Carlos Miller, founder and publisher of Photography is Not a Crime, discusses his 2007 arrest for photographing cops while working as a journalist, and why it prompted him to start the website; and how camera phones, social media, and brave activists have made the public much more aware of rampant cop violence – even though they are still mostly unaccountable for their crimes and violations of our rights.
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Alright y'all, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow, etc, etc.
Okay, check it out, on the line I got Carlos Miller from PINAC, which is photography is not a crime, the acronym for that I mean to say, photographyisnotacrime.com.
Welcome to the show, Carlos, how are you?
Thank you, I'm very good, thank you for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you here, and yeah, you know, actually I've been meaning to talk with you for a long time just because I like your overall project here.
I like, well, the first premise and the result too, so I'm glad to have a chance to talk with you about it.
First of all, how did this start, photography is not a crime?
Well, this started in 2007, in February 2007, when I was out on assignment for a local website taking pictures of cops, you know, the assignment was just about a neighborhood in Miami that was going through some changes, and I was just taking pictures of cops making an arrest, and they told me not to take their picture.
They told me their exact words were, this is a private matter.
My response was, this is a public road.
And then the five officers then came after me, they left that guy alone, whoever they are arresting, they came after me, and they told me to just leave the area.
I stayed there, I stayed on the sidewalk.
I said, well, I have the right to be here.
Please let me do my job, and please do your job.
And next thing you know, they pounced on me, they bashed my head into the pavement, they broke a camera lens, a flash, they threw me in jail on nine misdemeanors.
I was in jail for 16 hours, and they accused me of, the main charge was standing in the middle of the street blocking traffic.
The last picture I took before I was arrested shows the street behind them.
Then they said five counts of disobeying a lawful order, one count of disorderly conduct, one count of resisting arrest, one count of obstructing justice, and one count of obstructing traffic.
So it started from there.
This was 2007 when the blogosphere was very popular.
So I started the blog two months later, about a week or two before I was scheduled to go to trial, just trying to raise awareness of this issue, because the prosecutor did not drop the charges, which they should have, because the picture was already posted online in my article and everything.
It became a viral story.
But they insisted on going forward with the trial.
So I said, well, let me just use my skills, which is writing and publishing, and get the word out there, and hopefully that they would eventually drop the charges.
Well, of course, they didn't do that.
And to make a long story short, I was acquitted of all charges except resisting arrest, which I appealed, and I had that reversed upon appeal.
And then I was arrested a couple of more times for taking pictures in Miami.
And meanwhile, I'm documenting all this on the blog, photographyisnotacrime.com, and just the readers became very interested in this stuff.
And this at the same time was in 2007, it was in December 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone.
So that gave people a camera on their phone with the ability to upload video in seconds, where before it was very hard to do.
YouTube was purchased by Google in 2006.
So a combination of factors were coming together.
And meanwhile, I'm just writing about my case, but then these other things are coming together.
So there's people out there who are recording their videos, you know, might see police abuse, and they're recording police, and then the cops are telling them they're not allowed to record, or they're taking their phone away or arresting them.
These people will go on a computer to research the law because they were not sure, well, is this cop right?
Is it against the law?
And they would come across my blog.
So then I would write their stories because the mainstream media at the time was not reporting on these stories.
The mainstream media does not care at the time.
They did not care if anybody was getting arrested for recording if it was not one of their reporters.
So, you know, from there, it just blew up.
And, you know, now we have tons of websites out there.
Now the mainstream media is reporting on these issues.
But back then, they were not.
Yeah, well, that's the whole thing about it is that you're on the forefront of this, you know, change in the media landscape that's really, you know, changed everything in the world.
I mean, as you say, they wouldn't cover police abuse stories at all on Facebook.
Every local police abuse story is a national story.
But on TV, never.
Not really until Mike Brown.
And even then, that wasn't because of Mike Brown.
It was because of the insane overreaction against the protesters that night where they brought out the full militarization and all that really helped break through.
That was like kind of the Hurricane Katrina of police abuse in the country or sort of finally broke open the floodgate for getting the major media to pay attention.
But everybody else already knew.
And there was that much demand.
And I think you've really done a hell of a lot to help to create it.
And really, as you say, you realized right away the possibilities in having the high quality video cameras and YouTube and all these things.
