they’re human with human weaknesses. That’s all the more reason why we can’t treat them as if they are above the law.
It looks like they are about to try again. They even had a brief talk about how to yank open that second door when she opens the inner door.
Don’t open the door. There are no exigent circumstances, they can’t legally enter your home without a warrant. Tell them through the doorbell cam to fuck off and come back with a warrant.
Honestly, there is a certain point when you are willing to find out if the local police have level IV plates.
Police have two ways they can talk to someone in the public: consensual or seizure. A police consensual encounter is a voluntary, non-detention interaction where an officer approaches a person to ask questions or for identification. The person is free to leave, refuse to answer questions, or decline requests at any time- to include refusal to provide ID. It does not involve commands, force, or blocked movement.
A seizure is where a person isn’t free to leave. Police can use force to keep you there, they can search you, demand your ID. Noncompliance with this is considered obstruction or resisting and is illegal. The person being questioned still has the ability to refuse to answer questions, or refuse to answer them without a lawyer present. This is why asking police if you are free to leave is so important. This tells you if you are in a consensual encounter or have been seized.
If the police want to talk to you, they can ask or they can seize. In order to seize, they have to have probable cause that you are or have committed a crime, or they have to have a warrant. If you are in your home, a warrant is generally required, if they don’t have exigent circumstances. Those include the belief you are destroying evidence (e.g., flushing drugs down the toilet), or there is something going on that is an emergency (say you are murdering someone in the home). Police cannot make a warrantless, non-consensual seizure inside someone’s home just because they have probable cause. They generally need an arrest warrant (unless exigent circumstances apply). This is important.
Now to the case at hand:
Two years ago, three men were involved in a fight in a bar in Saint Cloud, Florida. One of the men was reportedly armed with a handgun and had left the scene. The other two individuals who were in the fight contacted police: one of them refused to give a statement, and the other (visibly intoxicated) man did give a written statement claiming the third man displayed a handgun. Both of the men who spoke to the police at the bar were rather vague on details about the fight or what started it.
The next step you would expect an investigator to do would be to, well…investigate. You would think that the cops would contact the man, ask him to come in and answer a few questions, or perhaps even send a cop or two over there to ask. After all, he isn’t under arrest, they don’t have a warrant, and the contact at this point is consensual. Or supposed to be.
The cops immediately assembled a tactical team and had a meeting where they discussed the methods and tactics they would use to take him into custody. They surrounded the house by posting two cops at the rear of the home to prevent his escape, the cops out front had a K9, bullet shields, and NFA long guns with suppressors. They called him on the phone and asked him to step outside to answer some questions.
The Raid
What happened next was captured on body camera video, you can see the video below. They held him at gunpoint and ordered him to the ground. Even though his hands were raised, they kicked him to the ground, used the K9 to bite him because he wasn’t going down fast enough, and used quite a bit of force for a consensual encounter.
Any reasonable person would agree that they are not free to leave at this point. This is a seizure. They avoided the requirement for a warrant by luring him outside using a friendly tone and a request to just “Answer a couple of questions.” Since police tricked him to come outside specifically to avoid the warrant requirement, courts tend to scrutinize that. This trick is called constructive entry. This was never intended to be a consensual encounter, as evidenced by their own meeting and plans to take him into custody.
There was no reason to rush over there and arrest him. The incident was over, and there was plenty of time to secure a warrant. There were no exigent circumstances, and therefore no exception to the requirement to get a warrant. This doesn’t look like a casual “knock-and-talk” but more like a planned arrest operation without a warrant, which courts scrutinize closely. Payton v. New York ruled that police cannot do indirectly what they’re forbidden to do directly—i.e., they can’t avoid the warrant requirement by tricking or forcing someone out of their home.
House surrounded by armed officers
Officers positioned to prevent exit
Suspect called and told to come out
Show of force (guns, numbers) suggesting no real choice
Use of force when subject was compliant and not offering active resistance
In my mind, there is little doubt that this man’s constitutional rights were violated, both in the arrest without warrant, and in the manner the arrest was carried out. There was no reason to use force on a man who had come out voluntarily and was offering no resistance. Not one of those cops mentioned “hey, maybe there is a better, more constitutional way to do this.” This, in my opinion, destroys the “few bad apples” trope.
To make it even worse, it turned out that this man was the victim and the two intoxicated men had attacked him. The prosecutor in the case dismissed all charges, saying that the case was “unsuitable for prosecution.” He has since filed a lawsuit against the city and its police department for violating his civil rights. The cops will almost certainly hide behind qualified immunity claims.
