09/29/14 – Raeford Davis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, on Liberty Radio Network.
Now, man, I have a whole cop section today.
At the top of it is Rayford Davis and his blog, Blue Emnity.
What an interesting name for a blog.
Blue Emnity, it's at blueemnity.blogspot.com.
Welcome to the show, Rayford.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
It's glad you're having me here.
Very happy to have you here.
Tell me, who are you?
I am a former police officer.
Former police officer, from where?
I spent six years, four on patrol and two as a detective with the city of North Charleston Police Department in South Carolina.
It's about the eighth most dangerous city at the time I was there.
All right.
Now, I'll tell the people, the reason that you're on the show is because you emailed me and said, hey, I'm a former cop and I listen to your show and like it.
It's not, apparently, it's not that you're stalking me, but you like it even though I say such horrible things about cops all the time.
That piqued my interest and I read almost all of this essay here.
Pretty much, yeah, I read it.
This essay that you have at your blog, I guess it's your first one about this shooting.
I guess I'm interested to know how it is that anyone who was ever a cop could have the slightest patience for a guy like me at all, even if you kind of got a different attitude about policing now.
Piling around with Will Gregg is one thing, but I'm a hater.
Come on, Rayford.
Yeah.
You know what?
You're right.
It's really hard.
I'm reminded of Upton Sinclair's quote, it's very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding.
When you have, you know, you're grown up with, hey, police are good and bad guys are bad and when somebody comes and tells you different, that's very hard to accept.
But certainly, my experience as a police officer, you know, that's the conclusion that I came to based on my experiences there.
All right.
And so, now you say that you conducted thousands of traffic stops.
You were a cop for how long?
Well, six years, I mean.
Six years?
No, I was just a normal cop, but when you're on patrol, that's what you do.
It's traffic stops.
Make a couple a day and they start adding up.
Yep.
All right.
Well, tell me, I guess, can you go back to what you really thought when you signed up and what changed you?
What made you, I mean, after six years, was it after six years or it was earlier than that that you, I guess, from the very beginning, you started learning the job was a bit different than you expected or how's that work?
Well, sure.
I grew up, you know, reading the Constitution, you know, conservative, thinking, hey, you know, I know cops do maybe some bad things here and there, but, you know, I'll be different and I can go in there and I didn't sign up to get honor and integrity or anything like that.
I signed up to bring honor and integrity to law enforcement.
I have a bachelor's degree in criminal justice.
I, you know, I thought I knew the law and had a good judgment.
It didn't take long.
I remember the first week I was there on patrol during training and I watched one of our special enforcement teams that go through particular neighborhoods that need special interest.
And they had pulled over some poor kid on a moped probably for, you know, not having his turn signal on long enough or something like that and had obtained consent to search his moped and they're tearing this thing apart looking for marijuana or whatever.
And this kid's not happy about it, but he, you know, really didn't have a choice.
I knew right there that, you know, this war on drugs just doesn't seem quite right.
However, drugs are bad and, you know, they do lots of terrible things.
And when you don't understand the effects of what a black market is and how actually when you make things illegal, that's what brings in the violence and the crime.
And then you disenfranchise people from any type of dispute resolution.
If you're a local drug dealer and you have a dispute, you have to use violence.
You can't go to a court or something like that and say, hey, you know, this guy, you know, I've loaned him some product and he didn't pay me for it.
I mean, you have nothing to do but go straight to violence.
Now, obviously, you know, you're different than the average cop, but does the average cop understand that?
Because it doesn't seem like it's that difficult, especially when you're living through the experience of it all the time and seeing how, you know, you make people outlaws and then they have to act like outlaws, like you say.
Well, you know, you do see it.
And if you talk to any cop about marijuana, oh, yeah, that's, you know, we got to make that legal.
But that's as far as I go.
If you start questioning any more than that to say, hey, why are we messing with drugs at all?
Why are we interfering with anyone's right to carry a weapon to defend themselves or anything like that?
And then you question basically your entire reason for being there and everything you've ever been taught in your life.
And that's very difficult to do.
In other words, they look at pot as just no big deal.
It's like drinking a beer.
So they don't care.
But as long as we're talking about drugs that are actually bad for you, well, then those got to be illegal.
Same basic simplistic mindset without any thought to it.
Correct.
And when you don't understand, if you don't know, if you haven't read Murray Rothbard or Lou Rockwell or anybody else that talks about, hey, there's this thing called natural law and free markets.
And when you try to change those by adding laws to ban substances and to interfere with people's normal exchanges, that's what brings the problems.
Yeah.
Well, now, so it's interesting, you know, it's not that I mean, I guess you weren't a detective out solving homicides or whatever.
Like you say, you're basically a traffic cop out there pulling people over.
But then every traffic violation becomes a drug war investigation, basically, right?