And then having, you know, the motivation to go out there and be cop watchers and take this on as a personal responsibility to be media.
That's what you say.
Photographyisnotacrime.com.
Be the media is the slogan of the site here.
And boy, I mean, you just make the biggest end run around them.
You could read this website for a while and forget that TV news even exists.
You don't even need them anymore.
Well, you know, I've been a journalist for a long time.
I was in my background in print journalism and newspapers.
And I went to school for journalism.
So I always knew the First Amendment applied for everybody.
You know, the First Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be a journalist.
The freedom of press, if you work for CBS or CNN, is for everybody.
But the problem was before the Internet and before YouTube and before the iPhone, if you have no access to the press, then you have no true freedom of the press.
And the Internet changed all that.
The iPhone changed all that.
Suddenly we have access to the press right under our fingertips.
And all we've got to do is just post it up online and let it go from there.
Now, you mentioned Mike Brown.
The reason the Mike Brown story got so big is when they killed Mike Brown, the Ferguson Police Department left his body laying in the street for four hours.
So, meanwhile, people are tweeting about it.
The neighbors, the residents are tweeting about it, tweeting about it, putting pictures up there, videos up there.
And, you know, at the time there was already a long history in Ferguson between the black community and the police department.
But then it just blew up.
I mean, if the police department would have cleared his body within minutes, like they sometimes do, we might have had a completely different outcome.
But they left his body there, and that just infuriated the residents and it just infuriated the country.
I mean, they're seeing this guy's body laying there, and then the cops are just, you know, then they're making up excuses.
And, of course, you know, we all know what happened after that.
But, yeah, that was the main thing.
It was because the citizens had their cameras and were putting it up on the Internet that it got so big.
It wasn't because of the local media.
Yeah.
In fact, I think you're wrong, though, that everybody knows what happened after that because what I always hear is, well, geez, even Eric Holder says that he didn't put his hands up.
So that's all you need to know, get it?
Because Eric Holder's black, and Eric Holder's a liberal or a Democrat or a something, never mind that he's Mr. DOJ, right?
As long as he says that Mike Brown wasn't surrendering, then that's all you need to know about that.
When, in fact, that's a load of crap.
And I saw the two white construction contractor repairmen on CNN say that they saw him put his hands up.
He turned around and he put his hands up.
And, seriously, you want to talk to me about Eric Holder, the cover-upper of the Oklahoma City bombing as just the beginning of his crimes, the guy from Fast and Furious running guns to the CIA's Sinaloa cartel in Mexico.
He's the standard of whether Mike Brown had his hands up or not.
Give me a break.
Yeah, you're correct because I saw that video, too, and these two white contractors, they didn't know Mike Brown.
They didn't know anyone in the neighborhood.
They were just working.
Yeah, and I saw that live on CNN myself.
Right, and they were like, he had his hands up, he had his hands up.
Now, the DOJ investigation, they concluded that they couldn't really prove one way or the other whether he had his hands up or not.
So, of course, the people who believe, who were siding with Darren Wilson were saying, well, the DOJ even admits that hands up, don't shoot was a complete lie.
Well, nobody really ever said Mike Brown said those words.
Those words, you know, evolved after the shooting.
But, you know, there's a lot of people who said he had his hands up.
And then, of course, they're saying he charged a cop.
But it doesn't make sense to me.
It doesn't make sense to have a cop who's pulling a gun on a person, an unarmed person that he would charge him.
Yeah, no, clearly he's running away.
The cop's shooting at him still anyway.
So he decides, geez, I'm going to get shot in the back.
And rather than get away, so he stops and turns around and puts his hands up, and the cop keeps shooting.
And, of course, it was actually it was Sean King that proved that they just lied about the distance between the cop and the corpse because they were trying to pretend that he was charging the cop when he was doing no such thing.
And so they moved his distance from 100 and whatever feet to 35, I think it was.
Yes, and that just goes to show the importance of cameras because, you know, in the Walter Scott shooting, you know, even though the jury, you know, it turned out to be deadlocked, you know, we saw we saw this man get shot in the back.
And we saw a cop throwing a taser right next to him.
And even then, you know, they still couldn't convict this cop.
So with Michael Brown, there's no video evidence.
So obviously, it makes it much, much harder.
