03/03/17 – Raeford Davis on the seven Baltimore cops indicted on federal racketeering charges – The Scott Horton Show

So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scothorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
All right y'all, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scothorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scothortonshow.
Introducing Rayford Davis.
He's formerly a cop and now he is with LEAP.
That's now Law Enforcement Action Partnership.
Used to be law enforcement against prohibition, but it's still more or less the same thing anyway.
And also, he's a regular writer at the Libertarian Institute.
Very happy to have you here, Rayford.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thank you for having me on.
Before we get started real quick, I'm doing well.
I had Korean food last night.
Korean takeout.
I get a great little place.
It's inside a gas station.
So I had gas station Korean.
It cost me $40.
Are you kidding?
For the family.
It fed me for the day.
I just want to speak out to the audience here and your listeners and say, you just went to Students for Liberty and spoke to a bunch of kids and you nourished a bunch of people's minds.
That's what you do on a regular basis.
And so you really make a difference and feed people intellectually and spiritually.
And so your listeners out there, man, you're worth more than one gas station Korean meal.
So send 40 bucks your way and tell Scott, thanks for feeding you intellectually through all these years.
Well, that's very kind of you to say.
And I do like money.
And in fact, I don't spend nearly enough time on this show thanking the supporters and the vast majority of the supporters of this show do monthly donations of 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks, these kinds of things.
And this is absolutely what gets me through the month and the bills paid to keep this thing going.
No question about that.
And I really should spend a lot more time saying thank you to all you people who do that.
I know you notice when you pay me every month.
I notice, too, but I don't always let you know that I do and that I really do appreciate it.
So thanks to you, Rayford, for saying that.
And actually, I should correct you.
I didn't actually even give a talk at Students for Liberty.
I just went to show up and pile around and try to introduce the new institute to people a bit and that kind of thing and had a great time and met a lot of great libertarians and stuff, but didn't actually give a talk there.
But anyway, thank you.
Hey, listen, your thing is, hey, everybody, guess what Rayford's thing is?
He used to be a cop.
And now he talks about and writes about police abuse and how it's not supposed to be this way.
And the reason I got you on the show today is to talk about a couple of very important stories here.
And you know what?
This comes with an apology to my audience, too, that I have not done nearly a good enough job covering police state, especially like local police abuse type stories lately.
I've been falling behind on that.
But so here we're trying to make up for a bit.
And I'll go ahead and introduce the two stories.
And then you can tell them in whichever order you want.
And I think you're probably going to weave them together for us to seven Baltimore police officers indicted on federal racketeering charges.
Man, I already got 100 questions about that.
And then this one is 18 year old's fatal shooting by Baltimore police becomes flashpoint in debate over repeat offenders.
And this is a an article about the police shooting of an 18 year old named Curtis Deal, also in Baltimore.
So go ahead.
Take it from there.
Yeah.
Let me start off with the Curtis Deal shooting.
And and Curtis in this.
So earlier in February, Curtis Deal, 18 year old kid, he had been arrested three times in a single month.
In the month of January, he had been arrested three separate times, two times for possessing of a gun, a second time for a drug charge.
And and this is the day after his third arrest for that.
Police officers in Baltimore make contact with him and they end up shooting him.
And this is one that's captured on on a body cam from the police officer.
So.
And if you watch the video, you know, it's it's it's really it's really just kind of disturbing.
And but it gives a good example, you know, as myself as a police officer.
And this is exactly kind of what I went through, you know, more than one occasion, you know, chasing down bad guys with a gun, you know, in the you know, in the streets.
And so you see Curtis is this kid.
He's running and he's clearly got the gun in his hand running down the street.
And there's this cop chasing after him.
And Curtis stops for just a moment, turns and raises that pistol towards that officer.
And, you know, the officer fires a couple rounds and and kills him.
And and so you see that and you go, well, 100 percent justified.
And and even if I was a police officer, I would have done the exact same thing and and would have shot him if Curtis didn't shoot me first.
That's a very real possibility.
But you've got to look any time someone is killed, you've got to step back and instead of just this little 30 second view through a soda straw, which look, this was slam dunk justification.
You've got to step back and look at what conditions brought these two men together where one of them loses his life and another one is transformed forever because now he's killed someone and nearly got killed himself.
And and.
And so.
Especially.
This is the type of policing and now we have we have an idea, seven police officers who run in the gun task force were out there running around, running their own operations, kind of like Vic Mackey from The Shield.
And they're going down, shaking the people down, grabbing up guys, stealing their dope, reselling it, arresting them and then going to their house and stealing money, making false arrest reports.
You know, they're just this their own wrecking crew.
And the people in these communities in Baltimore have been complaining about these guys for years.
And they say, hey, they've been saying, hey, the police are just as bad as any gang out here.
And everybody blew them off.
But now we see that that's the truth.
And and so that puts in why would why would somebody run from the cops?
Why would somebody try to shoot a cop?
Well, maybe a kid like Curtis had seen a police officer.