Some kind of fishing expedition.
Absolutely.
They all do.
I mean, certainly you have people out there.
They're doing their thieves and committing violence against others.
But it's mainly the drugs and guns that, you know, that's what you're looking for.
That's what every traffic stop.
That's what you're doing.
And that's what generates the violence is because people, they have a little bit of weed or, you know, a gram of cocaine or something that's and that they know, hey, I'm fixing to get arrested, probably going to go to jail.
It's going to cost me thousands of dollars and and, you know, they're willing to resist or flee because of that.
And that is part of what I want to put out is, hey, that's what's making it so dangerous for the police as well.
Right.
Yeah.
I told the story before I talked to a childhood friend of mine after twenty five years or something and he was a DC cop.
He said, I chase crackheads around all night.
I said, oh, for crying out loud, you're the only reason they're running.
Don't you know that you basically invented crack by outlawing cocaine use?
I mean, what is this?
Are you this is really the life that you're living?
I can't believe it.
You know, that's right.
That's right.
For people that in law enforcement officers, they don't understand it.
I try to explain it to them, ask them a question.
When is the last time you've seen two convenience store owners that sell beer and alcohol or two liquor distributors have a shootout?
They don't do it.
A fifth of whiskey is just as dangerous as as cocaine and marijuana.
But well, hold it right there, Ray, for we got to take this break.
Every time with Rayford Davis, he's at Blue Amnesty dot blogspot dot com.
He's a former cop.
We're talking about the way things are now.
Scott Horton dot org, we'll be right back.
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All right, welcome back to the show.
Talking with Rayford Davis.
Former cop from Charleston, South Carolina.
And we're talking about the way things are now, the futility of the war on drugs and the destruction of American liberty that comes hand in hand with it.
The cops.
Unwillingness to understand the situation for what it is because they have every incentive to not understand, of course, although everybody who's not a cop pretty much in the rest of society, that's maybe the most paranoid of an ill-informed of moms, are against the drug war.
Now, hell, William F.
Buckley from the National Review, the father of the new right from the 1950s, he came out against the war on drugs 25 years ago or something.
Everybody who understands anything about economics at all, left, right, commie, libertarian or anybody else knows that it cannot work for anything but providing jobs for government employee union members.
You know, that's basically what it's all about.
But, you know, here's the other thing.
And you mentioned this in your emails to me, Rayford, is the war on guns, too.
And of course, you've got to be a libertarian to be good on both.
For some reason, it's like a magical thing to understand the economics of gun control and drug control in the same kind of a way.
And we seem to be in a situation here.
I got a I got a headline, 23 people killed by American police in the span of one week.
And I don't know exactly.
I assume most of those weren't armed at all, but maybe some of them had a gun, but they weren't necessarily doing anything with it.
And we live it's such a contradiction.
We live in a society where everybody knows guns are legal and there's some kind of concealed or open carry.
Now, in all 50 states, we got 300 million guns for 300 million Americans, although pretty much about 150 million Americans are the gun owners and the other 150 million not.
But still, that's 300 million guns in private ownership circulating around in open markets in regulated ones, but legal markets in America, a small percentage of black market guns there.
And yet the cops act like if anybody has a gun, kill them.
If anybody has a gun, they're trying to kill you with it.
You go home tonight if they don't tough.
And so you see just over and over just people they and they'll say, well, he had a gun.
But, you know, I've heard and I'm no former soldier or anything like that, but I've heard soldiers and I've heard cops and I've heard people who were neither say, well, listen, unless I can see the barrel of a gun and they're really an imminent threat to me, I'm not shooting somebody.
Right.
Like that's the standard.
Not someone may have a gun in their waistband, not they were reaching into their car for what could have been something or something.
When you see that barrel of the gun pointed at you.
Yeah, you got to be a quick draw.
But the alternative is you murder innocent people all day.
And that's what we've got now is a bunch of cops who somebody told them to expect that anybody with a gun is trying to kill them, even if the cops are breaking into their house in the middle of the night.
Well, you know what?
I've I've had that gun in that barrel of that gun pointed at me, and it's a terrifying experience.
You know, fortunately, I did not shoot anyone and I didn't have to.
And I was able to survive the encounter, but it's the fact that the gun in possession is de facto legal.
I know they have all these concealed carry laws and all of this, but cops still, you know, they basically treat anybody with a gun as as as it's it's somewhat illegal.
And and that's what makes the danger.
We have this thing called the Second Amendment that's not to be infringed.
Not to be infringed.
But yet it's infringed.
And you see that attitude increasing more and more.
And this is coming from cops who are generally conservative.
And they're, you know, hey, they're NRA and, you know, don't take my gun for me.
You'll pry it from my cold, dead hands.
And then they go right to a Tenth Amendment center, Oathkeeper type guys.