But it just shows why cops need to have their body cams and their dash cams and why the citizens need to record everything because there's still no guarantee you're going to get justice.
Right.
Even with cameras.
Absolutely not.
Yeah.
Now, just one more point on Mike Brown.
I just want to say for people who want to know more about this, and I know it sounds silly to cite them for a footnote, but it's my best one is a story at Vox.com about this, where they quote the guy who was with Mike Brown that morning, his friend, and they quote Darren Wilson's story.
And they quote them side by side in the chronology of what happened.
And you can tell that basically what's happening is Darren Wilson is confirming Mike Brown's friend's story, only also lying.
But you can tell the parts where basically Mike Brown's friend's story is what makes the most sense, starting with the cop pulled up so close to him that when he opened the door, he hit him with the door and fell back into his own car, his own truck, I guess it was.
And that was where the whole conflict started.
And then he's the one who pulled the gun.
So, oh, Mike Brown went for his gun.
Yeah, well, the guy pulled a gun on him.
What are you supposed to do?
But anyway, if people just go and read the friend's version of what happened there and the cop's version of what happened there, you can tell the cop pretty much proves the friend right and that his embellishments in his own favor don't hold up.
Right.
That's the only fair reading of it, seriously.
Right.
It looks like Darren Wilson pulled up and grabbed Mike Brown while they're in the street.
And there's a natural reaction to pull back.
And then the cop pulls out his gun.
And then I can see Michael Brown just instinctively trying to pull the gun away.
He doesn't want to get killed.
It's a survival thing.
Then he runs away.
And then the cop steps out and then shoots him.
There's no charging.
You're running away.
You're not going to charge a man with a gun.
It just doesn't make sense.
All right.
Now, sorry for getting too diverted into that, but it is a really important one.
It is a real watershed in terms of the coverage.
But on the other hand, you know, the river that was coming, the watershed is really sites like yours and Freethought Project and Copblock and these other things that have grown up, this independent media providing, at least attempting to provide checks and balances on cops, good journalism on cops.
That was coming.
I mean, I've cited this a few times in other contexts too, but I have just regular people that I know who aren't political people at all say to me, hey, what is going on with the cops these days?
Man, I see on Facebook and it's just like they just declare war against anybody they can reach out and hit.
Man, it's crazy.
And that's just that reality is getting through to people who have no ideological bent necessarily whatsoever, you know, who just who typically just think of cops as the local security force.
And that's it.
But they're terrified of these guys now.
And so that was really, you know, Mike Brown was the damn breaking, really.
But now they can't stop because now these stories, as you document on your site daily here, they just keep coming and coming.
Really?
In fact, let me let me ask you that rhetorical question of those friends of mine.
What did happen?
Is it just the differences that people now have cameras and it always was this bad?
Or what do you think is the difference in, you know, makes for the difference in people's perception of cops now?
Yeah, there's a combination of things.
And, you know, there is, you know, cops have always been aggressive.
But then there's also been I've talked to cops about this, several cops, you know, who are veterans.
And they say there's been a reduction in training over the years compared from the 70s to 70s or 80s or 90s.
And then there's also more militarized police these days.
And there's more, you know, they're training cops.
They used to train cops to deescalate situations.
You know, back in the day, in the 70s, when I was a kid, you know, you had cops.
Even when I was a journalist in the 90s, I would interview these local cops who have been cops for 20 years.
And they would brag that they've gone two decades without ever pulling out their gun.
Now you've got cops who can't go two months without pulling out their gun because they're trained.
Everybody's a threat.
Everyone here, everyone that you pull over is an enemy combatant.
So that's in the minds of these cops.
You train them that way.
So, you know, and a lot of these cops are not very – they don't – I mean, I don't know.
I've noticed that they don't really think independently.
They think the way they're told.
So you have to be told this way.
You have to think this way.
So they're always in fear for their lives.
They think that we're all going to kill them.
And we could be out there with a camera, but then they're going to think it's a gun.
And it's also a power thing.
You know, they're trained to take control of a situation.
So they show up to an accident, say, or a shooting, and there's people recording in their mind.
They have to control that.
They've got to take control where the law is very clear.
The court decisions are very clear.
People have the right to record as long as they're not physically interfering.
And that's it.
You know, there's no question about that.
But they're still – And that's true in all the 50 states and all the federal court districts and all that kind of thing?
