a demand for identification violates the Fourth Amendment unless a law enforcement officer has reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime.
[…]
In a police report, Officer Eddie Boyd III argued that when Mentzel invoked his constitutional rights Boyd had reasonable suspicion that Mentzel was a fugitive
[EDIT} You have no legal obligation to provide an officer with identification, unless you provide reasonable suspicion, by not providing identification.
One gets the impression that part of the training for Ferguson police is a close reading of Catch-22.
I do what I have to, to protect my family. Me being a “race traitor” and all that. I don’t send any money - well, except to the SPLC, who I support financially as well as subscribing to their publications. But I understand you might consider the SPLC a hate group since they oppose racist organizations of all types.
Well, it’s clear that you don’t know; perhaps you should be addressing that rather than excoriating me for wading through the cesspools you are too high and mighty to explore?
I used to visit racist web sites, too, which is how I know about racists encouraging other racists to vote for Obama for president.
I don’t “explore” cesspools because I already know they’re full of shit. I’m asking you because you claim you find something other than shit in them, something of value.
Was there some practical value to you of that knowledge? And as I asked before, what else of value is to be learned by reading white supremacist literature? “Protect your family”? How does that work?
I notice that you didn’t address at all what initially raised my ire and comprised most of my comment – your implicit equating of black hatred of white with white hatred of blacks. Why not? Do you really think those two problems deserve equal attention?
Can someone explain this bullshit? Karr is the Chief Prosecutor, but she’s also a private attorney? So she can decide, on her own authority, to pursue horrible cases that do nothing but rack up huge legal fees, which go directly into the pockets of her own colleagues?
Is there no such thing as conflict-of-interest in this state? Isn’t this racketeering, or at least embezzlement?
They don’t increase taxes. They already get ~20% of their budget from predatory fines against poor people, so they can just arrest more people for no reason and squeeze them harder to pay for the lawyers to defend the practice.
This seems like a great case for jury nullification, when they stand so opposed to their subjects, but what they need is to throw out the entire police force and city hall and start fresh.
But that’s most definitely not what’s being said here. What’s being acknowledged is that the Ferguson police have been disproportionately targeting the black population for completely bullshit “failure to comply” ‘violations.’ The fact that the city is losing these cases at a disproportionately high rate (despite a provable institutional bias against African Americans) demonstrates that it’s extra bullshit. Which is to say: the “problem” in this case is entirely being caused by the police, the victims are the black people being arrested and, because those charges are bullshit, taxpayers at large.
I imagine there would have to be some collusion with the police forces for this to be the case. As it is, they’re simply prosecuting cases that are being given to them when they really should decline to do so, but these cases wouldn’t exist if the cops weren’t using the law as a means of harassing the population.
Their system is structured in a staggeringly inept fashion. Smaller counties generally have to get creative to fill certain roles (judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, clerk, etc), but Ferguson’s method strikes me as particularly prone to abuse.
If each paid $150 fine covers one hour of the hired attorneys’ time for each prosecution, and a significant number of the victims are defending (and winning) the cases, these dumbfucks have a negative profit rate, so increasing the volume of transactions will not do much to help their budget.
It is almost as if “stovepiping money to parasites” and “immiserating the poors” were higher priorities than “staying solvent”.
There’s something very screwed up and St. Louis-y about this. As a former St. Louisan I am sad. I can only imagine how frustrated and tired normal citizenry in Ferguson—not anyone employed by Ferguson city government—must feel. It’s like a nightmare that you just can’t wake up from.
@SpunkyTWS has it right. (I wanted to find a hoop snake image where the scales were all dollar signs and the snake was drooling. Instead I found this. )
What endgame is the Ferguson gummint hoping for? An official declaration of bankruptcy so that even more bizarre power players can be forcibly installed with zero accountability, ala Flint or Detroit? What are they truly after?
It’s not even a Catch-22. Even if failure to comply with the demand legitimately caused reasonable suspicion, the demand was made before that suspicion was raised.
(I got arrested once at a Canadian border crossing. They ran down what I took to be their version of Miranda, including not being able to strip-search without reasonable cause – they had a poster about it and everything. After asking me to take off my jacket they went through the pockets and found their reasonable cause, then fully strip-searched me, finding nothing more of interest. I said that they hadn’t had cause when the strip-search began, i.e. the removal of my jacket. “But zat wasn’t ze strip-search yet!” they protested. (It was Quebec.) “What else would you start with when stripping a fully-clothed suspect?” I countered.
To my considerable surprise, that worked! After a brief conference they reluctantly let me go, sans contraband, but also sans charges.)
