Captured, Cuffed, and Jailed: A Personal Story - Jeffrey Tucker - Liberty.me:
August 23, 2015 - "From one minute to the next, I went from seemingly free to cuffed and captured. Anyone who has ever experienced such a thing knows exactly what I mean. If you haven’t experienced it, I hope you never do....
"By day’s end, it was over. Except not really. This one incident is over. But the reality that none of us really control our lives, that none of our property is really our own, that we all stand vulnerable to legal kidnapping at any moment: This is an ongoing reality for the whole population....
"Well, here’s how it happened to me. There’s a new traffic law in most states called the 'move over' rule. When the police are stopped on the right hand side of the road, you are to move over to the left lane. This makes the police feel safer. For my part, I had never heard of this law or never had it really tested in my driving behavior. The police had set up a trap, stopping there on the side just to test compliance. I moved over a bit but not enough.
"The lights flashed behind me, and I pulled over. I gave the officer my license. Another police car arrived. He returned and told me to step out of the car, and asked me why my license was suspended. I was shocked. Then I remembered I was one day late in paying a parking ticket. The lady at the counter told me there might be an issue with my license, so she gave me an official paper labelled 'Official Notice of Reinstatement of Driver’s License,' and put the official seal on it....
"I told the police that they could find this document in my car. They looked because at this point I was not allowed to move. They brought the paper back and stared at it. One policeman said it was clearly legitimate. The other said, no this was issued by the municipal court, not the Department of Motor Vehicles, so he couldn’t accept it....
"I was cuffed and led to the car. I protested that my computer, my phone, all my stuff was in the car. None of this mattered. They searched my car for drugs, guns, liquor, or whatever. They found an unlabelled bottle of pills (a blood thinner) and interrogated me about it, strongly implying that having an unmarked bottle of pills is illegal (is it? I don’t know).... My car would be towed to a wrecker lot, [they] explained. If I get out on bail, I could pay to get it back. Would the lot still be open by then? I asked. The policeman had no answer, no concern....
"The police car with me in it took off and within 15 minutes I was being strip searched. They dug deep into every pocket, looking for what? (I would learn later)....
"A Hispanic man was brought in after me, and I saw how other people are treated. He was cuffed in back, very tightly. They were much more rough on him during the search.
"Then something remarkable happened. They found what looked like small flakes of marijuana in his pocket, no more than ¼ of a teaspoon. They immediately changed his charge from 'failure to appear' — he missed a court date for a traffic violation — to a felony: bringing illegal substances into a correctional facility. Once this happened, the officer shouted to everyone with great glee: 'we’ve got a felon!!' They high-fived it all around....
"In other words, this is why they were searching me so thoroughly. They want to find any excuse, any small reason to intensify charges, to spread more misery and wreckage. One of the guards seemed less excited than the others, and I asked him how he can stand to watch this kind of thing happen all day, every day. He told me that you just get used to it.
"'Just doing my job.' I must have heard that phrase 15 times during my ordeal. The cops use it. The clerks use it. The guards use it. The whole system sees itself this way. It is just doing what it is supposed to do.... No single person is responsible for judging the morality or justice of it all. It is the system, and they work within it. They can’t change it. They cooperate with it. They live by the book. It’s the book itself that is the oppressor....
"This is a system of exploiters and the exploited, exactly as Marx himself had explained. But the difference is this: the law is the exploiter and the population is the exploited ... every law ends in the right of a tiny elite to capture you, pillage you, and, ultimately, kill you. Every addition to the law code intensifies the violence."
Read more: https://tucker.liberty.me/captured-cuffed-and-jailed-a-personal-story/
'via Blog this'
August 23, 2015 - "From one minute to the next, I went from seemingly free to cuffed and captured. Anyone who has ever experienced such a thing knows exactly what I mean. If you haven’t experienced it, I hope you never do....
"By day’s end, it was over. Except not really. This one incident is over. But the reality that none of us really control our lives, that none of our property is really our own, that we all stand vulnerable to legal kidnapping at any moment: This is an ongoing reality for the whole population....
"Well, here’s how it happened to me. There’s a new traffic law in most states called the 'move over' rule. When the police are stopped on the right hand side of the road, you are to move over to the left lane. This makes the police feel safer. For my part, I had never heard of this law or never had it really tested in my driving behavior. The police had set up a trap, stopping there on the side just to test compliance. I moved over a bit but not enough.
"The lights flashed behind me, and I pulled over. I gave the officer my license. Another police car arrived. He returned and told me to step out of the car, and asked me why my license was suspended. I was shocked. Then I remembered I was one day late in paying a parking ticket. The lady at the counter told me there might be an issue with my license, so she gave me an official paper labelled 'Official Notice of Reinstatement of Driver’s License,' and put the official seal on it....
"I told the police that they could find this document in my car. They looked because at this point I was not allowed to move. They brought the paper back and stared at it. One policeman said it was clearly legitimate. The other said, no this was issued by the municipal court, not the Department of Motor Vehicles, so he couldn’t accept it....
"I was cuffed and led to the car. I protested that my computer, my phone, all my stuff was in the car. None of this mattered. They searched my car for drugs, guns, liquor, or whatever. They found an unlabelled bottle of pills (a blood thinner) and interrogated me about it, strongly implying that having an unmarked bottle of pills is illegal (is it? I don’t know).... My car would be towed to a wrecker lot, [they] explained. If I get out on bail, I could pay to get it back. Would the lot still be open by then? I asked. The policeman had no answer, no concern....
"The police car with me in it took off and within 15 minutes I was being strip searched. They dug deep into every pocket, looking for what? (I would learn later)....
"A Hispanic man was brought in after me, and I saw how other people are treated. He was cuffed in back, very tightly. They were much more rough on him during the search.
"Then something remarkable happened. They found what looked like small flakes of marijuana in his pocket, no more than ¼ of a teaspoon. They immediately changed his charge from 'failure to appear' — he missed a court date for a traffic violation — to a felony: bringing illegal substances into a correctional facility. Once this happened, the officer shouted to everyone with great glee: 'we’ve got a felon!!' They high-fived it all around....
"In other words, this is why they were searching me so thoroughly. They want to find any excuse, any small reason to intensify charges, to spread more misery and wreckage. One of the guards seemed less excited than the others, and I asked him how he can stand to watch this kind of thing happen all day, every day. He told me that you just get used to it.
"'Just doing my job.' I must have heard that phrase 15 times during my ordeal. The cops use it. The clerks use it. The guards use it. The whole system sees itself this way. It is just doing what it is supposed to do.... No single person is responsible for judging the morality or justice of it all. It is the system, and they work within it. They can’t change it. They cooperate with it. They live by the book. It’s the book itself that is the oppressor....
"This is a system of exploiters and the exploited, exactly as Marx himself had explained. But the difference is this: the law is the exploiter and the population is the exploited ... every law ends in the right of a tiny elite to capture you, pillage you, and, ultimately, kill you. Every addition to the law code intensifies the violence."
Read more: https://tucker.liberty.me/captured-cuffed-and-jailed-a-personal-story/
'via Blog this'
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