Or can you parse that for us more?
Yeah.
Well, you know, there is – there's still actually – there's a story I have to write about in one of the appeal – the appellate courts.
Right.
The appellate divisions.
Yeah, the districts.
Yes.
And there's some – there's the circuits.
That's the word I'm looking for, the circuits.
Oh, okay, yeah.
And there's the First Circuit, which was in Massachusetts and those states up there.
That was with a Glick decision.
You know, that really confirmed it.
And then there's the Seventh Circuit, which was in Chicago with the Anita – the DA with the head over there, the Cook County DA, who was trying to put people in jail on felonies for recording police, and that was found to be unconstitutional.
And there's other circuits that had come to those decisions.
Not all have come to those decisions, but there's no case that says you don't have the right to record.
You don't.
Because it doesn't – and it has never gone to the Supreme Court because it always ends up getting settled at the appeal court, the appellate court.
And you're saying there's no – are there convictions then at the – I guess there are convictions at the local level.
But you're saying they've always been successful on appeal.
Right, right.
There's been convictions of, say, wiretapping, for example.
And before they started using the wiretapping laws were actually meant for telephone conversations.
And they started twisting the law to arrest people for video recording because when the cops finally realized, okay, we can't arrest people for taking our picture or shooting our videos, we'll get them for audio recording.
And even then that's been sorted out.
But there's still – I think it's the third circuit.
The circuit that's down in Missouri, they need – there's actually a case coming up that I need to write about where they need to settle that as well.
And they will because what happens is the appellate court – the appellate judges, they look at what the other circuits have done.
And they're going to rule in accordance to that because if they rule against them, it just doesn't look good.
And then they have a lot of explaining to do because it just looks stupid.
They're going to say, well, we conclude this.
But you still have to say – you have judges that come out sometimes and say, yeah, well, there's one in Pennsylvania who said, well, if you're recording police, that is not a First Amendment right unless you're actually expressing yourself verbally, which doesn't make sense.
Because I generally advise people to not say a word when you're recording police.
Just let them do their job and just record.
You don't have to hide or anything.
Just keep recording.
But then this judge came up with that and – but that's going to be reversed upon appeal.
The ACLU is already fighting that.
And the ACLU would win – will win on that one.
So it just – there's a lot of cops – there's a lot of judges out there who – they're very cop-friendly.
They love cops.
They want to be – they just want to pretend that we're going to protect the police officers from these evil people with cameras or whatever they think.
But once it gets to the higher level, it's not going to win.
Hey, I'll check out the audiobook of Lew Rockwell's Fascism vs.
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Yeah.
Well, and now this is amazing here.
You have this headline.
It's not by you, but I'm sure you're familiar with the story here at photographyisnotacrime.com.
Texas cop on trial after caught on video illegally searching Pinak reporter's car.
No way.
Yes.
Yes, that was crazy.
It's actually surprising that he's actually on trial because they arrested Philip Turner, and he's one of our reporters out in Texas, and he's very good at what he does.
He's very calm.
He goes out there and records, and they bully him.
They intimidate him, but he remains calm, and they arrested him.
It was in 2015 in front of the Galveston Police Department.
He was recording a police memorial, which you would think they would want recorded.
They're proud of that, but no, the cops came out there and demanded his identification.
He asked them, well, can you articulate a reasonable suspicion that I'm committing a crime, which they have to do in order for you to be legally required to identify yourself, and they arrested him.
They handcuffed him.
They threw him in jail, and then they took his keys, and they found his car, and they entered his car, and they started searching his car without a search warrant, and the dumb cops didn't realize that there's a dash cam recording them.
So now the charges against Philip were dismissed a week later, and he actually won a settlement maybe a year later, or I can't remember the exact date, but he won a $10,000 settlement.
And now the cop who searched him, now he's on trial today, and he faces up to six months in jail.
Even if he's convicted, I doubt he'll deserve a day in jail, but we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
Just the fact that he's on trial sends a message to the other police officers that you have to think before you just do whatever you want.
You can't just search people's cars without a search warrant.
We have a story yesterday from Missouri where a female cop is being sued for searching another woman's vagina for drugs.
When all this woman was doing was riding a passenger in a car that made an illegal—I'm not even sure it was an illegal U-turn.