There is a lesson to be learned here.
Don’t talk to the police.
I’ve said this before- don’t talk to the police. Ever. There is no such thing as a friendly chat with cop. I will refer you to an old post of mine on the subject that contains a video titled “Don’t talk to the police.” Don’t talk to the cops, no matter what. They aren’t your friends. They aren’t there to help you. They are there to make a case to arrest someone, and they will get the arrest that requires them to do the least amount of work they can. At best, they are there to find reasons to take you to jail, at worst they are there to use their cool toys on you- whether that be a machine gun, a K9, or just a good old fashioned beating.
Most cops are pussies and cowards. We see that time and again- they will use overwhelming force on those who pose no threat, even going so far as to toss grenades into a baby crib, but will cower outside with their machine guns and body armor while children are being killed by an armed murderer.
A cop calls you on the phone and wants you to come out and answer questions, ask them if they have a warrant. If the answer is no, you tell them you don’t want to answer any questions or speak with them until you have an attorney. Offer to come down to the station with your attorney to answer questions, and tell them your attorney will schedule the meeting. Whatever you do, don’t open the door. You have a doorbell camera for a reason.
Open that door, and this just might happen to you. Ever since my incident in Orange County, Florida in 2001 where a Deputy Sergeant threatened to kill me when I presented him with my concealed weapons permit during a traffic stop, I don’t inform cops of shit.
The cops may not have enough to arrest someone, but you talking will give them what they need. If they DO have enough to arrest you, there is nothing you can say that will talk them out of it. Refuse to talk to them, don’t open the door, and go about the rest of your life.
A pretty good discussion on the difficulties of SEAD in Iran. I trust this channel because the guy who runs it, MOOCH, was assigned to the same ship I was on during the Gulf War. Meaning, I met him in a previous life, and therefore know he isn’t some Asian fake account.
These were the most chilled out cops ever. I will certainly call out the cops when they are wrong. In this case, they handled this traffic stop in the most professional way.
This entire interaction was due to the US “the customer always gets their way” approach to customer service. These women have learned to just scream for a manager, who will come and kiss their ass, letting them have whatever they are demanding. That doesn’t work on police, and it shouldn’t. If you are on a traffic stop or are getting arrested, the only response people should get when demanding a supervisor is “No”
If you have a problem with your arrest or stop, fix it in court.
Don’t forget that James O’Keefe exposed a plan by US military Generals who were planning on refusing orders from President Trump and overthrowing the government. I believe we are still seeing the fallout from that.
James O’Keefe released a report just before the inauguration, where a former FBI agent was bragging to an undercover reporter about how he had been in the Tank (that is the Pentagon underground command post) meeting with a number of senior military Generals, and they were planning to resist the legitimate orders of the President upon his inauguration. This wasn’t a one time conversation- this FBI agent was a senior advisor to the Pentagon, and also a key player in the efforts to torpedo Trump’s 2016 campaign for the Clinton campaign.
During these meetings, according to the interview, high-level Pentagon officials were discussing in secret meetings defying and potentially overthrowing Trump if he issued orders deemed controversial by military leadership. If that sentence doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, you don’t understand the US military.
I believe that Biden knew about all of this, which is why Milley got a Presidential pardon. After all, we already knew that Milley had staged a coup back in 2021.
So there is an apparent conspiracy theory that the Ford was hit on the fantail by a Yemeni missile. The commenter who posted this theory here says the missile hit in the “open area near the fantail.” This is a picture of the ship arriving in Croatia:
The “open area of the fantail” is the jet engine shop, which is located on the first deck directly aft of the hanger bay. That’s where technicians repair the jet engines installed on the ship’s embarked aircraft. The ship’s laundry is 20 feet below the waterline on the sixth deck at frame 215, which is about about 160 feet further forward than the fantail. (In case you are wondering, the compartment is 6-215-1-Q My berthing compartment, the place where I lived for five years, was on the second deck, directly below that jet engine shop. Located below that on the third and fourth decks are the ship’s steering gear. Those steering gear rooms are vital to ship operation, and she couldn’t maneuver without them. For that reason, those areas of the ship are armored with fairly thick walls, and those are in turn surrounded by void compartments that are designed to be blown up to absorb the force of the explosion. I spent a year standing watch in those steering gear rooms as the aft steering gear electrician.
