Two of Merrick Garland’s relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. Garland says his family’s history is the reason he devoted his life to upholding the rule of law. https://t.co/60gPelcNMC pic.twitter.com/rVzqB2zBK8
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 1, 2023
Uh, the Holocaust WAS the rule of law. The law doesn’t always mean that it’s right or moral. Dumbass
How will we ever be able to fight a war and expect to have enough munitions when we have so many problems getting uniforms that the Marines don’t even have enough uniforms to wear?
This post is about a video of a police interaction in Virginia, which is included below. Let me say that the cops really need to stop being total dumbasses, because I really don’t want this blog to become an anti-cop blog. It just seems like they can’t help themselves. They are just hiring tyrannical dumbasses to be cops.
Here is the basis of the video that follows:
Police received at least one call complaining about shots fired in a rural area. The vehicle involved was reported to be a red pickup truck.
A deputy sees a vehicle matching that description and initiates a traffic stop. By the deputy’s own admission, he is not aware if the shots were fired in the vicinity of houses or a road, meaning that he has no idea whether or not a crime has been committed. In other words, there is no reasonable suspicion to believe that the driver of the red truck has committed a crime, because you can’t even point to a crime that you would suspect him of, thus making the traffic stop illegal. Note that Virginia law is plain on this:
Any law enforcement officer may detain any person whom the officer encounters under circumstances creating a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime, and require the person to identify himself. Any person so detained shall identify himself by giving his full legal name, but may not be compelled to answer any other inquiry of any law enforcement officer.
Here is what happened next:
Note that the deputy claims “You can’t shoot within so many feet of a home,” but by his own admission, he has no idea how far away any homes are from the location where the shooting was talking place.
I believe the cop is wrong about what the law says. For starters, the law in Virginia says that you can’t discharge a firearm on public land, AT a building, across or from a road, from a vehicle, or in a reckless manner. None of which has been alleged here. Watch this second, longer video of the traffic stop, and the second cop says that merely operating a vehicle on the roadways of Virginia constitutes reasonable suspicion to initiate a traffic stop and demand to see the ID of the driver.
He says that “Evidence of a crime isn’t reasonable suspicion. You need to get a better lawyer.” The cop is clearly wrong. The law says:
A police officer may have reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed if based on all of the facts and circumstances of the situation, a reasonable police officer would have the same suspicion.
The cop is not being reasonable, which is the standard here. He can’t even articulate which law, if any, he believes is being broken. How can a police officer believe that this man is committing a crime, when he can’t even point to a crime that he reasonably believes is being committed? The statement that merely driving down the road constitutes reasonable suspicion is extremely incorrect.
He says that I don’t have to point to a crime to initiate a traffic stop. This fucking dumbass of a cop then proves beyond a doubt that he doesn’t know what he is talking about when he admits that this isn’t a Terry stop. A Terry stop gets its name from the Supreme Court case, Terry v. Ohio. In a Terry stop, if a police officer has a reasonable suspicion that an individual is armed, engaged, or about to be engaged, in criminal conduct, the officer may briefly stop and detain an individual for a pat-down search of outer clothing. Since, under this cop’s own admission, this isn’t a Terry stop, then he has no reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed.
So instead, the cops go to the man’s property and arrest the father on a trumped up charge to teach the property owner (the son in the red pickup) a lesson. The cops went to the man’s property and arrested the man’s father because, in the cop’s own words, “He ain’t gonna curse me out.” This is a clear violation of the First Amendment rights of the father.
NOTE: A look at Sussex county court records shows that the father, Robert Steven Huffman, has been charged with a violation of 18.2-416, abusive language to another, a 3rd degree misdemeanor. His next hearing is December 18.
The Supreme Court of Virginia has limited the sweep of § 18.2-416 to abusive language that has “a direct tendency to cause acts of violence by the person to whom, individually, [the language is] addressed.” Mercer v. Winston, 214 Va. 281, 199 S.E.2d 724, 726
So is the police officer alleging that the man saying “Leave, get the hell off of my property” is language that would tend to cause him to commit acts of violence? No, this officer is a tyrannical asshole.