It was a U-turn.
They pulled her over, and next thing you know, they have her against a truck, and she's fingering her, basically, looking for drugs.
And this happens awfully.
In Texas, it happened at least twice before in the last few years where they had to pass a new law in Texas saying, well, you cannot search a woman's vagina without a search warrant.
Why do we need laws like that?
But yes, I guess we do.
Yeah, well, yeah, there are a lot of lines.
They're just looking for them to cross, I guess.
That's certainly one.
So tell me this, then, covering this day in and day out as you do.
There are a few different cases of cops being prosecuted on your front page today for one thing or another.
And I wonder whether you can tell or would you attribute— or first of all, is there really an increase of any kind of accountability for cops actually being prosecuted?
And then two, would you attribute that, if so, to public pressure and this kind of response, your kind of journalism and Facebook shares and this kind of thing, increasing outrage?
In other words, they feel pressure that their legitimacy is at stake at this point, finally?
Yes, yes, without a doubt.
Because when I post stories, a lot of times, say the police department did something just clearly illegal, we'll post their phone number, or the police department will put the link to their Facebook page, and the readers will go on their Facebook page and leave tons of comments.
And they'll call them and just make a bunch of calls and just complain about them.
So now we're living in an age where the cops are hearing directly from the people.
A few years ago, you had the media, the mainstream media, that was kind of like the buffer between the police and the public.
So maybe the cops were not sure exactly how the people felt, but now people are really letting them know.
And with all this video evidence, you can't just continue killing people and shooting people in the back and shooting unarmed people because they're reaching for the wallet without prosecuting them.
I mean, you know, it just doesn't look good.
I mean, the prosecutors themselves, they're elected officials, so their career depends on this.
So we're seeing a lot more indictments.
We're not seeing a lot of convictions, though, because the juries, unfortunately, they still are afraid to convict cops.
There's always people who don't.
We just cannot do it no matter how much evidence they see.
The Walter Scott case is a perfect example.
I mean, he was running away.
He was shot in the back.
He was no threat to that cop.
All he was trying to do was just avoid going to jail because he owed money on child support.
Yeah, it's a different matter.
You know, he doesn't deserve to get killed, but he doesn't deserve to be shot in the back.
But the one juror in that jury said, I'm not going to convict.
I'm not going to convict.
So here we are.
And so we still have a lot of work to do.
We still have a lot of work to do, and we're just getting started.
What really needs to change is within the department.
And the reason we're not seeing a lot of changes there is, and I'll tell you one thing a cop told me, a former cop.
His name is Ray Lewis.
He was a former Philadelphia cop, and he became an activist, and he was 20 years as a cop.
He spent 20 years as a cop, and he said something that I always remember.
He said, out of all the people that join the police academy, one third go into the police academy because they want to make a difference.
These are the people who you might call the good cops.
Then you have another third that go into the police department because they need a job.
They may get out of high school.
They may return from the military.
They need a job.
And obviously, policing is a steady job where you get a steady paycheck.
Then you have the other third that go into policing because they like power.
They're power-hungry people.
And we know these people.
In every job, there's always somebody who wants power.
These people rise up, and they get moved up, and they get promoted.
Well, when the cops do that, out of all these people that join the police academy, obviously, the ones that join the power-hungry cops, they're the ones who move up in the ranks.
And then once they're running the department, they protect the other cops who are coming in, the same power-hungry cops who are killing and doing all these illegal things.
So then the one third that goes in there who actually want to make a difference, they realize they're outnumbered.
They become very jaded.
They realize they can't speak out because they get retaliated against.
They get punished.
And so you only have a handful of cops who actually blow the whistle, and they always have to pay the price.
So that's the part.
We have to change our culture.
And I can't do it because I'm on the outside.
It has to change from the inside.
But the way we get them to change from the inside is to keep putting the pressure from the outside.
And it takes every single one of us to do that.
Yeah, absolutely right.
I mean, it all comes down to just accountability, right?
Even if you're talking about the nicest little old ladies at the Social Security Administration, if there's no controlling legal authority, as Al Gore would say, they will steal money.
People are people.
You have to have the checks and balances and the processes and the incentives and economics built into the thing to make sure.
I mean, assuming you have to have these county and city and state based police departments at all, which is a big assumption for our conversation.
