Police set dog on a driver who politely refuses to answer questions

What if you had to choose between petting a dog and talking with a sovereign citizen?

6 Likes

Hey, the driver could have been found guilty of suspicion of criminal coloration and aggravated mopery and been shot fourteen times so he probably got off easy.

Don’t mind either so long as a muzzle and a leash are involved.

13 Likes

I would just add, though, that if I was in law enforcement, my anxiety level would be pegged at 11 every time I dealt with a sovereign citizen. The likelihood of an encounter with those whackadoos ending in a shootout is way higher than your normal traffic stop. They’re all armed, and none of them follow the law. Most of them will just use a bunch of weird jargon on you, but some will fight, and are looking forward to doing so. But I wouldn’t set the dog on someone, nor would I tase them, swab pepper spray on their eyeballs, or use some other police torture technique.

Yeah, I honestly don’t know what to say on this one. “Sovereign Citizens” are the types of people who blow up federal buildings and shoot at cops. They are scary as fuck and probably the most likely people to do something “bad”.
As far as rights, their claim is that they actually don’t have rights because each one is their own nation and ergo they don’t have to follow any laws or some crazy shit like that. So they get to make up their own laws and the police have no authority over them, nor does the constitution?

However, I agree that this is egregious and illegal. I just wouldn’t put this into the same category as beating up on a guy because of his ethnicity or because of a mental illness.
These cops have every reason to be scared as fuck of this guy.

2 Likes

When I read the title I immediately thought was referencing to the city of 广州市 that now is tanslitterated to
Guangzhou.

How I can associate the land of the free with a communist dictatorship?

2 Likes

I heard somewhere that police are actually moving towards German Shepherds and, I suppose, the Belgian Malinois because doberman breeders have been working very hard to make the breed more docile in an effort to avoid the same sort of controversies around, say, pit bulls.

This is a bit of a problem for me, because my parents always had German Shepherds when I was growing up, and people-friendly German Shepherds can be so dorky that I feel like I’d have a hard time registering a police Shepherd as a proper threat (though I should).

1 Like

But hey, look on the bright side - at least he’s white.

I haven’t known any doberman K-9s. But I am sure they have some. The German and Belgian dogs are usually selected for their intelligence as well as size and a decent nose. I have a friend who has two who she has trained and certified as search and rescue dogs. They also eat kayaks. But like I said, I was pretty wary of them until I had friends with “normal” Shepherds who were great dogs.

The problem I have with Pit Bulls isn’t that I think they are more aggressive than most other dogs (though they can be trained to be). It is that they are so fucking strong a bite is going to be bad news. Couple that with the “fact” that is seems like too many of their owners aren’t exactly the most responsible people…

1 Like

Is that white angst in your pocket, or you just happy to be with us?

5 Likes

I’ve had a couple of run-ins with aggressive German Shepards. It won’t take long.

Maybe true, but Canton isn’t a large city. It’s a small shitstain 20 miles south of Akron (a medium shitstain, where I grew up) and it is populated largely by hopeless people (as in people with no hope, not people undeserving of hope) and many of said hopeless people are armed.

4 Likes

This is a very generous read on the situation by Fox 8. Restrained…mauled…whatever.

10 Likes

Man, this is a story with no one to root for. But I guess that’s how brutality like this is normalized–the baseline gets set by using it against genuine doofuses with little to no popular support.

5 Likes

Shit like like this does not make me proud to be from Ohio.

16 Likes

There is nothing to defend on either side here. The guy’s argument “you might have a legal reason but not a lawful reason” wtf is that supposed to mean? If he’s a “sovereign citizen” then he’s an outlaw, so he’s asking to be treated like a criminal, even just not registering your car or getting a driver’s license means the cops are going to notice him (and if he’s a sovereign citizen BUT also has a concealed carry permit, that’s just more wtf, picking and choosing which laws he wants to officially follow.) But that doesn’t justify the cops turning a dog on him, nor does the fear that he might have a gun justify their actions.

11 Likes

The problem is that a thing is not a group. A person is not people and a “sovereign citizen” is not “sovereign citizens”. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads to all prejudice. People make the mistake of identifying the actions of an individual with the actions of a group or the actions of a group with the actions of an individual.

7 Likes

Absolutely. However, cops need to learn that there are settings between “normal polite request for driver’s license and registration” and “pulling out a gun/siccing a K9 on the guy.”

12 Likes

I try to be sympathetic to people who just want to be left alone, but it’s hard when it comes down to “I don’t want to pay taxes or be a good neighbor with no consequences”.

If you really don’t want to live in society you need to move out of it. Hike deep into the forest somewhere and live off of the land. Otherwise you’re just a moocher with a fancy title.

10 Likes

Sometimes I wish that were still possible. Unfortunately we no longer have the right to make a home for ourselves out of our labor.

1 Like

I once painted the house of one of these Ohio cops (in another, smaller college town that had ZERO need for such vicious animals) who also kept and trained these dogs. They fetishize the vicious German Shepherd types and they use all German commands with them, as if they are trying to channel the Gestapo. Everything about it was extremely unsettling. These are not good cops.

13 Likes