State troopers collect privilege taxes from truckers and enforce safety regulations in Title 55 upon shippers and people with DOT numbers on their vehicles. (Photo department of safety and homeland security)Sheriff Jim Hammond gives an interview prior to his running for re-election as sheriff of Hamilton County. (Photo 92.7 FM)
Hidden like a nettle in a satin pillow is the bur of police violence in the CV-19 near future.
By pillow I refer to possible blessings coming into view from the state’s acts to convert Tennessee local economy and free markets into a penal colony. The concept of a lockdown is from the world of prisons.
But, first, the blessings. It is good for commercial government to be shut down. City. County. State. Maybe the federal government? (Is it time for it to slip into receivership, having survived its debt repudiation in the 1960s by going off the silver standard and lasted another 50 years?)
The shutting of public schools is a major boon to the people. These schools serve as indoctrination centers for the modern welfare-warfare-police state, in which the students are taught to be materialistic atheists and spiritually and intellectually dependent. They are longtime failures in service to families, and morally bankrupt.
But now to the briars.
Andy Berke, Chattanooga mayor
It is the possibility that police and sheriff’s deputies will work, amid the government shutdown, as a private gang seeking to harass and threaten people on the road. Under pretext of law enforcement and EO enforcement, I envision them harassing travelers and extorting them, especially if the Lee / Berke gulag lasts weeks.
Cops and deputies have already a lot of practice in state-sanctioned extortion. Much of police activity today is privilege enforcement and tax collection. Many small towns make budget by police harassment and speed traps. City of Chattanooga, despite being under a legally binding Tennessee Transportation Administrative Notice, keeps cops and courts busy rationalizing themselves by misusing the trucking statute.
Officers, chiefs, city attorneys hold their ultra vires acts of abuse of Title 55 as no big deal.
The Tennessee code provides that only the Tennessee highway patrol has authority to enforce the revenue laws upon privileged parties using the roadways for private profit and gain, operating and driving motor vehicles and instrumentalities in commerce under Tennessee Code Ann. § Title 55.
For years now, traffic enforcement has lowered the threshold of probable cause and articulable suspicion to mere technical faults of using the road — lack of indicator, illegal lane change, “light law violation,” speeding, suspended driver license, expired tag. These are not crimes. They are not evils, malum in se wrongs with a moral content. They are often causeless glitches.
So, the cop can stop (i.e., arrest) you with no public offense or crime in view.
Under emergency, the picture worsens sharply against the citizen. You theoretically can be stopped (arrested, the courts have ruled; a “traffic stop” is an arrest under the federal 4th amendment) for merely being there.
That means merely being on the road could, as pressure builds, be a cause for the blue lights to be flashed against the back of your car as you travel on private business down the people’s roads.
If you are careful and intend to defend your rights by insisting on your right to see a magistrate, you now enter into a dangerous situation. If you refuse to sign the citation because the cop had no probable cause to stop you, you are in danger of being infected by the cop, Officers deal promiscuously with members of the public, and are probably more likely to be infected with CV-19 than others.
Is ‘bill of attainder,’ ‘general warrants’ regime ahead?
Every arrest for a traffic infraction — apart from a warrant if there is no accident, DUI or flight from the scene — is illegal and a tort if done without a warrant, according to Tenn. Code Ann. § 40-7-103, grounds for arrest by officer without a warrant.
You, now, face arrest by an officer that is illegal, and you are being touched by the officer, put into his cruiser and are being taken to the county jail, where protocols are slack and prospect of getting infected are higher than in other parts of the city.
Under emergency, the police operate under what is a bill of attainder regime. People as a class are presumed guilty. That would be, anyone on the road is presumed guilty, and the cop needs no real cause to affect an arrest. This is a bill of attainder regime; it is also a general warrants regime, under which Tennesseans already live.
They live under it because, despite court rulings, police and magistrates and lower courts accept the redefinition of terminology in Tenn. Code Ann. § 40-7-103, grounds for arrest by officer without a warrant. He worries about judicial approval AFTER the arrest, not before, and arrests people on the spot who have not committed a public offense nor any of the dozen enumerated defenses allow for arrest without a warrant.
In emergency, it’s all the easier. The man in blue needs to particular suspicion against you, but can stop and search you without cause, or for a stupid or irrelevant cause — whatever he wants to do.
Traffic enforcement relief
Two years ago the Memphis district attorney decided to stop prosecuting black people and others for “minor infractions” of the traffic code, namely license provisions that caused so many arrests the system was choking on human traffic.
Shelby County slashed criminal cases in sessions court by 43 percent, more than 3,600 cases a year.
This sort of abuse is systemic across the state, with no evidence that licensing compliance has the slightest thing to do with accident rates. Much of what police do against blacks, immigrants, the poor and everybody else is harassment and revenue enhancement with no safety value whatsoever.
Perhaps, in God’s providence, CV-19 will bring a spell of police violence, following by a violent public reaction and a recognition that my proposed reform has merit and deserves a concerted mass public effort to bring into effect in court.
Katherine Burgess, “Shelby County DA’s office stops prosecuting many cases of driving with a revoked license,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, Oct. 19, 2018. https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2018/10/19/shelby-county-da-revoked-drivers-license-cases/1694404002/
David Tulis is live on the air weekdays 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. on NoogaRadio 96.9 FM and other NoogaRadio Network stations, covering local economy and free markets in Chattanooga and beyond. Nothing here is legal advice; if you want legal advice, find a law firm downtown or on another planet — where the law actually matters.