But anyway, as long as we do have them, then, yeah, of course, the whole thing should be designed.
And this it sounds so anti-cop and what have you.
But then again, this is the very basis of the American tradition of governmental power is checks and balances and separations of power and federalism here.
And we even keep the cops and the prosecutors in separate departments with separate revenue streams and all this kind of thing.
That's for a reason.
You know, we're dealing either with monkeys or fallen men, whichever you prefer.
But they need checks and balances.
Even if you worship cops, they need checks and balances and they don't have them.
And that's the whole thing that, you know, for the two thirds of the cops who are just regular people and or, you know, really good guy cops that they understand that the reason so much of the population who aren't criminals hate them is because of them.
It's not because of what's wrong with society.
It's because regular people who aren't criminals, probably each and all of us have at least once had a cop screaming in our face like some kind of drill sergeant in full metal jacket or whatever, as though he owns us, as though we're dogs and he's some Superman or whatever it is.
And so guess what?
We hate them.
That's why I hate cops.
That's how they treat me.
That's how they've always treated me my whole life.
And in fact, after the first one ever treated me that way, I vowed to be an enemy of their power in any way I possibly could from now on, because vendetta.
And that makes that's the same for me and everybody else, too.
It's not because we're bad people.
It's because they're bad people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they commit bad acts.
The abuser power.
And then they think that we're going to kiss their ass.
I just don't understand that mentality.
You know, if they were respectful and courteous and, you know, and they used to say they didn't even say this anymore.
They used to say, oh, these are a few bad apples or isolated incidents.
They don't say that anymore because they know it's all bullshit.
But, you know, people used to believe that.
And that was the case where every time there's a bad cop because, you know, maybe they slip through the cracks and then they hold them accountable.
Then we would have more respect for the cops.
But that's not the case.
You know, I look at the cops as a mafia.
I call them the blue mafia because they protect each other.
You know, if you blow the whistle from the inside and you get retaliated against, it's like a murder like the mafia has.
And you break the blue code of silence.
So it is a mafia.
And you see how they gang up on people.
They're like a gang.
And they're just very brutal and vicious and physical and aggressive.
And, you know, the story that we published yesterday, but it came out last week.
The video was released last week of the black man in Illinois who was driving his own car.
And a woman called him, called the cops saying, oh, he looks like he's stealing the car.
It was his own car.
He knew what was going on.
He was recording on his own dash cam.
He steps out of the car after he gets pulled over.
He's actually trying to drive to a police department to clear this whole confusion up.
But they pull him over.
He pulls over in a parking lot.
He steps out with his hands in the air.
And they just pounce on him.
And they beat him up.
And they punch him.
And then they say, well, he was not complying.
Well, they told him, get on the ground.
And within a millisecond, they jumped on him.
I mean, you know, you can't just jump.
You can't just drop to the ground in seconds.
And then they're pawing on him.
They're all on top of him.
And they're telling him, turn around.
Stop resisting.
Well, you have all this body weight on you.
And I've been there.
We have all this body weight on you.
You can't do anything.
All you're trying to do is breathe.
All you're trying to do is survive.
But they're punching you.
And then it turns out, well, the cops were, they were, you know, it was justified is what they call it.
The man is suing.
He will win.
But, you know, so they protect each other.
You know, so how can we trust that?
You know, I mean, it just makes me so angry when I watch these videos.
And there's nothing we can do.
We can't even fight back.
Or else we get killed.
It's not like a regular street fight where they beat you up.
Then you can fight back.
And maybe you have a chance.
No, you have to take the beating.
And you have to call them, sir, while they're beating you up.
And if not, then you might die.
That is a big problem in this country.
Yeah.
Well, and also, you know, the lag in the part of our civilization that hasn't figured this out yet.
And their first knee jerk response is to call 9-1-1 on each other all the time like this.
Like this lady who called the cops on this guy over a misunderstanding that he was breaking into his own car when that wasn't what was going on.
And, of course, the most tragic ones that we see really all the time is people have a schizophrenic family member or somebody going through some kind of crisis.
And they're acting crazy.
And people just reflexively call the cops for help.
And the cops come looking for a chance to kill somebody and take it.
It happens all the time.
And the mom is left going, oh, my God, I can't believe I called the cops.
Yeah.
I mean, what did you think was going to happen?