Maybe he had been abused by these officers before or some like him.
Maybe he saw that or at least heard of it.
And that's law enforcement loses credibility and it creates these type of conflicts.
Well, and OK, so he had some parts.
I'm sorry.
I I didn't get a chance to reread this article today about the shooting.
I did just rewatch the footage there where they show it in super slow mo.
You're right that he absolutely is turning and raising the gun at that cop.
But now I'm trying to remember, because off the top of my head, I think it said that, oh, yeah, he had a list of priors.
All right.
But they were all just possession of guns and drugs before, but not actually doing anything to anyone with them.
But, you know, at this point, when you're saying, you know, maybe they had abused him or whatever, maybe just the fact was he was facing if they got their hands on him, he was facing possibly years in prison just for possessing the damn thing.
So at that point, you know, I mean, assuming that the Second Amendment is the law and that this guy has the right to bear arms, he's basically, you know, facing being kidnapped and imprisoned for years and years.
I don't know what the legal standard is for someone's trying to kidnap you, whether, you know, at what point you can take their life or not.
I'm pretty sure that in any other circumstance was other people doing it to this guy over a non-crime.
Right.
You can't kidnap someone over the fact that they own a gun, but they can.
So in other words, I'm not saying it was a justified self-defense shooting on his behalf necessarily or anything like that, but I'm just saying those are the eyes that he was looking out of clearly.
Right.
And and that's where these laws like the gun possession and the drug possession create these dangerous conflicts unnecessarily.
And so was was Curtis Deal part of a robbery crew?
Was he going around robbing people?
They mentioned that he was possibly a suspect in a shooting from earlier in the year.
And that very well may be true.
Busted with some heroin, it says, too.
Right.
Just possessing it or selling it.
Yeah.
It says Deal allegedly tossed a bag of suspected heroin under a car before he was caught.
And that was previously.
So.
Yeah.
So here I want to talk to, you know, really conservatives who love the Second Amendment and say, you know, we have a right constitutional carrier.
You should never have to get permission from the government to carry a gun.
But here's Curtis.
That's what he's doing.
He you know, that's that's what he was arrested for is he's 18 years old.
He's an adult and he's carrying a gun and he lives in the wild west where everybody has a gun.
It doesn't mean that he's planning a murder just because he has a gun.
That's what you're supposed to think.
Well, he's young and black and poor and lives in the projects and has a gun.
He must be on his way to kill somebody.
Every conservative, you know, would say, well, if I was going, I would never walk through that neighborhood unless I was strapped with my Kimber, of course, five and two stacks of ammo.
And you're like, yeah, this kid lives there.
So, right.
You know, why do you expect him not to go around armed?
What are you crazy?
And so, you know, he's just doing the same thing.
And then he's got to worry about the cops.
And, you know, I want to interrupt you here to emphasize, too, as long as we're addressing the right.
It sounded almost like you were going to say, yeah, but guys, poverty and fatherlessness and society made him this way and this kind of thing, like some, you know, Namby Pamby care too much for criminals, college professor kind of shtick that conservatives are used to rejecting.
But when you're saying zoom out from your soda straw view, you're actually only arguing, let's just zoom out one click.
Like, never mind whether the government had locked up his father over drug possession or whether the federal government had redlined an entire section of town into poverty in decades past or any of these social causes that an honest person might want to take into account.
You're just saying, let's zoom out one click and go, well, wait a minute.
All this guy's priors are for possession.
All this guy's priors are for not actually really doing anything.
Possibly, as you said, allegedly, maybe he was involved in a burglary or whatever the hell it was, but what he actually was in trouble for were non-crime.
They were some kind of robbery crew, right?
It's just as much suspicion now for look like what they're doing.
And let me, let me address the progressives out there to say, well, we just, you know, it's the guns, it's the guns in the streets.
Well, this is, I mean, if there's anywhere that they're trying to lock down and you have law enforcement really making an effort to keep guns out of the hands of a quote unquote criminals, it would be downtown city of Baltimore in these neighborhoods.
And look, that kid got his hands on three different guns in one month.
So you ain't stopping it.
And now he's illegal.
And now he's running.
You know, this reminds me for whatever reason, I guess of Murray Rothbard's review of the Godfather, where he talks about how, you know, get it straight.
The Italian mob is a black market protection service that does, that is basically a police force.
That's what it is.
And, and it's involved in the exact same racketeering that regular police forces are involved in.
And yes, it's true that the quote unquote legitimate ones have something like a rule of law and representative bodies that vote and black robe judges that make sure and whatever.
But the fact of the matter, Rothbard's point is that in his example, the Irish police in New York wouldn't protect Italians.
Screw you guys.
And so they had to make their own police force.
They were outlaws.
They were outside of the protection of the law.
So they had to create their own black market police force.
They couldn't create their own separate, you know, state lit or whatever it would have been crushed, right?
So they had to go to the black market.
