It's all well and good to have a plan and know how to defeat Stormtroopers and reavers who show up in masks and body armor at your house at 3AM, to kidnap or murder you and your family- after shooting Rex and stomping Fluffy for the sacred cause of Officer Safety, of course.
However, the reality is that most of the kidnappings will be done as the result of a "traffic stop". This is where they have gotten more people accustomed to forced encounters with agents of The State. And most people are trained and frightened into being compliant and cooperative. That is going to have to end if liberty is to ever return to the former America.
I'm sorry to be the one to have to break the news to you, if you haven't already realized it on your own. But it has come to this.
So, think about it and plan accordingly.
.
DHS didn't buy all those check point booths for the fun of it.
ReplyDeleteTraffic stop survival in a nut shell-
ReplyDelete1. Don't leave ~anything~ that you don't want seen in plain sight. If the officer is able to see, say, a ~suspected~ (it only has to look enough like something illegal to convince the court that the officer was acting in 'good faith') whatever, it's legal for him/her to search the part of your vehicle where the something is, and make up a few excuses to keep searching until they find ~something~ chargable (there's almost always ~something~ in anyone's vehicle).
2. Just because you're asked, "Do you mind if I take a look around?" ~doesn~ mean you have to say yes. The officer is trying to get you to ~consent~ to a search, again perfectly legal. But it's also perfectly legal for you to say ~no~. And if for some unfathomable reason you do consent to a search, as long as nothing has been found, as soon as you say, "Stop" the officer has no ~legal~ recourse other than to stop. That doesn't mean they won't try some dirty pool, but ~legally~ they don't have a leg to stand on.
3. As the dearly departed Patrick Swayze said in 'Road House', be nice until it's time to not be nice. All of that old crap about flies, honey and shit is pretty much the truth. If you start right out with an attitude, it's only going to piss the cop off and he/she will be looking for any way to f- with you that they can. No ass-kissing is necessary, but if you surprise them by being polite and affable (dazzle with BS), they're unlikely to notice that you're watching them like a hawk, preparing for the worst, and that your 'Mr. Friendly' is as much a smoke-job as 'Officer Friendly' is.
There are a lot of other little details, but every traffic stop is different, and you generally just have to play it by ear. And if you're wondering whether I'm just talking out of my ass or what, I spent 20 years as a Military Policeman.
I've been on both ends of this, and one of the things I could never stand was a dirty cop; they're the ones who color everyone's perception of the rest of us. And now, of course, I no longer believe in the validity of 'The System' itself, so I know that, despite good intentions in most cases, those cops are supporting something that should be allowed to collapse.
I've always belived in and tried to live by the MP Corp's motto of "assist, protect, defend", but I'm afraid that not all (or even a majority) of the officers out there have any sort of moral compass at all these days.
Good advice, MJ. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteDo you believe there are anything other than "dirty cops" today? Does that depend on your definition of "dirty"?
I can forgive living on "tax" money- ignorance is bliss- but not the enforcement of counterfeit "laws". But what is your line?
@Kent- Unfortunately, I think that most cops, and Soldiers for that matter, are just like 99% of everyone else. We were all raised on the 'koolaide', and unless something comes along to 'snap you out of it', you just tend to go on believing the same tired old lies.
ReplyDeleteI like to think that most of the cops out there at least believe that they're doing the 'right thing', and don't understand the counterfeit nature of the laws we have; I know that the thought never occured to me until well after I'd retired and was able to get some perspective on it all.
I'm one of those crazy bastards who's saddled with a mild christ/superman complex (deriving my satisfaction from helping others even to my own detriment), and I think that's a fairly common motivation for people who enter law enforcement and other 'protective' services (fire fighters, paramedics, etc.).
Unfortunately, this led me, as a LEO, to often do 'what I thought was best' for people, not necessarily what they wanted to do, and this meme is pushed into a LEO's head from day 1 of training. LEOs are trained to think that, as long as they're forcing others to follow the law, they're doing them and 'society' a favor, 'ensuring the public trust' and all of that rigamorole.
From the inside, like a cult, I guess, those ideas are pretty much just universally accepted and unquestioned. Once I was out, though, and started digging into what liberty was actually about (largely thanks to my wife who's been a libertarian for many years now).
It was kind of like that biblical moment in Gensis when Adam and Eve bite into the apple. I saw my whole career in a whole new light, and realized that there were at least some parts of it that I was ashamed of. I've never been involved in any 'attrocities', on the road or in a combat zone, and I like to think that I have actually made some people's lives a little better, but there were a lot of little things over that 20-year period that I certainly would have done differently if I believed then what I believe now.
Sorry to have babbled so much, and the shortest answer to your question that I can think of, I guess, is that most of the cops out there just don't get what a counterfeit law is and think that what they're doing is perfectly legit. And there are those few who do get it, but they're either the ones higher up the 'food chain', dirty in just about every way imaginable, or quite often both.
MJ- Don't apologize. That wasn't babbling at all, but very informative. Thank you for taking the time to share your insight.
ReplyDeleteIt has been my experience that the most "anti-cop" people I have ever met have been ex-cops. I'm not saying you necessarily fit that description, but that you probably understand how it comes about.
Do you think there is any way to get through to an "active duty" cop- to get them to see the nature of what they are doing? Or is any attempt doomed to fail? I hate the thought of just writing anyone off, but I also understand the futility of trying to teach a pig to sing, as they say.
Kent- I'm not necessarily anti-cop; I still have a lot of empathy towards cops who are actually trying to help others and at least trying to make their communities a better place.
ReplyDeleteI've always been vehemently anti- ~dirty~ cop. Besides giving everyone else a bad name, those folks are betreying the oaths that they took (violating their contracts), and showing themselves to be honorless, untrustworthy bastards.
That violates not only the ZAP, but the two basic philisophies that I've tried for most of my adult life to follow, the Wiccan Rede, and The Golden Rule. I'm not religious, but both of those always seemed seemed to make sense to me, and that was long before I'd heard of the ZAP.
As for getting through to an acrive duty cop/Soldier/whoever, I'd say that it can be done, but it's a hit-or-miss thing. If my wife hadn't turned me on to the Libertarian view-point, I'd probably have kept cruising on as a former Liberal turned Right-leaning Independent. In other words, it was lucky happenstance, and I've always been fairly 'open-minded', I like to think.
I can certainly think of a couple of guys who might be open to the truth, but, as is the nature of Army life, they've all moved on to other duty stations and I've lost all contact. But I will say that I believe that there are at least a few, and hopefully more than a few cops/Soldiers out there who won't just blindly carry out what they know are illegal/'immoral' orders, and who, if the 'ballon went up', would turn on their 'masters', not the folks that they're sworn to protect.
Thank you very much for all your insight.
ReplyDeleteI am thinking about that "superman complex" a lot. I wonder if there's a way to show people that it isn't "superman" to enforce counterfeit "laws"; it's "supervillain".