Right.
There was a case in D.C. where I wrote about a couple of weeks ago where a man – it was on Christmas Day, although the video came out later, where the man was – he was angry.
He was having some kind of episode.
He pulled out a knife and he was threatening to kill his girlfriend.
Well, his girlfriend's sister took the knife away from him and without any guns, without – and then he took another knife.
And then so the cops showed up and they killed him within a second.
So, you know, the cops are like, well, we have the right to kill him because, you know, we're in freedom for our lives.
But the sister or the girlfriend's sister could take the knife away from him.
Well, maybe they should make it more of an effort or maybe, like you say, people should not call the cops because they have to learn how to handle their own issues.
And you call the cops at the last resort, especially a family member because, you know, these people don't care.
The cops do not care if it's your family member.
All they care is about how they were trained.
I got to train to kill.
I was trained to kill.
And that's all I'm going to do.
They're not trained to help.
They are trained to hurt.
Right.
And if they have to, they kill when they can.
You know, we're within the loophole.
The guy had a knife.
You can't dispute that, even though there's a thousand shades possible of nuance between had a knife and was an actual threat to you, you know.
But had a knife, good enough, you know.
This always reminds me of probably myself, but I certainly remember being like a 10 or 11 year old boy sitting around on my bicycle with other 10 and 11 year old boys in the neighborhood.
And the discussion was, yeah, if anybody ever broke into my house, I'd shoot him in the head.
Oh, yeah.
I shoot him in the face.
Well, I would only shoot him in the leg because I don't want to.
Not me, man.
If I had the excuse, the legal loophole where I could kill someone.
Oh, yeah.
I'd be the first one to do it.
Cried all the macho 10 and 11 year old kids in my neighborhood when we were 10 and 11.
But that's how these cops think is when they have the opportunity to kill somebody.
In fact, we're talking about Ferguson before there was a I guess he was a black former cop.
I'm not sure if he was black, but he was a former cop from Ferguson who wrote an essay in The Washington Post where he put it perfectly.
He said he described a situation where somebody had a knife and he didn't kill them and said, but any of the other cops in my group, they would have deliberately escalated the situation until they had the chance to shoot.
And then they would have shot.
They would have screamed at the guy with the knife until he raised it or whatever it takes to have the chance to murder someone.
Yeah.
And they high five each other.
There's so many videos I've seen where the cops just the other day when they crushed that guy to death.
The video came out just the other day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a game to them.
They don't know because they have dehumanized us.
And that's OK, I guess.
You know, that's the way it is.
So they cannot complain when we dehumanize them.
So when they say, oh, you're a cop hater.
Oh, you don't care.
Well, no, I don't care because you have to humanize me.
You don't care about me.
I know that.
I mean, that's proven day in and day out.
Not just me, but anybody else.
So why should we care about them?
You know, they create this division.
I mean, the American people don't want a division with the cops.
We just want to live peacefully and safely.
You know, we actually want I think most of us actually want to respect police.
But you can't do that when they don't respect us.
Yeah.
And look, I mean, we all know that there is crime in the city.
And you got to have some form of security force here, which is, you know, what they're supposed to be.
But then we can tell.
And this has been going on for decades on end now.
And just one example, but probably the most important, is the war on drugs that they enforce is what creates some huge percentage of the violent crime in our cities, in this country.
As people who are too poor or have felony records, you know, probably because they're so poor in the first place, who can't really participate in the rest of the economy, participate in the drug economy instead.
And then so instead of resolving disputes in small claims court, they resolve disputes with violence.
And instead of having anything like a free market, everything is about territorial monopoly cartels and all the violence and disruption to our society that comes with that.
So if you actually got rid of the cops and just let people be free in the drug trade, in the drug business, then we would all probably need their security force that much less in the first place.
You know, they're all just one big exercise in question begging, if you ask me.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
But it's a big business for the cops.
They make all this money from drugs.
You know, they're getting money from the federal government.
They're, you know, they're, they just, it's a basic, but they don't care.
I mean, they're not, there's no safety.
Oh, we're going to arrest these people for marijuana because we're keeping the community safe.
I mean, how are you keeping the community safe by doing that?
You're putting people in jail.
You're destroying lives is what you're doing.
And it just, it needs to stop.
Yeah, or even cocaine.