Again, remember that no crime has been alleged to cause the police to even be on the property in the first place. It isn’t a crime to shoot guns on private property. The cop keeps saying “We have complaints in the area of shots fired, and this is an open investigation,” but as we have pointed out already, there is no investigation, because there has been no crime alleged. In my opinion, the cops made the arrest to lure the property owner (the son in the red pickup) to an ambush.
The man in the pickup arrives on his property, and the cop arrests him because he won’t provide ID to prove that he is the owner of the property. Refer back to the law, above. The man doesn’t have to show that he owns his own land, which would mean that he has to prove his innocence. That’s not how this works.
This is a bad cop. The second cop who stood there and told him to “just comply” is also a bad cop. Why? Because he saw this illegal behavior and did nothing. He is also a dumbass that doesn’t understand the laws that he is supposed to be enforcing.
I hope they get a good lawyer, and I hope that they sue the Sheriff’s department of Sussex County. I also would like to reiterate that qualified immunity needs to go away. In the meantime:
A PA sheriff’s office has lost 185 firearms. Of that total, 76 of them are lost police service weapons. The other 109 of them are weapons that were confiscated and not returned. I wonder what the odds are that they are sitting in some cop’s house. If an FFL holder lost 185 firearms, would they still have an FFL?
We all know the answer to that.
Every state has a law allowing individuals to be involuntarily committed in the event that they are in such a mental state that they are an imminent danger to themselves or others. In Florida, it’s called a Baker Act, and it allows a doctor or law enforcement officer to hold a person for up to 72 hours for the purposes of medical and psychological evaluation, if that professional reasonably believes that they are a threat to themselves or others.
My last day at work, I placed a woman under a Baker Act after she told me that she had ingested several handfuls of pills in an attempt to commit suicide. If you do this, your documentation had better be able to stand up in court. Because if you misuse this power, you will and should get your ass sued. It’s one of the reasons why I carry a million dollars worth of malpractice insurance, and why that policy includes coverage of my legal bills.
But what happens if you are a cop with qualified immunity? What if you decide to misuse this power by lying in order to place an ex-girlfriend on an involuntary hold, then use force to enforce it? That’s exactly what Pennsylvania State Trooper Ronald Davis did. One of her friends got it all on video:
This cop is obviously a bad cop. Would I arrest someone for intervening in this situation? What if that person was holding the cop at gunpoint? Would I shoot them for pointing a gun at a cop? Even if it was being done to stop the officer’s felonious battery of an innocent woman? If so, can you still call yourself a good cop?
Something needs to be done. For starters, I think that qualified immunity should be eliminated. Let cops get personally sued into oblivion for stuff like this. They can go out and get malpractice insurance, just like medical professionals do.
Second, I think that cops should have *every* use of force judged by a panel of at least 7 people, and that panel should consist of: A judge, two current or retired police officers, and 4 citizens who are not convicted felons. That panel would have the power to fine police officers or refer them to the Grand Jury and suspend their LEO certification pending completion of the Grand Jury’s deliberations. The judge is there to advise the others on the meaning of the law, and only gets a vote in the event of a tie.
What other things might work?
There are those who say that I “hate cops” because I disagree with their actions when they screw up. Well, here is a time when I think that the police were completely justified in their use of force:
I don’t care that she is a girl. I don’t care that she is, at 16 years of age, still legally a child. She entered into a fight with a police officer and attacked him in an attempt to disarm him and acquire possession of his weapon. The police must presume that, should she gain control of this weapon, it will be used against them.
For that reason, the officer was entirely within the bounds of being reasonable when he threw her to the ground. This is a clear case of self defense.
Democrats in New York passed a law requiring background checks for ammunition. Now it’s taking up to 30 days to buy ammo. People will simply go to other states to purchase ammo, putting NY gun stores out of business. That’s the real goal.
When we last spoke about my property taxes, the tax assessor’s office was dragging their feet on my property valuation. The deadline for filing a hearing request with the Value Adjustment Board (the county magistrate that sets property values) was fast approaching, so I filed for a hearing.
This morning, I got a phone call from the director of the tax assessor’s office. They tried telling me that the sale price I would sell the house for is not the same thing as the market value. Then they said that the value as set by the appraiser that I hired was not the same thing, and besides (they said) the appraisal wasn’t the cleanest one, and that they would be attacking it in court.
