I submit that is a question you need to ask.
First, watch this video, an excerpt from the John Stossel show “Policing America: Security vs Liberty” recently broadcasted on Fox News, July 26th, involving USBP checkpoints up to 100 miles inland from an American border:
I find this shameful and repulsive, personally and professionally. As anyone in law enforcement (as I am) knows, there is the spirit or the law and the letter of the law.
A pastor had both of his vehicle windows broken and was Tazed from both sides when he refused to let USBP search his vehicle. He is Caucasoid and spoke clear English.
The issue? The federal law indicating “a reasonable distance from the border.” Is 60 miles reasonable? 100 miles? Yes, 100 miles. As Stossel points out, that’s where most Americans live, when you consider our borders north and south, and our coastlines east and west.
Some persons are installing cameras in their cars to document these abrogations, God bless them. This is pushback and they are patriotic for doing so. Again, see the video above.
The SCOTUS said that travelers can be briefly detained for the purpose of conducting a limited inquiry into residence status, as per United States vs Martinez-Fuerte, 428 US 543 (1976). Neither the vehicle nor its occupants can be searched, yet the video clearly shows that Americans are being told to submit to detentions, searches, and arrests resulting from non-cooperation when more than an ID check is demanded.
How does one conduct a brief check into residency status? Speak to the individual stopped, see if they speak English, check for a driver’s license and/or other forms of identification. Any prudent and reasonable LEO can tell you this readily.
What we see displayed above is what is known in law enforcement as “contempt of cop.” As in: you have pissed me off because you have dared to challenge my authority, and I am now making it personal.
John Stossel says “big government creates problems,” and that is certainly the case here, involving the Fourth Amendment. “It’s like living in occupied territory,” some lawful residents of the United States of America are saying.
More Americans, as Stossel says, are pushing back. As I submit they should, particularly if they possess video evidence of their incidents. Further, as an affected citizen in an incident similar to those above, I would be suing the federal agencies involved and then the individuals themselves because, as the agents themselves made it personal, perhaps they should take a helping of “personal” in return.
Let there be no mistake: I have been in law enforcement for 41 years. I have worked in a LE capacity for the federal government and for local agencies, where I have worked now for 35 years. I was a Field Training Officer (FTO) in Patrol and have been in training the bulk of my LE career. I taught my trainees to respect the foundational documents and in fact they had not only to conform to my agency training regimen, but my personal training regimen as well, which included knowledge about the Bill of Rights and its applicable amendments.
I emphasized that arrests and detentions should be built but upon solid probable cause and reasonable suspicion, and that we do not bluff. If the law is not on our side, then we don’t make a potential bad situation worse. We know, I would literally say (and wrote in my own adjunct training manual that I would hand out to my charges), when to back down.
Let me submit this for your consideration: if the USBP were literally “striking it rich” from vehicle blockades many miles within the United States proper, they and the Obama Administration would be crowing about it from the tallest of spires, the mightiest hilltops, far and wide, proving the efficacy of these policies. Not only that, the American Media Maggots, sycophants that they are, would plaster these statistics over TV screens and newspapers for days and days.
Except they aren’t. Which tells me one very salient thing: the stats are not bearing out the efficacy of this policy. Trust me, if these interior check points were literal gold mines of success and productivity you would know.
And as far as Representative Peter King (R) is concerned, he is wrong. Open your eyes. All you have to do, sir, is watch this video.
Big Brother is indeed watching. But in this case, watching the wrong Americans — whilst purposely allowing illegal invaders easy passage through our southern border.
This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me.
This is not the America I remember from even, say, 30 years ago.
I still adhere to the age-old axiom and standard I was held to when I worked Detectives, in Theft, Child Abuse, Warrants, Robbery and Homicide: see below.
That is how it is done in a free United States of America where the police respect the foundational documents, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Should the USBP exchange their green shirts for Brown Shirts?
BZ