It's the same thing here with gangs in poor black projects, where, as you're explaining, and I should let you really elaborate about this other story here about these cops who have been indicted by the feds now for their predatory behavior, that these people in the poor black East and West parts of Baltimore are most of the time or many of them, especially in the government projects and what have you, they're outside of the protection of the law.
They are simply its prey.
And so where do you think the gangs come from?
Nobody's going to call the cops on each other.
You have your friends and your brothers to protect you because these guys aren't your friends and your brothers.
They're not going to protect you.
They're your enemy.
They're hunting for you.
And so, you know, a lot of this is all just, you know, kind of blowback in the first place, never even mind drug prohibition and all of the rest of that.
And the fact that everybody's father's been locked up over, you know, their previous possession charges and all those things.
But just on the face of it, they basically they're being told by the government to you might as well create your own internal police, you know, black market internal police forces for your neighborhoods, because, you know, if we see you, you're obviously your only instinct is going to be to run away as fast as you can, rather than, you know, say, hi, officer, will you please help me?
You know, how naive would they have to be to go to the cop and say, help me to call 9-1-1 and say, help me.
They know better than that.
So that that's what they have.
And that's that's what you have with the with the gangs.
And, you know, in a lot of ways, they're not just gangs.
They're just kind of like neighborhood affiliations.
And yeah, they're you know, they shoot each other and do all kind of retaliations back and forth.
And it's you know, and it's a real mess.
And so there is that real violence.
But law enforcement contributes to it.
So by the first of all, that, yeah, the drug prohibition, that creates all of the money that runs this stuff in the first place.
So if you legalize drugs, these guys, you know, the market's going to dry up.
And so that takes away a lot of the violence and a lot of these disputes and all that you have.
You'll still have you'll still have some, you know, with poor neighborhoods and all, but a lot of it will go away.
And then you'll have people less people criminalized.
And then you won't have police officers jumping out.
And you see how with Curtis Deal and how they so they said they recognized him in the car.
Maybe they did or didn't, or they just kind of after the fact said, yeah, well, we knew it was him.
They even used their fox, their aerial surveillance as part of following this kid around.
And he was at here's the justification for chasing him is the car was acting in a suspicious manner, stopping and starting or swerving.
And they opened a door a couple of times.
And this is a high crime area.
So that means they're up to no good.
So they had really committed no crime when Carter started running.
But you see the police officers and this is what these, you know, jump out boys or these plainclothes detectives you see in the video, what are they wearing?
The same stuff Blackwater wears or these, you know, operators special paramilitaries.
Yeah, they're paramilitaries.
They're wearing, you know, the khaki pants and the boots and, and, you know, the, you know, the collared knit shirt with the I think it's really telling, actually, if you watch some footage of these kind of things, where in the in the raids to you have the guys who really do the raid, and you see them kind of turn around and walk out.
And then it's the guys in the park is who come in to do the investigation, whatever.
And you realize that the guys doing the raid, that's their only job is to be paramilitary house raiders.
They're not actually really investigators at all.
It's not that the investigators are dressing up in SWAT gear, because that's what they have to do to get their dangerous job done.
It's that this is basically just a group of soldiers who, you know, work as a special operations team whenever the investigators need them.
And so that in you asked them, I want you to go out there, I want you to get guns and dope off the street.
And I want you to be tough and be creative and be aggressive and proactive.
And we use all these words.
Well, this is what you get is you get, you know, undercover officers that were in plain clothes, or they have a badge or, you know, whatever they look like paramilitaries, and they're running around, and they try to spook people, and they try to get them to run or to react.
So they give them an opportunity to chase after them and grab them and put their hands in their pants and look for dope, or hopefully they'll throw a gun, you know, and not try to shoot them, but at least take it and toss it.
And that way they can, you know, grab the gun and then lock up the guy.
So that incentivizes police officers to actually create more dangerous conditions.
And you almost think about, you know, the movie from The Full Metal Jacket, where you have the, you know, the crazy machine gunner just shooting people, you know.
How do you know the enemy, you know?
And he says, well, if they're running their VC and, you know, if they're standing still, they're well-disciplined VC.
And in some ways, that's kind of the mindset of the law enforcement.
Hey, if the dude runs, he's a bad guy.
If he stands still, he's well-disciplined.
And then that guy, if he stands still, the cop's going to come up there and harass him and, you know, use affirmative movement.
So let me pat him down for guns when I'm actually looking for dope and running for warrants and just, you know, just very unsavory type interactions.
And so that creates all of that and a whole incentive.
And so people say, well, those guys are just dope dealers anyway.
And so just because they don't have dope on them or a gun at them when they're getting harassed, that's okay.
And I would ask people, do you speed?
Do you speed when you drive?
Yeah, sure.
Sometimes, sure.
Well, what if a cop pulled you over when you weren't speeding and gave you a ticket and say, well, you speed sometimes.
I know you weren't speeding now, but I'm going to make something up and write you, you know, write you a ticket or arrest you for it just to teach you a lesson.
And people would remember that forever.
And they would, you would start to have animosity and enmity for police officers.