That's what they all are.
And then they go right out and.
Treat anybody with a gun like a criminal first and then lawful citizen later, and especially racial minorities, too, there's just no way around it that, you know, I mean, in The New York Times, did you see a couple of months ago they ran this article that I swear to I mean, the headline was, gee whiz, everybody, liberal do-gooder, Upper East or West Side or whatever it is, people in New York have only been there once.
Well, look, did you know you know how sometimes black people aren't criminals?
Well, guess what?
Sometimes the black people who aren't criminals own guns and go shoot down at the range and they're gun owners and they're they're basically like white people who own guns.
Like that was the tone of the entire article was like, can you believe it, that a black guy would own a gun or black woman even for any reason other than to rob a store was like the whole New York Times article was like a Sunday weekend magazine piece.
Geez, look, everyone, black gun owners.
And if that's what The New York Times thinks, imagine what all the cops think, you know?
Well, you're right.
You know, there's just very little individual racism or, you know, I never saw any police officer, you know, just really be a racist.
But two things I would love to see the black gun community and, you know, like the NRA, that's two groups that I think could get together and and really bridge this.
The bridge, this problem and get together on some issues, right?
Yeah, you know, the ACLU is actually slowly but surely getting a little bit better on guns because they're realizing that like this, their special report on the SWAT team raids that, you know, the cops have this so-called matrix of the threat and you get assigned a number, I guess, you know better than me.
And so but if you're a gun owner, it doesn't matter whether you're just wanted for a bunch of old speeding tickets and they've never had any cause to think that you might be a threat to a cop in your whole life.
Doesn't matter if they're kicking in your door, that makes you a defensive threat against them, right?
Like Iran is to the empire.
Well, it's not fair for you to just sit there armed.
And so that's the way they look at it.
And so they include that information as a reason to raid people.
Well, the ACLU looks at that and says, well, you know, geez, I'm not sure if that's fair, because after all, and they recognize there are a lot of law abiding gun owners in America, just because someone has a gun doesn't mean that they deserve to be executed by the law.
Certainly, you know, law enforcement does a terrible job of.
Understanding that and say, hey, people are armed and they have a right right to do so and they just just don't get.
Yeah, all right now, so I wonder, too, about the training, because it seems like what we have here and maybe it's a myth that there was ever really a doctrine of use the minimum amount of force for any given situation, because really your your your sacred duty is to protect the rights of the suspects of even the very worst crimes.
You're there to protect them ostensibly from the lynch mob to make sure they get a fair trial, that they're presumed innocent and all these kinds of things, not to be the punishers out there going after people.
You're supposed to be protecting our rights and using the minimum amount of force.
And yet it seems like all cops in America, SWAT team or not, are trained on the Powell doctrine.
Overwhelming force.
If you have to cripple them, go ahead and break their spine if you want to, in order to neutralize any possible threat to you at any given time.
So just they and this is a big part of the shootings all the time, too, is, you know, he looked at me funny.
I had.
Hey, there are bad guys out there and, you know, you do anybody.
Even a private libertarian world security force would would want to protect themselves.
My what I want police officers to think is.
When is it OK to use that force to put yourself in the position where you need to use that force in the first place?
You know, there's this thing beyond policy and procedures that you learn to train.
There's things beyond the state law or the federal law or even the Supreme Court.
There's things called natural law.
And, you know, you can't use force against a person unless they use violence against you to begin with.
And just carrying around a gun is not using violence.
Well, I didn't come to any old arrest, whether are they really training the cops nowadays?
You know, the new ones in the academy that look the people out there, they're animals.
You're a soldier in the war against their barbarity.
And so go out there and get them.
Or are they taught at all about like, hey, your job is protecting these people.
So take it easy on them out there or what?
You know, it seems like that would be the obvious training.
The latter there.
Well, it goes back and forth.
You know, certainly.
I'm sure here locally with that, you saw the police officer, the dash cam in Columbia where the state trooper shot the guy when he asked to go get his wallet and he went and got it and he thought it was a gun and shot him.
And so, you know, everything will calm down for a little while.
I just just last week, though, I went to a funeral of a local police officer.
He he was shot and killed.
He was responding to reports of a disturbance at a apartment complex.
They go to knock on the door to see what's up.
And the guy fired a rifle through the door and and killed officer and wounded another one.
So they kind of go back and forth with that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, still, it seems like, you know, the job is and boy, it's starting at 80 grand or something here in Austin, Texas.
So, you know, maybe that's part of the problem.
It should be an underpaid job like a school teacher that like, you know what, you do it because you really want to go out there and protect people.
And you know that you're taking a risk and that you have to restrain yourself in a situation where you might want to do worse.
And you are putting yourself in danger in some circumstances.
But just because you have to be careful doesn't mean you have to be brutal.
And you know, and here's what I'm really trying to get at.
