On Friday gangsta rap artist Jamaal ”Maal the Pimp” Hicks and four music world colleagues gave an interview at NoogaRadio 92.7 FM in Chattanooga about their lives together and the Fam Records label from 1997 to 2003.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 9.27 FM
Their story is so compelling I had to wait until the segments were over to bring up the matter of Tennessee transportation administrative notice, under which Chattanooga police have been on awares for 1,144 days, since Feb. 20, 2018, when I put the municipal corporation on notice about violation of law.
I am seeking the favor and interest of these men, whose contacts are broad across the city and county — across the state.
Gangsta Rappers sing hard, make good
Interview starts at 19 on FB
I gave Mr. Hicks a copy of the notice, with the first two pages printed in bright yellow, and a one-sentence script that he and other people can use to “make use of” and “take advantage of” this legal analysis, put legally and lawfully into the public space without rebuttal thus far from any of the parties so notified of the limits of authority under the state trucking law.
This law is used to oppress the people, with African-Americans the most grievously affected and the least able to fight back. Policing has origins in way back to Greek and Roman slave times, but also to American slavery days before and after the war to prevent Southern independence. Police is people-as-property management, and newly elected Chattanooga mayor Tim Kelly, who takes office Sunday, will oversee a 500 officer-strong force of employees who will continue their depradations against law and liberty by police power. Mr. Kelly, however, is aware of at least important aspects of abuses on which we have been reporting.
The notice says law and the courts make distinction between travel and transportation. Tenn. Code Ann. § Title 55, motor and other vehicles, and § Title 65, chapter 15, carriers, are used to “regulate” blacks, the poor, immigrants and everybody else, though police officers have power under the charter to enforce ordinances and and keep the peace.
In conversation with gangsta rappers Maal The Pimp Mr. Hicks and colleagues — Ss Da Butcher (Stanley Dillard), OG (Gerald Toney), Petey Wang (Damien Boozer) and Mookie Mac (Terence Wigfall Sr.) — I proposed they consider a simple script useable by people who don’t know the content of the notice, but who have heard about it. The single sentence is sort of talisman or mantra that is intended to apprise officers of their limits, and of their personal liability if they abuse the citizen. The statement is:
“Officer, I’m traveling under administrative notice and I make no statement without my lawyer present.”
Chattanooga, Hamilton County, Red Bank, East Ridge, state of Tennessee and the Hamilton County district attorney’s office are under notice since early 2018 in this effort to combat a system of illicit law enforcement supported by Tennessee courts. Judges, lawyers and the white legal political establishment use a legal fiction to maintain what I mildly term “commercial government.”
That fiction is a legal presumption that should always be challenged in court. And that is, “There is no right to travel; all use of cars on the road is commercial, under privilege, and for profit and gain.“ Cops arrest people routinely on the spot without a warrant (in violation of yet another law, T.C.A. 40-7-103) on presumption of the regulable activity of “driving” or “operating” a “motor vehicle.”
Only carriers for hire are subject to transportation laws. A carrier would be a bus, taxi, an 18-wheeler semi-tractor with trailer, dump truck, ambulance, wrecker, courier, car used for Uber and DoorDash, and hauling vehicle of many kinds. Since the 1930s and the rise of American fascism, cities and counties apply police power promiscuously to ALL users, even those on the road for the exercise of their rights or for the handling of private business or necessities.
The system is rightly called “Jim Crow” when its application routinely keep the jail cells filled with ebony bodies, which are the lubrication and fuel of the judicial-industrial complex in Hamilton County and every other county in the state.
I am not an attorney and don‘t give legal advice or have a law practice or business. It takes an investigative reporter to see this great evil, and to propose abolition of the practice in the interest of the gospel, of prosperity, liberty and constitutional limitations upon the state and its hirelings, actors and dependents.