And you would stop to stop cooperating with them, wouldn't you?
You would remember that forever.
And that's what you have going on.
These communities has been going on for years and generations.
And in this, this is kind of how that focus of the guns.
That's why I hate cops so much, man.
I was told when I was 15, I started skateboarding when I was 11.
So I've hated them ever since I was 11, because they were messing with me ever since then.
When I was about 15, or no, I guess I was 16 when I first started driving.
When I was 16 years old, I had a Williamson County Sheriff put his gun to my head and tell me that, you know, he'd be perfectly happy to murder me and then go home and screw his wife and have a great time that night and it wouldn't bother him one bit.
And I just said to myself, if I hadn't already decided this, that all cops are my enemies from now on.
And I mean, obviously, I'm not going to commit an act of violence against them.
This is not probable cause for anything.
But the point is that it's my destiny to delegitimize their power because they don't deserve it.
And most of them are scum and criminals.
And that's my experience from being, you know, the son of a successful business executive white boy from Northwest Austin.
Imagine, I think for just a moment, of what it's like to grow up poor and black on the east side compared to, and I've seen cops, now I didn't have as smart of a mouth, but I've seen cops beat the crap out of my friends for smarting off to them when we were just kids, you know?
So yeah, being poor and black, forget it.
You're going to jail.
You're going to juvie and you're going to be there for years.
And we're going to make some money off of you, pal, whatever, you're done.
You got no chance whatsoever compared to rich white kids on the Northwest side, you know?
And they treated us like dogs.
You see how that perpetuates.
And I remember a young black kid, 12 years old, in my cab told me if his grandmama told him, you ever get pulled over, you put your hands out the window.
You know, my dad told me, don't be stupid.
You put your hands on the steering wheel where they can see them.
Yeah.
Well, if you're black, your grandmama tells you, you put your hands out the window.
If you're a 12 year old boy, you put your hands out the window and that's sign language for, please don't execute me.
But that tells you right there for a cop, he's like, oh yeah, these guys are up to something.
And that's Austin, which is one of the nicest towns.
We don't have like hard black ghettos here.
I mean, as bad as it is here, you could be white and walk by yourself and not even get jumped.
I mean, Austin is a really nice town compared to some really tough places in America, you know?
Yeah.
So we've got to step back, you know, conservatives and progressives and look at, you know, how law enforcement contributes to the destabilization in these communities, creates the own animosity to where they can't do their job now or creates these deadly conflicts.
You have to look at that.
Anytime someone dies, that's bad.
Just because the cops survived this is not a victory.
And we have to look at this at a bigger level than instead of just a 30 second soda straw body cam.
And notice this one justified the cops.
So this body cam video came out real quick.
You know, they're not exactly what, you know, what was the justification for the stop and all they're just like, hey, you know, well, nevermind that he had a gun, you know, that's the same thing they did with Freddie Gray.
And you remember they, well, the reason we were after Freddie Gray is he was, you know, we know him and he deals drugs and oh yeah, after we arrested him, we found a illegal pocket knife that wasn't actually illegal.
So very similar thing.
Brandon Soderbergh, he wrote a good write up in the, in the city paper in Baltimore and you know, about in the title of it is, you know, reasonable enough suspicion on Curtis deal.
And he does a good job of talking about it.
I'll read the last little paragraphs and what you see in the past months or so of Curtis deal's life is the chaos of the justice system and it's grim pointless ends justify the means approach.
The police follow a suspicious car in a high crime area where cops are looking for crime and encouraged to proactive to be proactive.
It turns out deal who has been scooped up three times in the past month for having a good gun or drugs.
And because of these previous arrests for guns and drugs, he's someone to pursue to arrest for more guns and drugs is in that car.
So deal gun in hand fleas, which he has done before, which the police know is he has done before, which leads the police to chase him.
This ultimate leads to officer Kincaid, a Baltimore police officer who field for his life shooting and killing deal who ran from the police and also feared for his life.
Here's the last line.
It's a devastating loop of human lumps, lunkheaded recidivism, Siffian police tactics and systemic cruelty.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself wallstreetwindow.com.
Well, you know, I think a big part of it too is and we really need a report on this.
Maybe there is a real solid report on this in the change in the training.
Oh, yeah, I guess, you know, I've read about this guy who's like this goes around training cops preaching the gospel of you go home at night at all costs, officer protection at all costs and screw the average person.
They're regular humans are to be considered the enemy until proven innocent first and shoot first and ask questions later and all these kinds of things.
And I think that people's you may know the guy's name and be able to answer to that.
I know exactly you're talking about that.
There is a guy like that.
But anyway, I think I want to say real quick in my imagination, which I think is pretty representative of the average American or at least the average white American's imagination about how this is supposed to work.
We just assume that what they're trained is if you absolutely have to shoot, you do.
But if you don't, you don't.
And that you're supposed to use the minimum amount of force and this kind of thing.
But that's just not right.
If you listen to cops on any of the TV shows or whatever, when they discuss any of this, they always use the word can or may or whatever, in the sense that that you never hear them say or not never.
