Transportation administrative notice is a remedy for the plague of police abuse, I tell members of the unity group Sunday night.
I am asked to give a presentation about police abuse and a blockade I have prepared against police along a pathway cops use for easy access to black people and others.
By David Tulis / 92.7 NoogaRadio
The pathway is Tenn. Code Ann. § Title 55, the law a regulating shippers and transportation. The blockade is transportation administrative notice, an accurate description of the law that binds officers to obedience through their oath and under penalty of bad faith oppression litigation. Unity Group is informed that the notice has been in effect in Chattanooga city limits since Feb. 20, 2018.
The invitation to speak is useful in getting the word out about the remedy against transportation stops such as the one that afflicted motorist Frederico Wolf on March 10, in which encounter he was the victim of an armed threat, execrable profanities and a beating by officer Ben Piazza of Chattanooga’s finest.
The group meets at a Tunnel Boulevard church and is concerned about questions such as gentrification, housing prices, city governments regard for developers, the shabby condition of public schools and the prospect of a police oversight committee. Members Sunday are skeptical that any police oversight board subject to city government or the police department will be effective in countering outbreaks of cop abuse of the citizenry.
Sue cop as oppessor, defend self in traffic court: Transportation Administrative Notice
Leading the meeting is Sherman Matthews. Also in attendance are Helen Burns Sharpe of ATM, the taxpayer watchdog; Eric Adkins; Dr. Edna Varner; Calvin Davis; Austin Sauerbier; Tiffany Rankins; and Marie Mott the activist and talk show host.
The remedy for people on revoked licenses is forefront in my presentation, because an estimated 50 percent of black people on the roads do not have licenses in order. They are either revoked, suspended, expired or none. Perhaps more than half the black population does not have insurance on their cars as required under commercial statute, my survey indicates.
Title 55 lets cops rake in defendants
Police have easy access to black people through Title 55, which gives authority to the Tennessee highway patrol to enforce commercial regulations. Police departments and sheriff’s departments, however, in contradiction to the state’s report to the U.S. government, enforce transportation laws as if they had legal authority to do so.
Police use Title 55’s low cause of action standard to their advantage, to the ruin of many people’s lives. Ordinarily, a cop has no arrest authority unless he has seen a crime committed, has a warrant for a person’s arrest, has a warrant to search a person’s property, or obtains a reliable eyewitness testimony that the person accused has just committed a crime. Title 55, I say to the group, allows cops to stop people for technical faults such as no tag light or no blinker.
Police use Title 55’s commercial enforcement powers to fight the drug war and pursue their targets among minority populations (gang members).
Riotous excess of defendants
Administrative notice tells cops in departments under the notice that their authority to enforce transportation laws extends only to parties involved in transportation. Meaning what? Meaning cops have power to stop for technical infractions (lights, speeding, weaving) parties such as shippers, dump truck operators, ambulance services, wrecker services, semi tractor trailer operators, Uber operators and cabs.
I tell the group that it will take about 3 1/2 years to stop transportation stops almost entirely in Chattanooga and bring relief to the city and the poor, whose vehicles are often out of order and whose stops are important in helping keep the jail full. Police and sheriff deputies pour 50,000 defendants into the system every year in a riotous excess of police “law enforcement.”
It is time to make Chattanooga a glad and happy city where this sort of police abuse is curtailed by obedience to the actual statute.
