Dear sir, your job on city council is to deal with ordinances, which are laws, which are legal. You passed an ordinance on scooters that is a law and is a legal matter. Your whole job is about ordinances/law. Your whole job is legal questions and legal issues. That’s really your only job.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 92.7FM
I suggest two years into this reform that you get current. The city is liable for obeying black-letter law and respecting the rights of the people. However you and city council members deal with this notice is a political decision. It is a political decision to obey, disobey, ignore or comply with any law. I am telling you in notice you have to obey Title 55 and the limits therein, and you must act in good faith and avoid acting in bad faith.
To say it is a “legal question” and that I should talk with Phil Noblett is saying that you don’t care about the rights of the people that I am seeking to protect with this notice. You are declaiming a fiduciary responsibility and ducking out.
I suggest you read my notice. It is online. https://nooganomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Transportation-Administrative-Notice-Tennessee-3.pdf. I suggest you get current on my reporting on the issue of travel v. transportation, and get back with me with a quote. The city has been under TAN 2 years, and has 500 employees in CPD, many of whom enforce Title 55 outside the scope and in their personal capacity. If you care about city staff, do something to protect these men and women in uniform.
I am putting together a story about the city’s compliance with the law, and you are a lawmaker. So please give this matter some of your time, which I know is scarce and precious. And give me please a statement and not a blowoff comment.
Letter No. 2: How cops get access to African-Americans
Sir, I would be grateful for your interest in this matter. I am here to help the city, help the police officers, and help the citizens and people who travel through Chattanooga.
Traffic stops are the police officers most dangerous encounter with the public, with domestic violence calls coming in No. 2. If we are going to maintain our police force manpower, the city needs do everything it can to reduce risk to these men and women. And one way of doing it is to avoid enforcing a law that is the job of the THP to enforce and putting these people in danger.
Neal Pinkston and the courts of appeal approve of the status quo in enforcement activity. They approve of it because the Judiciary is activist and is imposing a legal fiction upon the rights and freedoms of the people. The courts hold that the only travel that exists in Tennessee is the relocation of one’s domicile from one state to the other. Travel other than that does not exist.
The courts insist in their fiction that all use of the road must be through the taxable privileged activity of operating motor vehicles as common and private carriers for hire. The only reason anyone needs a driver license is to be an operator for hire.
I have been detailing this phenomenon and how it operates for 2 years and giving individual motorists a practical legal defense when stopped and also provided them grounds by notice for litigation against oppressive and bad faith enforcement activity.
There is a clear political element to this story which I think you should be aware of. The mayor can declare Chattanooga a sanctuary city from the widespread customary abuse of title 55. I have urged Andy Berke to order the law be obeyed but he is not responsive.
A mayor who obeys this law will become a national figure, I propose. It has powerful constituencies on left and right, among democrats and republicans, among libertarians and progressives. Making an executive decision to properly enforce this law will bring huge political gains to anyone who decides to take that step. Halting illegal traffic stops is hugely pro police but it is also anti police And plays well with minorities. However, court action may at some point solve the problem that I am describing.
Given political realities and multiple embedded interests such as the bar that maintain this system of abuse, I have been working to stimulate a bottom-up reform among the citizenry, having little hope that elected officials or important people will do anything to halt the illegal activity.
My legal and intense coverage are already bearing fruit in sessions and criminal court, and I believe that I can bring an end to traffic stops within 3 1/2 years.
Again, the problem is that title 65 (Chapter 15) on motor carriers and Title 55 on motor and other vehicles apply to people who are involved in the hauling, shipping, freight, trucking and transportation fields of business. The THP has authority to impose this body of administrative law on these people, but the THP and local cops and deputies impose the commercial statue on people who were not involved in hauling, shipping, freight, trucking and transportation.
For blacks and the poor, police traffic enforcement is Jim-Crow and social management and ruins the lives of many. Traffic enforcement is a police gateway to their bodies and persons under the lower probable cause threshold that initiates the pretext traffic stop protocol.
If you are thinking of running for mayor this might be the most powerful argument you could make to set Chattanooga apart from other cities and make her a freer city than she is. The other candidates are incredibly conventional in their thinking, even Andrew McLaren who comes across as a kind of maverick.