But oftentimes, it's not that I absolutely had to do this to defend myself.
It's that the line was crossed by the so-called perp or the suspect that made it OK, where I can shoot and that this is what they're taught.
If the guy reaches for his waistband, shoot him because that's furtive.
And that could be where there's a gun.
And geez, if there was a gun there, then he might be able to shoot you before you shoot him.
So don't even take the risk and wait around to see if there's a gun, even though especially we're talking about mostly, again, patrolling poor black men who it happens to be a style to wear your pants kind of baggy and loose.
And if they have to take off running, they're going to almost always have to reach for their waistband to hold their pants up, you know.
But anyway, if they reach, you can shoot.
And in fact, remember, I think we talked about this before in The Washington Post.
There was an article that they published by a black police officer from Ferguson who talked about how one time he didn't shoot some guy who was like holed up in his bedroom and had a knife and was acting a fool.
And he said, I know, though, that if it was any of the other cops in my department, they would have escalated that situation to the point where then they could shoot, would try to get the guy to come to this side of the line.
So he has a knife, but he's still sitting on his bed.
I wonder if there's anything we can do to scare him enough to make him jump up.
Then we can shoot him.
And how then that's the mindset is like there's this line.
Let's see if we can.
Boy, it would be a shame if some citizen was close to the line where I could have shot him, but didn't quite get there.
Let's see if I can provoke him a little bit more.
And that becomes the mindset, according to this cop writing in The Washington Post.
And it seems like because it all comes from the training that these people are all would be enemies, not you are their security force.
They are, you know, the poorest, most illiterate, fatherless black person, former convict even.
He's the king of this county and you are his servant to protect his rights, period.
They're not taught that ever.
And so this is the way they behave.
It's just a matter of course that like I can shoot.
In fact, back to my neighborhood and rich white kids in northwest Austin and, you know, right on the border of Travis and Williamson County, there was a kid who was suicidal and was acting a fool.
And he had a knife and his dad called the cops on him.
Big mistake.
But he was in a parking lot away from everyone else.
There's no one else around.
He had I think it was like a butter knife, literally a butter knife, not even a steak knife.
But it was certainly a kitchen knife he had in his hand.
And they told him to drop it a couple of times and he didn't.
And so they shot him to death.
And it didn't matter that he was a rich white kid in the northwest part of Austin.
And this was, I don't know, in 2004 or something.
It's just one that comes to mind where I mean, look, according to the rules, they could shoot him.
So they did.
That was it.
It wasn't even a question, Rayford, of whether they had to.
That's some other make believe America or some past one or maybe some future one.
But that's not the way it works now.
The way it works now is if I can shoot him, I get to shoot him.
Well, that's what we go to the Curtis Deal shooting in the body cam.
If you just rewind back 30 seconds, it looks like, well, geez, the cop, he followed policy and nothing else he could do.
Geez, guys, you know, why are you hard on the police?
I'll disagree with you a little bit.
Do cops want to go out and actually shoot someone?
Yeah, not so much.
But in ways where you're just kind of like, you know, when you're a kid and you want to you fantasize about joining the military so you could, you know, be in this moment of glory or type of thing, you know, do the hard job, you know, and face down an enemy and come out victorious.
You know, you have that in your head.
Now, do cops intentionally kind of agitate people or create conflicts?
Absolutely.
And you're trained.
It's weird.
So when you would look at normal police training, you would go look at all this stuff that cops are trained, what they can't do when they're when they're interacting with with individuals, all this stuff they they cannot do.
But but actually what's going on is cops reverse engineer all of those restrictions.
And so they subtly manipulate people's reactions and they actually want them to react.
That way you can get an arrest that can give you probable cause to pat them down or maybe they even just go straight up and resist.
And so you can arrest arrest them for assault or resisting or whatever else.
And you've got your stat and you got a bad, you know, a bad guy off the street without actually having to have a crime that he committed.
So in that way, yes, you're absolutely right.
They definitely create and it's a lot.
Some of it's unconscious and other it's intentional.
A lot of these these jump out boys or or, you know, these street detectives, that's you know, that's kind of their full time job and exactly what they're supposed to do.
And if you want to be a good cop and you want to get guns and dope off the street, this is how you have to do it.
If you're just a nice guy who, you know, doesn't doesn't work in this manner, you're not going to be very, very active and successful.
And you see these seven cops and their gun trace team, man, these were top cops, man.
They were just pulling all kind of guns off the street.
In fact, now we know it's because they totally crossed the line.
Tell us more about them.
Tell us more about this case of this indictment here, please.
Yeah.
So, you know, these are seven, seven guys.
Apparently the FBI or DEA found out that they were, you know, extorting money from, you know, people they were they had stole money.
Yeah.
Two hundred thousand dollars out of some guys.
They arrested a guy that went to his house and robbed his safe of like two hundred thousand dollars and a watch.
I think one of them was selling drugs.