The carrot:
Then they asked me if there was a value that I would be willing to drop my case for. I gave them a number, and they weren’t happy with it. Still, we aren’t that far apart, and I can defend the number I’m asking for. There isn’t a single property in this area that has sold below that in the past two years.
The stick
Then they said that they know I own multiple properties, and they would be making sure that, if I were to win my case, my non-homesteaded properties would be increased in value as well, which would increase my taxes. I took copious notes. If that shit happens, there will be a lawsuit. You can’t single me out for retribution because I exercised my rights under the law.
They told me that there are property owners who think that the market values in the area are too high, which is making taxes high. I pointed out that increasing property values wouldn’t hurt residents because the SOH tax credit limits increases to 3% per year. They responded by saying that there are some commercial property owners in the area that don’t want to see valuations go up because taxes on rental properties in the area will go up. They (the tax office) isn’t willing to take on the big companies, so they are going to oppose my request.
Translated: We the tax office are owned by the large companies, and we will fight you tooth and nail, even to the detriment of the taxpayers we are supposed to represent.
We have talked about how you should never talk to the cops. In the video at the end of this post, a heroin addict who is under arrest because he was found near the scene of a robbery conducts a master class in applying this tactic:
They took him back to his cell, but questioned him again two hours later, and this time they brought him sodas. Still he didn’t talk.
The video talks about cops using the Reid technique. It is a trick used by cops, especially the FBI, to trick people into confessing. This technique is a form of psychological manipulation that is designed to trick people into agreeing to a set of facts that is a confession.
The best way to avoid this technique is not to say anything beyond:
That’s it. I’m guessing that psychological games and manipulation are why the J6 supporters are being held in the deplorable conditions that they are. A person who has been denied nutrition, sleep, and social interaction is easier to manipulate. At this point, they are political prisoners or even POWs.
Anyhow, the video is below:
In this case, an online predator has tricked a child into taking nude pictures of herself. The father understandably calls the cops, thinking that the cops would protect a child from an online predator. Instead, the cops arrived and threatened to arrest the child for producing child porn. Of course, they were going to do no such thing, because getting such a charge past prosecutors, a judge, and a jury is not going to happen. What this statement was really intended to do was send the message that the cops weren’t going to do anything.
In the old days before organized law enforcement, someone would molest a child or steal a horse, and the members of the community would form a posse, then ride out to find the criminal. The posse would often return without the criminal, but with the stolen object. The issue with this is that these vigilante law enforcers frequently got the wrong person.
Police departments were created to ensure that people accused of crimes receive a fair trial. The cops are nominally there to protect the right of the accused. At some point, they became corrupted into being the enforcers of government edicts, then morphed again into lazy cowards who are sucking at the public teat while doing as little as possible. Normally, it would make me happy that the cops weren’t out there arresting people on trumped up charges, or tossing grenades into baby cribs while searching for weed.
This isn’t the first time we have heard of children facing child porn charges for taking pictures of themselves. In 2015, a pair of children were charged as adults for producing child porn. The act that got them into the adult legal system? Taking nude pictures of children: themselves. So they were simultaneously adult criminals and juvenile victims. Twisted logic, to be sure.
This entire situation just sent a clear message to the father: his child is not going to be protected by the legal system that his is paying taxes to support. There is only one inescapable conclusion to this situation- the father is either going to have to do it himself, or he will have to let this go and accept the fact that his daughter is the sexual plaything of both a sexual predator and the cops who are supposed to arrest freaks like that. In my opinion, an appropriate response would be to duct tape the molester to a fence, cut his genitals off with a dull knife, then leave him there to bleed out.
The lesson that I take from this? A society that can’t protect its most vulnerable members (11 year old children) has already failed. Don’t call the cops. They are as useful as a football bat.
In a blog first, I offered to let my police readers do a guest post, defending this sort of behavior from the cops. I got exactly one response, and it appeared on this blog this morning. His issue was more with my made up on the spot number of 90% of cops being bad ones than any substantive disagreement with the behavior of cops. He was correct as far as that bit of hyperbole goes, but my main point remains- cops who allow this sort of behavior to exist without doing anything to put a stop to it are not good cops.