Articles by Herschel Smith

TechDirt:

This insight into how police think the public should interact with them is certainly enlightening. (via this tweet and Amy Alkon’s Advice Goddess blog)

The backstory is this: a woman was walking down the street when a motorcycle cop approached her, asked her if she lived in the area and if she would talk to him. She says his approach made her feel uncomfortable, so she refused and continued on her way.

“I thought that maybe he was flirting,” she said. “I just thought it was odd, I thought it was odd. I wasn’t really sure but I felt uncomfortable because there wasn’t anyone around.”

She says she was worried he might not even a real cop, so she refused to stop and began jogging away from him.

“He just crept along beside me on his motorcycle and he started saying, ‘Hey ma’am! I want to talk to you. Hey stop, ma’am! I want to talk to you.’ Then my anxiety rose even higher,” she said.

This was followed shortly thereafter by the cop dismounting, chasing her down, tackling her and placing her under arrest. The police chief claims this arrest was for “walking on the wrong side of the road,” (as well as “evading arrest” and “resisting arrest”) despite the fact that the woman wasn’t ultimately charged with anything.

Even if the preceding events could possibly be dismissed as hearsay, or something tainted by false impressions and emotions, there’s the police chief’s responses to questions about this interaction.

Whitehouse Police Chief Craig Shelton says this:

Shelton says by law you’re not required to stop and talk to an officer if there’s not a lawful reason for them to be stopping you.

But then he says this:

“Normally if a police officer pulls up, in my opinion, it’s awful odd for somebody just to take off and not want to speak to the police officer,” Shelton said.

Let’s rehearse this one more time for the uninitiated among us, even if the police chief is lying and knows it.

Do … not … ever … talk … to … the … police.  Ever.  Got it?  Good.

Times-News Burlington:

The Burlington police officer who obtained a search warrant for the wrong house in a drug investigation was present when the warrant was executed, but wasn’t able to stop deputies before they entered the house, police officials said Tuesday.

Burlington Police Chief Jeffrey Smythe called into Talkline, a local morning radio show on AM station WBAG, on Tuesday to discuss the incident, which occurred April 4 at a Mebane house outside of the police department’s jurisdiction, thus requiring the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office to execute the warrant.

Though the Times-News previously tried to get information from police on where Officer R.D. Hebden, who obtained the warrant, was while deputies entered the wrong house, Smythe explained on the radio show that the officer was present but was in the last of four cars to pull up to the site.

Smythe said sheriff’s deputies had already entered the house, located at 3264 Maplewood Ave., before Hebden could inform the ACSO lieutenant overseeing the operation that he had put the wrong address on the warrant, but that the officer immediately did so.

On the show, Smythe admitted the Burlington Police Department accepts the blame for the error, and mentioned that he had already apologized multiple times to the two residents of the house.

“It was due to a mistake on our officer’s part,” said Assistant Chief Chris Verdeck. “We’ve repeatedly apologized for our mistake and are investigating it thoroughly, internally, to try to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

The Sheriff’s Office has maintained that its deputies acted properly, and followed normal procedure for entering a residence at the address listed on a search warrant — which included a team of nine deputies from the vice and special operations units who went inside the house with guns drawn, ordering the residents on the ground and handcuffing them, said Randy Jones, public information officer.

Jones said one of the deputies carried a shotgun, one carried an AR-15 assault rifle and the others carried handguns. He said deputies knocked on the back door and announced their presence multiple times, to no response, before ramming through the door.

Once inside, the residents were ordered to get down and were both handcuffed while deputies conducted a walkthrough to ensure no one else was inside. He said once the scene was secured, Lt. Brandon Wilkerson, of the sheriff’s office, began to question whether they were at the correct location and went out to confer with Hebden.

The mistake of address on the search warrant was a result of Hebden selecting the wrong parcel while using an Alamance County geographic information system, said Lt. Brian Long, of the Burlington Police Department.

“Entered the wrong home …,” “apologized …,” “no response …,” and so on the clinically worded prose goes.  But there is nothing clinical about this.  Nine law enforcement officers crushed in a door and pointed weapons at innocent victims, thus endangering their lives, all over a mistaken address.

As a sidebar comment, if one of my readers does something like this, you would get charged with assault, reckless endangerment and brandishing a weapon.  And properly so.  But my readers wouldn’t do this.  They would ensure proper muzzle discipline at all times when in possession of a weapon.