So, you know, he would tax people, take half their dope and then go and sell it himself.
Oh, yeah.
And then which is just kind of crazy.
The most outraged that people seem to be about these officers is they were faking their overtime sheets.
And so they went on like vacation or went gambling at some casino and were writing it down as overtime.
And, you know, had like thirty thousand dollars or three hundred thousand dollars between the two of them, between the seven of them for an overtime because they're unaccountable.
And that's just the level.
And now let me defend them just a little bit and say, this is, you know, these guys went a little too far, but this is how it's done all the time through these little groups, these, you know, drug task force and gun task force and these street level guys.
This is how they operate.
These guys went a little jealous and they were stealing money, which is that's a civil asset forfeiture.
That's all they're doing.
So, you know, they just they just didn't do the paperwork just to justify their actions.
Right.
And they were encouraged to do this by their leadership.
You know, they were.
And they go out there.
But now, see, their leadership is, you know, wipes her hands and says, well, we didn't train them to do this or, you know, they didn't follow policy, which you never follow policy.
At least luckily, in this case, we've all seen the wire.
So it makes it a little bit easier to imagine the dynamic in the Baltimore Police Department because we kind of have a little bit of an idea about how it already works around there.
But which goes to the point about what you just said about because there's no accountability.
And yet the way it's supposed to work in America is that, you know, the people elect the district attorney and his, you know, incentives are supposed to be based around protecting them at all costs, even from his own or their own protection force, which is also supposedly elected.
I don't know if the police chief is elected.
County sheriff is elected in most places, I think.
I don't know about all the 50 states or what.
But anyway, it's supposed to be a little d democracy here where how could it possibly be that the D.A. and the chief of police can declare war on subjects of their population like this, deprive them of their rights in this kind of ongoing way.
And it takes the federal government to come in, the FBI to come in and say, well, we get to make our bones bust in yours when that's supposed to be the local D.A.'s job.
And yet, for some reason, that's not the winning ticket that like I'm running for D.A. of Baltimore and I'm going to stop all this police brutality.
How come democracy is not kicking in here, Rayford?
Well, they're under a federal consent degree right now.
And yeah, so the leadership kind of washes their hands and don't get don't get sucked into thinking, well, it's just bad apples.
And in these guys, yeah, they went too far.
But this is how it operates anyway.
They just didn't write their paperwork properly enough on their reports to justify their actions, because so much abuse is legal and justified that you can do to that.
You know, you can take people's money.
You can run up and grab folks and pat them down for guns and in all of this based on, you know, this kind of made up reasonable suspicion.
You just didn't articulate it good enough.
It was when it causes the problem.
And so the leadership will get away.
And then you have the feds.
Now, I don't know about the specific team, but you remember the federal government with the Department of Justice and HUD.
They give grant money to these police departments to run these special gang operations and gun streaks.
So the feds funded these guys and put them out there in the first place over and over again.
This is the whole scandal back 15 years ago.
Man, I'm old, Rayford, 20 years ago, right?
The whole scam about the New Jersey Turnpike.
Don't you be black on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Man, you're going to get framed for some drug possession.
And it was this huge thing.
And of course, just in the exact same way that you say the feds came in and said, my God, you state police in New Jersey are so racist and you county sheriffs and city police are so racist.
We're going to put federal Department of Justice monitors inside your local police departments and do all these things to rein in your racism when it was their federal mandate in the first place that you have got to bring in this much amount of drugs and this, that, and the other thing to get your grant money and to get all your support and all your equipment and all of your things.
And all they were trying to do was fulfill the federal quota.
But what are they going to do?
Bust a bunch of rich white, you know, judges and relatives of judges for using cocaine?
Hell no.
Of course, they're going to target black people because they don't have any political power to fight back with.
So, you know, it's low hanging fruit, basically, because if you're, you know, because blacks typically are poorer and so therefore typically have less political power, ability to hire a lawyer to protect them, this kind of thing.
And so, yeah, see the same thing again and again and again with this drug war.
And that's that's what I saw, you know.
And then you see blacks.
You can see why blacks say, well, white people don't care about us at all, because all they do is keep inflicting their cops on us nonstop forever.
And they never let up as though it's, you know, white people doing it just because white people have more power than them.
That doesn't mean white people even understand this, much less are behind it.
It's just the government.
It's the state.
It's the cop, the cops themselves and the lawyers.
I was that white cop, you know, in the black neighborhood.
And I really thought I was helping.
Oh, gosh, you know, and they and the leadership in the black community, they're begging for help and they need it.
But then this is what they ask for is, well, we're going to get, you know, this special team to go after guns.
And here you go.
It just spirals down.
And I was looking at the neighborhood that Freddie Gray lived in.
I read one article where you were an arrest wait for the neighborhood that Freddie Gray lived in in Baltimore.
You were 13 times higher than the national average.
And if you took any neighborhood or community in America and you arrested people at a rate 13 higher, 13 times higher than the national average, and you did that for years, I'll show you a totally destabilized community that's unable to pull itself up from its own bootstraps.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm sorry.