Not that I'm doing a good job of it.
It's treating everybody like they're hardened criminals when the cops obviously know.
They must know that.
No, we are not all hardened criminals.
Hardened criminals are hardened criminals and everybody else is everybody else.
And yet they treat us like they're the only ones who are the everybody else.
And the civilians, every non-cop, every non-government employee in America is a dangerous felon to be, you know, intercepted and interdicted and indefinitely detained.
They treat us like we're scum.
Everyone.
I mean, I know from the first time I ever met a cop in person when I was a little kid, he screamed in my face like a Nazi drill sergeant and called me a damn dog and this and that.
And I've hated every single cop on earth ever since then.
You know, screw these guys.
What what natural authority does this pig have over me?
None.
And I see them treat every single one of my neighbors like this all day.
Every day.
Some some mom right now is being pulled over on the side of the street within a couple of miles from here and is being treated like the lowest scum of the earth by guess who?
The lowest scum of the earth.
Only he's got the flashing lights and the little costume jewelry.
Well, you know, we think we do some good.
I would say about 30 percent if you had to put it.
You know, there's actually there are some bad guys out there.
And and and to deal with them.
But certainly I was I was the biggest jerk in the world many times.
And you know what?
I had no idea.
I did not realize that that that's how I was coming across.
Yeah.
Well, you know now you're right in there, people and everything, but I can't give them the benefit of the doubt.
They don't treat people like they're innocent until proven guilty.
So I assume they're all guilty until proven innocent.
After all, when's the last time you ever heard of a cop arresting his partner for felony assault or or murder, manslaughter, whatever, whatever.
Whoa, that was an unjustified shoot.
You're under arrest right now, buddy.
That has never happened ever, ever, because they're all criminals.
They're all just co-conspirators, aiding and abetting and covering up for each other.
They commit crimes all day and they never arrest each other.
That's the proof that the whole barrel is bad.
There may be one good apple in there, but you quit for some reason.
Right.
What happened to that?
Well, I'll tell you.
Yeah, I did four years on patrol.
I went to detective division for two years and I've I worked with sexual assaults and juvenile crimes.
And so, hey, right.
I mean, cops can't screw that up.
But the the very one of the last things where I said, hey, I've got to get out is actually I was investigating a sexual assault and I did not believe that the that the suspect actually committed the crime.
And I was talking to my supervisor about it and I was saying, no, I didn't know that for sure.
But I talked to my supervisor and said, hey, you know, if I was on the jury, I would not convict this guy.
So why am I charging him criminally?
And it was like, you know, the needle scratching across the record.
Oh, wait a minute.
You know, you can't make that decision.
You've got to charge this guy.
And and right there is when I felt this understood moral inner injury.
And and they say, wait a minute, I'm fixing to basically kidnap a guy, destroy his life, even if he's found not guilty.
You know, he's going to be thousands of dollars in debt and have this, you know, sexual assault arrest on his record.
And and right then I said, you know, even we're trying to do good.
The government then government can't get it right.
Well, I got lucky, if you can say I was directing traffic one day and got hit by a truck.
Oh, damn.
Well, but what happened to that guy?
He was prosecuted, though.
Well, he he was charged.
Yes.
Charged him.
Did you contact his lawyer?
I I did.
As a matter of fact, you know, he had a public defense attorney.
And I talked to the prosecutor even after I charged him and said, hey, you know.
You know, I'm really uncomfortable with this case.
And this particular prosecutor said, yeah, OK, well, you know, we'll let the process work.
And I called the his defense attorney and told him my reservations.
And apparently he talked to the the prosecutor and got the case dismissed.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I was going to say, yeah, let the process work.
You know, the damage was done already.
Yeah.
Let the jury decide, even though the prosecutor doesn't necessarily believe in it.
That's good that the defense lawyer was able to get.
I was going to say when you said, you know, how can that go wrong?
I was going to say, yeah, falsely accusing somebody because, like you said, damage is done.
Even being charged is certainly on a charge like that.
It's guilty till proven innocent kind of thing.
That's right.
And so, you know, as far as why did I get out?
Well, that decision was made for me.
Yeah, man.
Well, you certainly were a good one then.
That's for sure.
Listen, I'm sorry.
We're way over time and I got to let you go.
But I hope that we can talk again.
I hope you'll keep writing.
I like your first one here at Blue Amnesty blogspot dot com, Rayford.
And I hope, you know, we talk police issues again in the future.
Well, thank you, Scott.
I appreciate that to speak out.
Yeah, it was really good to hear your story and to hear your point of view on this stuff.
All right.
So, yeah, we'll talk again soon.
Thank you.
That's Rayford Davis, everybody.
Blue Amnesty.
A libertarian cop's view of law enforcement at Blue Amnesty dot blogspot dot com.
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