There is no visible damage to the area. This is the rather normal looking ass end of a supercarrier. Here is a picture of it in port. If you look closely, you will see a barge tied to the aft end of the ship. When a carrier is anchored in foreign ports, that barge is tied there to allow tenders to loan and unload, then people and supplies can be brought into the carrier through a ramp that is lowered from the rear of the ship. Sailors refer to that barge as a “camel,” not to be confused with the fire stations of the same name.
If there had been a weapon that hit the aft end of the ship, and it was bad enough to be a mission kill, there would be visible damage, and the ship would have needed more than 5 days in port. Not only that, but the crew would not have been granted liberty.
The world is watching, and there is no way that Yemen hitting the ship would have been ignored and suppressed by the entire world. In fact, it is a genius move for the Trump administration to have sent the Ford to Croatia- because it lets the world see that the ship was not suffering battle damage.
I get it- people want the US to fail. They want it so badly, that they will spread garbage like this. However, this fire was nothing more than the things that happen to a Navy ship that has been at sea for nearly a year of continuous operations.
A great example of the bullshit being tossed out there is this article. It shows the Ford in port and the reader is left with the impression that this is a picture of the Ford in Split, Croatia.
Except that isn’t Croatia, it’s Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia. The earliest example of it I can find is from October of 2017. If you look closely, the port side CIWS isn’t there, no aircraft are there, and the area it’s in doesn’t even look like Split.
I know this post isn’t exactly timely, but it’s something I have wanted to talk about for the past several weeks. This is just the first chance I’ve had to write it all down.
There is a segment of the left that hates President Trump and this nation so much, they want the US to be defeated in every way. That includes the reported fire that reportedly occurred on the USS Ford. They are screaming about how it must have been an Iranian missile, and have come out as experts on Naval warfare, firefighting, and all things military. They are all incorrect. I will discuss the basic damage control for a Navy ship at sea. In port is a different story that is beyond the scope of this post and won’t be discussed.
Every sailor has received some training in boot camp on damage control, but it’s a rudimentary training at best. In smaller ships, a fire will generally cause the captain to put the ship at battle stations so the crew can fight the fire. The same is true on an aircraft carrier, except aircraft carriers are large and there is always a lot going on. When an aircraft carrier goes to battle stations, nearly half of the crew is assigned to damage control, to include firefighting. The ship has too much going on at all times to do this lightly, so for small fires, there is a dedicated fire department that is there to handle smaller incidents and prevent the ship’s crew from having to go to battle stations several times per week.
The capabilities of the ship’s damage control are fairly robust.
The fire party is broken into different areas. There is one segment, crash and salvage (colloquially referred to as ‘crash and smash’) whose job is to fight fires on the flight deck and hanger bay. You will sometimes see them on television and movies wearing “silver suits.” The second segment of the fire party is called the nucleus fire party. That is a team of 23 damage control specialists and 2 electricians whose job it is to fight fires everywhere else on the ship- from the nuclear power plant, to the weapons magazines, berthing spaces, you name it.
There is a sprinkler system on the ship that is capable of releasing firefighting foam or seawater through sprinkler heads in the hanger bay and on the flight deck. When aircraft are aboard, there are men on watch in armored booths whose job is to watch for fires in the hanger. They can close large armored doors remotely and activate those sprinklers as well as sound the alarm if there should be a fire. The ship has more than two dozen fire pumps capable of sending more than 35,000 gallons per minute of seawater into the ship’s fire mains. Magazines have flooding systems that can flood a magazine with seawater to prevent an explosion.
Repair Lockers, aka Damage Control Lockers
If all of that fails, the ship can go to battle stations. One of the things this does is close all watertight doors, separating the ship into ten different watertight compartments. On top of that, each of those watertight compartments has a “repair locker” inside of it. These lockers are actually rooms that are about the size of a large living room in a home, and are filled with firefighting and other damage control equipment, as well as detailed drawings of the locker’s area of responsibility. When the crew is at battle stations, each of those lockers has several dozen crew members assigned to it, commanded by an officer, a chief petty officer, and other enlisted personnel.
Also located throughout each compartment are smaller teams of sailors (8 or 9 to a team) who also have smaller stashes of firefighting equipment. Also located throughout the entire ship are ‘camels’, stations with connections to the fire main and a couple of hundred feet of fire hose.
In all, there are about 1,000 sailors on a Nimitz carrier who are assigned to damage control when a ship is at battle stations.
I spent five of my six years in the Navy on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower. During my first two years on the ship, I was assigned to a small firefighting team located just under the flight deck for my battle station. Then my battle station was moved to the aft hanger deck to be in repair 1A. For my last year or so, I was then assigned to the engineering plant and no longer did damage control. I was also one of the electricians on the Nucleus Fire Party for about two years.