What's his name?
The guy that he tried to run against Hillary for a minute there, right, was the former mayor of Baltimore who had inflicted all of this, um, you know, broken windows, policing and all of this kind of stuff on him.
Yeah.
I want to say, yeah, or something.
I'm spacing.
Oh yeah.
Martin O'Malley.
Oh, that was him.
Yeah.
And that he was really the one who had engineered this as much as anyone.
Um, this whole, uh, you know, that's an interesting story where a sociology paper about broken windows can lead to such insane policies for decades, you know?
Yeah.
Well that, that was Hillary and Bill with their, you know, their cops on the street grants.
And that was that money back then to put cops on, you know, in these neighborhoods specifically.
And, uh, in, in schools, I'll tell you for the particular neighborhood that I patrolled in North Charleston, that was similar to this, uh, Charleston farms.
Uh, when I was there, we had a, we had a HUD grant and that funded, uh, you know, our, our kind of what I call the jump out boys, our speed team, uh, to work that neighborhood, uh, and put more cops in the street.
Uh, nothing's changed.
And just recently I see where they have an application for another, another, uh, another department of justice, federal money, uh, for this particular neighborhood, a blighted community.
What are they going to use that money for?
They're going to buy, they're going to fund a cop and a license plate scanner.
Do you know some of those mobile ones that they put on top of the police car?
So here they go.
They're, they're gonna, they're gonna run, uh, you know, license plate scanners in a black neighborhood, you know, to help fight crime.
Yeah.
How's that?
You know, how well is that gonna go?
Yep.
Um, yeah, you know, that reminds me of this thing I heard on, uh, on NPR about how, uh, Oh, it was just this little story about how they were putting in new parking meters in this town and they're interviewing the mayor about it and people have different opinions.
And the host just kind of snarks that like, well, I'm sure you're not going to have a thing where people have to pay quarters, right?
They're going to be all futuristic and at least have smart card readers on them.
Right.
And the mayor's like, Oh yes, of course we're, you know, we're faith phased out quarters for these things a long time ago.
But of course it didn't even occur to either of them at all that, you know, poor people maybe can't afford to have, maybe don't have enough money to even have a bank account or have a debit card of any kind and they live in a cash economy.
And so all you're saying is they can't park their car anywhere downtown.
If they have to take care of business anymore, you're not even going to give a, not give them an option to pay in cash.
And they're not even thinking of it.
Like they're trying to force people to conform to this.
They're just talking as though quarters are already a hundred percent obsolete in our society when they're just not, but they're just not even considering at all that like, Hey, some people still use cash, you know, and what they're really doing is making it, it's just another punitive measure to keep poor people poor, not deliberately, but in effect, you know?
Well, I saw that, you know, with law enforcement, with people trying to get to court or someone to have a felony charge, you know, that goes on for years and they have to come and check in once a month or whatever, and go to all these different hearings.
And I mean, just what a, just as absolute struggle it is for someone to get downtown for the court hearing.
That's probably going to reschedule it or something like that.
They get a takeoff from their job.
They are going to have to get somebody to drive them or ride the bus.
And then you have to pay for parking.
And it just becomes an absolute crucible of a nightmare.
And I know you're going, Oh yeah, boohoo, the dude committed a felony and, but he can't pay for the parking.
But that's how that stuff just, just grinds people up.
Oh yeah.
And a failure to appear that'll add all kinds of frustrations onto everything.
And they don't treat misdemeanors much gentler than that either.
I mean, just to go down and deal with a ticket is right.
Like you're saying you have to take off the whole afternoon where your boss might really not appreciate that.
And especially if just last month, your kid was sick and you had to take off some time.
Now you might be fired actually.
Cause you have to take that afternoon off to go down to take care of your tickets and whatever it is.
And so now you, you, you worry, Oh, I've got that warrant out on me.
So the next time a cop, you come in contact with a cop, you're going to run or maybe fight.
And didn't you, you know, for, for what, for what?
And yeah, so let me for, for what all of this law enforcement activity.
And, uh, you have in Boston where their conviction rate or clearance rate for assaults where somebody gets shot, but doesn't actually die is 6%.
That means 6%.
So all of these millions of dollars, all this overtime you're paying all of this, get tough, you know, planes flying in the air, license plate readers, cops jumping out with everybody.
And they solve 6% of their, uh, non-fatal shootings and their fatal shootings there at that rate is 26%.
Oh man.
20, 20, 26%.
You know, I just saw a stat on Baltimore is, uh, is just over 30%.
I'd like to see the history of that.
I just saw this as a slightly out of context, but I saw, um, Cade Crockford from the Massachusetts ACLU who, uh, she's a great presence on Twitter if you don't follow her.
Um, and she was talking about how in, I think the 1960s, late 1960s, uh, she was quoting stats that said that 90% of murders were solved.
I'm not sure if that was in Massachusetts or if that was nationwide or what, but, and she was saying, yeah.