The solution isn’t more apologies or radio talk shows.  The solution is to find another way to obtain evidence in criminal investigations that doesn’t involve ramming doors in or pointing weapons at people.  Note to LEOs: I couldn’t care less if you lose some of your evidence.  Use your heads and find another way.

Communist Harry Reid:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says “something is going to happen” to get Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy to stop letting his cattle graze on federal land.

“It’s obvious that you can’t just walk away from this. And we can speculate all we want to speculate to what’s going to happen next,” Reid told KSNV-TV. “But I don’t think it’s going to be tomorrow that something is going to happen, but something will happen. We are a nation of laws, not of men and women.”

Reid called militias staying at Bundy’s Bunkerville ranch “domestic violent terrorist-wannabes.

What Reid didn’t tell you is that he is gaming the system to line his own pockets and those of his son, Rory Reid, who is also a communist.  They want their crony who now heads the BLM to forcibly evict Bundy so they can use the land to spend stimulus money on Chinese communist “green” projects.  Reid didn’t exactly say that, did he?

No, because he is liar.  He comes across as a sniveling, pitiful, effete little worm.  In reality, he is an evil, rotten, despicable, loathsome, horrible, terrible, thieving, conniving, scheming, scurrilous, vulgar, opprobrious, offensive, dreadful monster and criminal who has hardened his soul so that he is no longer moved by differences between right and wrong.

There is only him.  Such is the final state of the wicked man.  And I do not believe that he is a product of the state, but rather, that the state we now live in is a function and product of men like him.

It was recently the anniversary of the fighting in al Najaf, and Travis Haley does an after action report on his engagement (the only one I think I’ve seen from him on this epic fire fight).  Take note of what he says: “Trying to find your dope in combat” is the last thing you want to do.  Practice, know your weapon, know yourself, and practice some more.

My son Daniel did a combat tour of Fallujah in 2007, but his other deployment with the Marine Corps was a MEU to the Gulf of Aden and Persian Gulf (which both he and I think is a horrible way to throw away money if we’re never going to use the Marine Corps for anything on these MEUs except for humanitarian missions – but that’s another topic).

As the pre-deployment workup for this MEU, the Battalion underwent extensive training in evidence collection protocol and procedures.  At the time I dismissed this as an aberration and thought no more of it.  Then the Washington Post recently had this article, and it made me think again.

When U.S. Special Operations forces raided several houses in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in March 2006, two Army Rangers were killed when gunfire erupted on the ground floor of one home. A third member of the team was knocked unconscious and shredded by ball bearings when a teenage insurgent detonated a suicide vest.

In a review of the nighttime strike for a relative of one of the dead Rangers, military officials sketched out the sequence of events using small dots to chart the soldiers’ movements. Who, the relative asked, was this man — the one represented by a blue dot and nearly killed by the suicide bomber?

After some hesi­ta­tion, the military briefers answered with three letters: FBI.

The FBI’s transformation from a crime-fighting agency to a counterterrorism organization in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been well documented. Less widely known has been the bureau’s role in secret operations against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other locations around the world.

With the war in Afghanistan ending, FBI officials have become more willing to discuss a little-known alliance between the bureau and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that allowed agents to participate in hundreds of raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The relationship benefited both sides. JSOC used the FBI’s expertise in exploiting digital media and other materials to locate insurgents and detect plots, including any against the United States. The bureau’s agents, in turn, could preserve evidence and maintain a chain of custody should any suspect be transferred to the United States for trial.

[ … ]

… FBI agents were regularly involved in shootings — sometimes fighting side by side with the military to hold off insurgent assaults.

“It wasn’t weekly but it wouldn’t be uncommon to see one a month,” he said. “It’s amazing that never happened, that we never lost anybody.”

Others considered it a natural evolution for the FBI — and one consistent with its mission.

[ … ]

In 2005, all of the HRT members in Iraq began to work under JSOC. At one point, up to 12 agents were operating in the country, nearly a tenth of the unit’s shooters.

It’s been routine to watch every little Podunk Hollow across America acquire MRAPs, and we’ve all seen the horrible result of the militarizaton of police in America with SWAT raids.  With former military snipers going to work for federal law enforcement agencies and former military in general finding work with law enforcement across America (which both Daniel and I think is a horrible idea), there may as well never have been a law such as the Posse Comitatus Act.  We have virtual military enforcing law and warring against citizens of America as we speak.

But this level of admixture is a new feature (to those of us who weren’t part of JSOC).  The professional military has welcomed both law enforcement officers and law enforcement protocol and procedures into its ranks.