When an aircraft carrier is at sea, they tend to have fires. It’s a huge industrial activity with thousands of tons of explosives, millions of gallons of jet fuel, two nuclear power plants, 50 or 60 aircraft, and literally thousands of ignition sources. As I recall, we would average a fire or two every week while we were at sea. Things like welding, electrical fires, fires in trash cans, and even fires in heat generating spaces like the ship’s laundry, one of the two power plants, and even involving aircraft. It happens.
So that’s the background. Now to what I think may have happened:
A fire could have begun in the laundry. The first indication would be someone reporting smoke. The nucleus fire party would be called out to investigate:
Ringing bell on the announcing system (the “1MC”) then three dings (three dings means in the aft part of the ship) “Ranch hand, ranch hand, ranch hand, away the nucleus fire party. Investigate white smoke in the area of the ship’s laundry. Compartment [Deck]-[Frame]-[Compartment]-[Compartment Use] (e.g., 3-120-3-Q). Use repair 1 alpha.”
The party would locate and begin fighting the fire. At some point, the team recognizes that the fire is beyond their capabilities, and the officer in charge would recommend to the chain of command that the ship go to general quarters. If the Captain concurs, it would sound like this:
At this point, personnel assigned to that repair locker will arrive and take over firefighting from the Nucleus fire party, or would work alongside of them, as determined by the chain of command. The DCA (Damage Control Assistant, a Lt Commander, or O4 who assists the Chief Engineer, who is the ship’s damage control officer) would direct firefighting efforts aided by his staff in Damage Control Central, a control room amidships, located next to the #2 Reactor’s Main Machinery Room. At this point, the repair locker personnel in that area of the ship, plus the nucleus fire party, would have meant about 200 people would be fighting the fire. The area around the laundry is a machinery area: the firefighting materials and supplies in that area are plentiful. It’s below the main deck, so the bulkheads in that area are stout and designed to contain water and fire.
The fire would have been contained fairly quickly, and I remain skeptical of the reports from the MSM, claiming it took more than 30 hours to put out the fire. The USS Forrestal caught fire in 1967, that fire was HUGE, involving the detonation of multiple tons of explosives and hundreds of gallons of jet fuel, and it only took 18 hours to completely extinguish.
I know some of you are likely thinking of the USS Bonhomme Richard, but that was a different animal. It’s a fire that happened in port, the watertight hatches couldn’t be closed because they were blocked by temporary cables and hoses passing through them due to repair work, and most of the crew wasn’t on board. That can’t be compared to a warship steaming in wartime conditions.
The reports I saw of unlivable berthing spaces and sailors sleeping on the floor is likely due to the loss of power to the berthing spaces, caused by damage to electrical cables that passed through the fire area. Naval ships have electrical cables that run through nearly every compartment, up near the overhead. A fire in a compartment can damage those cables, thus cutting off electricity and ventilation to other spaces, even spaces located quite far away from the actual fire. It’s my guess that this is what happened.
It doesn’t take action by the enemy to cause damage like we saw. This is reinforced in me by the fact that the Ford was in and out of the repair facility in a matter of days. The crew themselves could repair much of this damage themsleves, assuming they had all of the needed parts. When I was a workcenter supervisor, I had a large store of secret parts that were not on my approved list of spares. Any good NCO will tall you that they have resources unknown to the chain of command. I know I had several thousand feet of various sized cables, parts, boxes, clamps, and numerous electrical transformers that had been ‘liberated’ from a storage yard in the shipyard, and that is in addition to the hundreds of tons of parts an aircraft carrier has in official store rooms.
In a case like this, I would have had every electrician pulling cable whenever they weren’t doing anything to further the mission. Much of the damage would have been fixed in a matter of 2 or 3 weeks. When I was aboard, there were over 200 electricians on the ship. That number of skilled electricians can pull a lot of cable within a couple of weeks. I can still draw parts of the ship’s electrical system from memory, because we were required to know that in order to stand certain watch stations.
As an aside, nothing discussed in this post is classified. There are certain cases where some of the things I wanted to share were classified, and those were intentionally left out of the story or even altered slightly in ways that did not materially change the facts or story, so as to protect classified material.
Also, I possess no specific knowledge of what happened onboard the USS Ford, but I am familiar with carrier electrical systems and actually helped to write an SOP for electrical systems damage control and watch standing duties when I was in, but I am certain that those SOPs have changed in the 30 plus years since I served. Still, the general principles are still in place.