And making your same point, they didn't have license plate readers and all this and that, whatever things, but that was, you know, before the real kickoff of the war on drugs and the creation of all this crime where it didn't exist before.
So all of this, all of this, that, that we're seeing, you're not even doing your, your basic, if there was one job that cops should do, it is, I don't know, arrest murderers that actually shoot someone or people that, you know, shoot people.
Yes.
Go arrest them.
That's great.
Please do that.
And 6% success rate, 27%.
And it's, that's just, but on law and order, they do a real great job of solving it all the time.
And so that's what people believe is that really is the heart of police work.
But, you know, I mentioned that show, the wire it's, um, I think it's a former cop and a former newspaperman got together to put, to make that show.
And it's, I think it was the former cop who explained how, listen, if your job as a detective is solving murders, you might get one, two or three of those done a month.
That's some good work, man.
But meanwhile, the ones out there making the drug bus, they're getting 20, 30 something convictions a month, and it doesn't come into play which crimes are which and which are more important.
It just comes down to numbers.
These cops are more effective.
They're going to get promoted first.
They're on the fast track.
They get all the excitement while you're walking around being a dumbass gumshoe solving clues and stuff.
They're cracking skulls and taking guns and getting things done.
And so the whole structure is basically built around, you know, pushing on all the unnecessary stuff.
The incentives are built that way.
Even if nobody intended to build them that way, they did.
Well, you see the, the, the police detectives and the, you know, the, you know, the robbery homicide guys, they're overwhelmed because they have all these shootings and, and, and murders to, to investigate.
And, you know, it takes a lot of effort.
And so they're, they're just, you know, it's just coming over the transom on them.
So they don't have time to really, you know, focus on one case and solve it and then off to the next one.
You know, they're just, you know, one day after the next they have another murder and another murder and another shooting.
And, and so they, they can't even function as it is now.
All right, Rayford.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you come back on the show and all the great work you do.
And I think it's just at Rayford Davis on Twitter, correct?
Rayford D on Twitter.
Rayford D on Twitter.
And of course you guys can read Rayford's articles at the Libertarian Institute and your own blog.
I'm sorry, I put it, I put your name in Google, but I didn't see your blog come up.
I forget the URL.
Blue Emnity.
Blue Emnity, that's right.
If I write anything, we'll put it over at the Libertarian Institute.
Right on.
Okay, cool.
Well, listen, and LEAP again, used to be Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
Now it's Law Enforcement Action Partnership.
But anyway, cool.
So listen, thank you very much.
Appreciate your time as always.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Rayford Davis.
Check him out again at libertarianinstitute.org.
I'm proud to say.
And check me out there, too.
That's my institute.
Me and Sheldon and Will and Jared and Rayford, too.
Libertarianinstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show for me.
And check out my full interview archive, 4,300 something interviews, something like that.
Almost 44, I think, at scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
And I guess I'll go ahead and say here, because I think I'm pretty much decided, I'm going to do a thing on my full show feed, where I'm going to do questions and answers.
This was, somebody brought this up that I should do this and charge money.
I'm not going to, you guys can all still donate if you want, like Rayford says.
But what I'm going to do is, when people ask me questions on Twitter, and when people ask me questions in the email, and I'm inviting you all to do so, you want me to explain this or that aspect of the war, or why should I believe this or that or whatever, let me know.
And then I'm going to do short little podcasts that I'm going to put out on the old full show feed from last year, you know, back the years before when I had the live show.
So if you're subscribed to the full show feed, I'm going to start putting out, you know, questions and answers type things for you there for those who are interested.
So you can subscribe to that on iTunes and whatever the hell, it's just, you'll see on there full show, full show, full show from last year and previous to that.
And so I'm going to start with that today.
I have a couple.
So I'm going to record a couple of those this afternoon for you.
So anyway, check all that out if you want.
And that'll also be, I guess that'll all be on scotthorton.org.
And then I'll just blog it at the Libertarian Institute.
I'm not going to create a whole new feed at the Institute, but I'll just put on the blog there.
So okay, thanks guys very much.
Talk to you soon.
Hey, all Scott here.
On average, how much do you think these interviews are worth to you?
Of course, I've never charged for my archives in a dozen years of doing this and I'm not about to start.
But at patreon.com slash Scott Wharton show, you can name your own price to help support and make sure there's still new interviews to give away.
So what do you think two bits, a buck and a half?
They're usually about 80 interviews per month, I guess.
So take that into account.
You can also cap the amount you'd be willing to spend in case things get out of hand around here.
That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton show.
And thanks y'all.
I love Bitcoin, but there's just something incredibly satisfying about having real fine silver in your pocket.
That's why commodity discs are so neat.
They're one ounce rounds of fine silver with a QR code on the back.
Just grab your smartphone's QR reader, scan the coin and you'll instantly get the silver spot price in Federal Reserve notes and Bitcoin.
And if you donate 100 bucks to the Scott Horton show, he'll send you one.
Learn more at facebook.com slash commodity discs, commodity discs.com