The implications of this are perhaps enormous.  Quiet Man at WRSA points out that there are formal Army field manuals and doctrine and training documents for site exploitation, and remarks that “virtually everything they do will be ‘”joint” in the agency sense.”  Yes, and in the intra-agency sense as well.  The military is looking more like law enforcement, and law enforcement is looking more like the military.  For those who have been watching, this is likely not accidental, and is an evolution that is at one and the same time both immoral and lawless.  This admixture of law enforcement and military is probably irreversible and this fact will prove to be determinative as a catalyst in coming events.

David Codrea:

Putting aside reader opposition to or support for the Bundy claims, and ignoring allegations of Reid’s (and his son Rory’s) personal interests in the disposition of the land in question, what must be examined is what the senator must mean if he seriously believes his accusation.

Just another means to do what the collectivists have wanted to do all along.  Disarm us.  Bhaa.  Come and take them.

Don’t miss Mike Vanderboegh’s speech in Nevada.  Mike reminds us that he’s a Yankee by birth, but given his current station in life, we’ll forgive him for that.

So we discussed that “missing M-16” didn’t we?  It’s been found.

How many of you would “forget” about an M-16 you put in your gun safe?  Yea, that’s what I thought.

And here is the comment of the day from WRSA from Tom in Ohio.

Tea party politicians.  Officially UA.

UA cannot be an excuse for this load of crap from Charles C.W. Cooke, spoken like a true Brit, a subject of the Queen.

See the new featured article The Admixture Of Military And Law Enforcement.

Newsmax:

Ron Paul is happy that the standoff between a Nevada rancher and the Bureau of Land Management ended peacefully last week, but he fears the federal government may return in larger force.

“Governments don’t give up their power easily, and they may well come back with a lot more force like they did at Waco with the Davidians,” the former Republican congressman and presidential candidate said Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto.”

If it happens, that’s not the way it will happen.  It will be in the dead of night, 0200 hours or 0300 hours, with SWAT team members wearing hoods so that they can’t be identified – cowards that they are.

The doors to the home will be smashed in, rifles will be pointed at men, women and children, obscenities will be screamed by SWAT team members, and the helicopters used will be brought in without a filed flight plan.  Cliven Bundy will be sent off to debtors prison, and the land he is on will then be used by the Chinese communists to build “green” projects using American stimulus dollars while Rory Reid gets rich from it all.

That’s how it will go down.

Bob Lonsberry:

Well, Andy, with a handful of minutes to spare, I have complied with your law.

Your hateful, unconstitutional affront to my rights.

After a year of thinking it over, of going back and forth, of deciding where duty and honor called me to be, this is where I am.

I am ashamed to say that fear was one of the factors in my decision. I am a public person, it is well known that I own an AR-15. I wrote a newspaper column about it when I bought it 20 years ago. I have talked about it on the radio, on television and in web broadcasts ever since.

Further, I’ve got a Democrat district attorney – whose election I opposed – and half the cops in town hate me. So if I don’t register today, there’s a good chance I get arrested tomorrow.

And with five kids still at home, I can’t afford to be the test case.

I’d be a felon, I’d lose my job, I’d lose my house, I’d lose my right to vote and own guns.

And you’d win.

But it wasn’t just fear.

It was also something Abraham Lincoln said once, and something I said once.

Not that you would know, care or understand, but long ago Abraham Lincoln said that obedience to law was the American religion, that it should be taught to babies on their mothers’ knees, that it was the duty of every free man.

He said that unjust and immoral laws should be fought but obeyed. He said that citizens of a Republic cannot pick and choose the laws to which they are obedient. He said they must never tolerate unjust and immoral law, but they must tear them down through constitutional and lawful means.

That’s what Lincoln said.

What I said was that I would uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic – and that I would “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

I swore a lifetime oath when I enlisted in the armed forces of the United States to defend the Constitution and to live it.

And part of the dilemma of your hateful Safe Act is that it is on both sides of the constitutional line. It violates the Second Amendment, but operates within the structure of legislation and judicial review. I reject it, but I do not yet want to reject the system which produced it and which has yet to nullify it.

So conscience has me here.

But conscience will let me go no further.

You may be emboldened by your victory in this matter, you may be confident of taking control of the state Senate in the fall, but you should be aware you have pushed things as far as they can be pushed.

If you back a dog into a corner, at some point it bites, and if you listen carefully across this state you can hear a growl.