I mean, that's, you know, or even heroin.
I mean, hell, heroin's been illegal since the 1930s, right?
And now we got as bad of an opiate epidemic in our country as ever before.
And, you know, and we can all see how it happens, too.
It's all, you know, the legal prescription drug cartel and the way that they push these opiates.
And then they leave people addicted to them.
But then because of the war on drugs, the doctors are terrified to leave anybody on these drugs for any amount of time.
They might actually end up being prosecuted themselves.
So they kick people right off the opiates.
And whatever percentage of them, I guess it's a relatively small percentage, but whatever percentage of them resort to the black market and, you know, get hooked on black market heroin.
Now they're involved in crime and with criminals and all of this stuff.
When all it is, you're talking about somebody who has a bad elbow or something, who, you know, has no part of drug culture or criminal culture whatsoever.
And they're forced into it by the government itself.
The whole thing is crazy.
Anyway, sorry I'm sermonizing on your damn interview here.
But the point is that...
I agree with you.
I mean, I read a story the other day, I think it was maybe a few days ago, where they're comparing the number of people who are addicted to opiates in the United States to the people in the United Kingdom.
And the rate is much higher here, even though they get prescribed the same amount out in the UK.
And the article summarized that there's people in the UK, they have jobs, their economy is better.
People are, I guess, you know, they're more stable financially out there.
So they don't have to resort to the opiates.
Where here, there's a lot more despair economically.
And, you know, maybe that's what they had.
They can't find work.
You know, they're isolated.
They're depressed.
And so they turn to these drugs.
Yep.
Well, and, you know, I actually saw recently where there was an article like that.
And something on the order of a Black Lives Matter activist, I'm not sure, said, Yeah, see, get it?
When it's poor white people addicted to opiates, it's because their economic situation is so bad.
It's because they got no future.
They got nothing to do.
So they're sitting around and, you know, getting high and this and that.
They can't, even if they got a chronic pain thing, they can't soldier on.
And then the point being that, hey, guess what?
That's why black people do drugs, too.
When the rest of the time, you know, the idea being that, oh, yeah, this is just the pathologies of black culture or whatever.
When, no, this is the pathologies of poverty at stake.
Exactly.
You know, look, you take away, I mean, you shut down the factories.
This is the way economic reality.
You shut down factories.
You know, you take away people's jobs.
And then you complain when they resort to selling drugs to survive.
They're surviving.
People need to survive somehow.
Well, they can always get a job as a prison guard.
Right.
Hey, listen, you do great work, man.
I'm really glad that you do it.
And not only is your work great, but you set a great example.
Obviously, you have set a great example for a lot of other, I mean this in a nice way, copycat, do-it-yourself journalists working on explicitly and especially this issue, checking the abuses of local police in this country.
So it's really great stuff.
I really appreciate your time on the show, Carlos.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Oh, yeah.
All right, y'all.
That is Carlos Miller.
Find him at Photography Is Not A Crime.
Oh, wait.
Hey, are you still there?
Yes, I'm here.
Hey, man.
What would you say to a would-be activist, actually, how you can help them?
What are ways that you can help them help participate in this kind of work?
Well, I mean, if you want to record police, obviously learn the laws.
They're very basic.
If you want to go deeper than that, maybe learn the public records laws in your state and walk into any city hall, any government agency, any police department and request public records with a camera.
If you're using a phone, please hold it sideways.
And always try to remain professional and courteous.
Allow the cops to be the ones who embarrass themselves.
And sometimes it's hard to do because they try to egg you on, antagonize you.
But the best guys out there, like Philip Turner and Jeff Gray, these guys always remain calm, cool, and collected.
And if you can learn how to do that, I mean, you'll do a great job.
Because then look at Philip Turner.
Now the cop's on trial where the charges against him were dismissed.
Right.
There you go.
All right, cool.
Thanks again, Carlos.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Bye.
All right, y'all.
That's Carlos Miller.
Photographyisnotacrime.com.
And you know me.
I'm scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
And also slash scotthortonshow there.
Check us out, man.
We got a cool little thing there going on.
Libertarianinstitute.org.
Thanks, guys.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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So what do you think?
Two bits?
A buck and a half?
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So take that into account.
Also cap the amount you'd be willing to spend in case things get out of hand around here.
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