There were alternatives to registering my AR-15, but none of them were acceptable to me. I could sell it, but then I wouldn’t have it. I could modify it, but then I would lose the functionality I sought when I bought the gun. I could give it to relatives out of state, but then it wouldn’t be very useful to me when I needed it in a fight.

Which is why I bought my AR-15.

It is a fighting gun. It is, in fact, an assault rifle. I bought it for its intended purpose – near- and medium-range combat.

It is not for hunting, I have guns that do that better. It is not for target shooting, again, I have guns that do that better. It is a not a hobby implement or a status symbol, it is a tool of battle.

And though it’s been a long time since the Army qualified me Expert on this weapon, I think I still get the general idea. And I still want it close at hand.

And if I have to tell you the serial number to do that, at this stage I’m willing to comply. You’ve had the serial numbers of my pistols for a quarter century – another unconstitutional intrusion – and I’ve gotten by. Until freedom truly rings in this country, and a real civil rights movement advances all freedoms, I’ll bow to your power.

But recognize that this is the end.

The fear is that registration leads to confiscation. We shouldn’t fear the consequences of that, Andy, you should. Because when you come for the guns it won’t be the Capitol in the dark of the night, it will be Lexington green in the full light of day. We won’t think of Abraham Lincoln, we’ll think of Charlton Heston.

So we’re clear, Andy, the next step is cold, dead hands.

You ought to pull your head out of your arse long enough to recognize that if you turn up the heat under the pressure cooker it’s apt to blow.

Your arrogance and ignorance have left you blind to the culture and values of the vast majority of your state. You have no idea who we are or what we believe in. All you know to do is to mock us and demean us. Across most of upstate, we don’t have a governor, we have an overseer. You don’t give a damn about us, and the feeling has turned out mutual.

Simply put, we hate you back, Andy.

Me more than most.

My family had been in upstate more than a hundred years when your folks got to Ellis Island, and we’d been downstate some 200 years before that. It doesn’t seem plausible you’re in a position to tell us what New Yorkers value, feel or believe, or to force chains on us our ancestors fought to remove.

And, to be honest, your privileged life doesn’t quite qualify you to expound on American freedoms. I don’t believe you are a veteran, and I don’t believe any blood member of your family has ever served in the U.S. military.

That doesn’t mean anything, of course, unless you happen to be a veteran, in which case it means everything.

You are a tyrant, sir, and you have lost the affection and confidence of people like me.

Which I’m sure means nothing to you.

But you whipped us down on this one. I’ve registered my AR-15. The dog is cowering.

But if you listen you can hear the growl.

And you may yet feel the fang.

I apologize for pasting the entire article, but occasionally my readers don’t go to the links I provide.  In this case you need to read his entire justification for registering his rifle, and I figure that I’ll give him more traffic than he would get at this forum anyway.  Visit his web site and comment using Facebook.

This is an odd commentary, and Bob is clearly conflicted.  He draws his line in the sand, but one gets the feeling that another line has already been crossed, and he backed away from the line.

Bob calls the law an unconstitutional intrusion, which means both that the laws are immoral and lack any compelling justification.  But listen to his reason for acquiescing.

Abraham Lincoln said that obedience to law was the American religion, that it should be taught to babies on their mothers’ knees, that it was the duty of every free man.

He said that unjust and immoral laws should be fought but obeyed. He said that citizens of a Republic cannot pick and choose the laws to which they are obedient. He said they must never tolerate unjust and immoral law, but they must tear them down through constitutional and lawful means.

This is presumably the same Abraham Lincoln who suspended writ of habeas corpus and violated other civil rights, but at any rate, Bob has at the same time called the law immoral and an unconstitutional intrusion (meaning that the law-makers had no legal right to do what they did), and also implied that the recent SAFE act of New York was moral, since Lincoln himself said that we must never tolerate immoral law and Bob is willing to tolerate the SAFE act.

If obedience to the law regardless of its moral justification is the American religion, then the war for independence never really happened.  But we know that it did, and we know that a nation which has such a public religion is doomed.  And a man who can utter such things is in similar jeopardy.

And it will be a cold day in hell before I register my AR-15.

NRO Corner:

Like Rich, I deeply respect the rule of law. As an attorney who practices in federal courts across the nation, I respect the rulings of those courts (indeed, much of my career is spent securing rulings from federal courts to protect individual liberties) and — having reviewed the pleadings in Bundy’s case — I do not fault the courts’ orders. John Hinderaker is right, “Legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”

While rural America literally sustains life for urban America, many urbanites dislike large-scale farming (this parody is worth seeing), would like to see the rest of the country essentially transformed into a nature preserve, and argue that to the extent land is “used,” it should be used for selectively-defined “renewable” purposes, like solar energy or wind farms. The result — when urban regions become dominant — has been amply chronicled by Victor Davis Hanson and many others: rural regions increasingly serve urban ones and do so under comprehensive urban regulatory schemes that disrupt lives, destroy livelihoods, and lead to widespread frustration and despair.

And all of it is legal.

With few options left within conventional politics, rural Americans are beginning to contemplate more dramatic measures, such as the state secession movements building in Colorado, Maryland, California, and elsewhere. The more viable state secession movements aim to limit urban control by literally removing rural counties from their states and forming new states around geographic regions of common interests.

But until there’s a long-term solution, we may very well see more Bundy Ranch moments, where individual Americans (and their allies) simply refuse to consent to laws that destroy their way of life for the sake of regulations that provide no perceivable benefit to others. (I can only imagine my frustration if I had to end a more-than-century-old family lifestyle, arguably for the sake of a turtle that no one will see).

The long-term solution is simple to conceptualize but difficult to accomplish: de-escalate the stakes of our political disputes by limiting the power of government over American lives. Americans have always had profound differences, and we live together with those differences when victory for one side doesn’t mean inflicting real harm on the losers. But when victory for one side means the end of a way of life for the losers, instability can and will result.

I hope and pray that the dangerous standoff at Bundy Ranch was an aberration and not a harbinger, but until we can limit government’s power, I fear that respect for law will increasingly give way to contempt for the lawmakers.

French has missed the mark, attributing the event to differences in way of life to urban versus rural paradigms, instability due to the intransigence of the courts, and so on.  The reality is far bleaker than that.

The notion that federal agents should be armed is only a recent phenomenon in American history, and the idea would have been anathema to our wise founders, who would have considered them to be a standing army of occupiers.

But with Bundy we had agents dressed as “tactical operators,” who were prepared to raid the Bundy ranch for the sake of a corrupt deal between Harry Reid, his son Rory, and the Chinese communists, all funded by the taxpayer in the form of stimulus money.  Let’s consider that one more time.  Agents of the federal government were preparing to shoot civilians for the sake of crony interests and enrichment of communists.

And David French is concerned about the “rule of law.”  The comments to David’s article show how out of touch he is from readers, but this isn’t the main point.  French has elevated the law to a social religion, even if it’s majority vote or crony, corrupt judges in bed with the politicians.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such hand wringing and gutless commentary from an alleged “conservative” publication, but it does go to show that the divide between progressive and conservative isn’t that large after all.  Both sides want to game the system for what they see as the right beliefs, while the founders want to prevent gaming the system altogether.

As to the issue of an aberration and not a harbinger, as I’ve said before, this wasn’t even the first shot of the first volley of the first engagement of what is to come.  Gird your loins, because most people, despite your best efforts, don’t even understand what this is all about.  There is much more to come, and it’s all just getting started.

Prior:

Rory Reid: Liar And Traitor

Bureau Of Land Management Followup: It’s Not Over

Bureau Of Land Management Versus Cliven Bundy Post-Mortem

Real Clear Politics:

RORY REID, SON OF SEN. HARRY REID: We believe in a country in which we are subject to laws and you can’t just ignore the laws we don’t like. I think clearly if state and local prosecutors look at this more closely, they’re going to find that he broke the law and he should be prosecuted.

REID: He is not a victim and he’s not a hero. He’s been using that he doesn’t own for over 20 years and he didn’t pay. He broke the law. There are hundreds of ranchers throughout Nevada that conduct their profession honorably. There’s thousands of them throughout the country and when they have a dispute with the BLM they try to work it out. (source: KSVN-TV)

You’d like to make this about “the rule of law,” wouldn’t you?  Anything but your own immoral behavior.  It’s called a misdirect, and we have discussed this before.  This all has nothing to do with Mr. Bundy.

It’s about you, your own greed, your own theft, your own corruption, and your own ugliness.  It’s about your taking my tax money by the power of a badge and gun, and using it for your own enrichment and pleasure.  You don’t want him prosecuted, and you don’t want to reach an agreement.  You want his land, and to top it all off, the largesse you have taken from me and my people will go to Chinese communists.

You are a liar and traitor, and you deserve a traitor’s fate.