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I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Rayford Davis.
He is a former police officer from Charleston, South Carolina, and he's a libertarian and an activist nowadays.
You can follow him on Twitter.
He's at Rayford D, R-A-E-F-O-R-D, D, Rayford D.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
Of course, you serve a very useful function in the libertarian movement being a former cop and understanding how a lot of this police violence works from the other side's perspective and sort of translate a little bit between the two points of view, I guess, from libertarians and civilian victims of unwarranted police violence and those who are dishing it out.
Obviously, we have a couple of important stories to talk about here.
First and foremost, the killing of Daniel Shaver, which is too much even for the National Review, which has all kinds of...
Well, there are plenty of people on Facebook and Twitter making excuses, I guess, as well, but it seems like a lot of people who normally would be knee-jerk apologists for police are saying, no way, man, this one is a bad shoot.
And we'd heard about this for a while.
It was just now the video has come out because the officer has been acquitted.
Philip Brailsford, the officer, has been acquitted.
And so now we've seen the video.
But we'd already heard about this guy laying on the ground in the motel and then apparently was reaching for his pants.
And they shot him and said, hey, you know, waistband.
And they shot him and said, hey, you know, waistband.
And now we see that waistband seems to be an extremely effective defense for any cop.
Which is funny because if somebody's just walking, their hand is sort of near their waist.
Sounds like it's a license maybe to kill anybody they feel like.
But I don't know.
You saw the video.
What did you think?
Yeah, that's our kind of fear-based training that creates those types of situations.
The officers created all of that danger.
Daniel Chavers was no threat to them.
He had no weapon.
You know, he was not just didn't knock over a liquor store or was trying to go on some mass shooting.
He was not a threat to them.
It was the police officers through their actions that created all of the danger in that situation.
And then are the ones that actually harm someone by killing David Sanders, shooting him five times with an AR-15.
All right.
Now, so in the footage, you know, the guy, apparently they're saying he was drunk.
And obviously he's panicking, he's crying, he's begging for his life in the footage.
And the cop says, listen, if you you keep your hands up and if you are going to fall on your face, you don't even hold yourself up.
You just go ahead and fall on your face if you have to.
And then, you know, a few seconds go by and he's clearly because he's the cop is making him march on his knees.
And his shorts are long enough that his knees are holding the cloth to the floor.
Right.
So it's pulling his pants down.
So he reaches back.
He's obviously reaching back to pull up his pants.
And a lot of regular people, including myself, look at that footage and see a cop with an excuse that he was trying to provoke this kid.
He was hoping this kid would do something stupid.
He was hoping that that hand would go out of his sight for one moment so that he would have an excuse to murder someone.
Because some people like murdering people.
And in this case, this murderer got a job as a cop so that just for this reason, that he would be in a position to say, oh, yeah, no bad guy.
9-1-1 call about a gun and oops, his hand was invisible to me for just one moment.
And so I had to shoot him five times for fun and get away with it, which is exactly what happened.
You know, and there's there's some of that.
I don't think because, come on, he didn't believe the guy was reaching for a gun.
He did not believe the guy was reaching for a gun.
I know that by reading his mind through time travel.
Give me a break.
And it's police officers are, again, they're trained to to see that in all of this.
These simulations that you go through in training is, you know, if they go for the waistband, you must shoot them.
That's what they're trained to do.
I mean, do the police officers a little trigger happy that that's who joins up?
I mean, it's kind of like, well, you see Marines that wear T-shirts, kill them all, let God sort them out or something like that.
I mean, you have that.
You do have that mentality.
But, you know, in a way, police officers are they're hesitant to shoot people.
I could I could have shot a person every two months as a police officer.
And what it is, the training is that bad.
The mindset that's put into these officers that, yes, you are in these dangerous situations and you shoot someone.
That is how excessive it is.
The fact that that now police officers in America shoot a lot of people.
But they I'm telling you, they could shoot a lot more based on how they're trained and and how the courts will justify it.
All right.
So let me stop you there.
I'll concede then that I'm wrong.
I can't really read this guy's mind.
And maybe he wasn't just looking for an excuse to kill somebody, although it sure looks like that to me.
But so fine.
He is a good guy.
He did think he was joining up the security force so he could help people.
He got a 911 call that said, geez, there's a guy on a hotel balcony with a rifle.
Somebody's got to do something.
And he's the hero who swoops into action to keep us all safe.
And so now this bad training kicks in.
So tell me more about this bad training.
Right.
And so now now this is you're getting into the mindset there of what the officers do.
And so they're looking for, you know, an arrestable situation.
And it's in whether it's intentional or even unintentional.
This is what police officers do.
They they escalate it.
And and so when really you have, you know, a guy has a gun.
You know, people carry guns all the time and have a right to do so.
And they even carry them in hotels.
Sometimes they go hunting or carry them with them because they're traveling.
It happens.
It's not necessarily, you know, you know, an offense that requires Delta Force, you know, storm in their apartment like Bin Laden's compound.
And by using that escalation, they actually make the situation more dangerous.
And so and you saw the the officer that's actually barking those orders is not Brailsford that does the shooting.
It's it's Sergeant Charles Langley, a career police officer.
So he's not some rookie.
Really?
No.
So I did not understand that in the footage the whole time.
The guy's screaming room number one to come out right now or else this and that.
That's not the guy with the rifle.
No, no.
That's that's because that was half my interpretation was that the guys in the room, since they hadn't done anything wrong, they had no reason to believe anybody was yelling at them.
And so they were just sitting there going, wow, something's going on out in the hall or something was what was taking them so long, basically.
Right.
While the cops who are doing the yelling are saying, oh, my God, they're refusing to obey our orders.
They must be preparing an assault or, you know, taking the worst interpretation.
But so I really had conflated then, though, the guy giving the orders with the guy holding the rifle and thinking, you know, he personally is just on such a power trip.
So that really does change the context a lot for me there that.
So you're saying he's not even talking in that video at all or he does some very, very.
He says a few commands, but the one giving out those orders, that's Sergeant Charles Langley.
And there are six officers.
So there's other officers in the in the background as well.
So six cops have the drop on a guy that, you know, by all intents, doesn't really he's not carrying a rifle, that's for sure.
And so, you know, they've got to drop on him that they got control of the situation.
Now, wouldn't their training say that once they have him down on the ground and his hands are out in front of him and his feet are crossed behind him, that now one of these brave warriors would go over and handcuff him now instead of making him do this weird crawl?
And clearly he's wearing these long shorts and all of this.
The cop himself is saying you might have to fall on your face, but you're just going to have to take it because you better not move your hands.
This guy.
Why not just go ahead and cuff him then?
What what what about the training says that you have to make him do this?
Simon says crap.
And this is what regular people on Twitter are saying, too.
Or, you know, are just going, well, wait, he was already completely subdued.
Why didn't you just cuff him before instead of making him do this ridiculous thing where he's got to crawl down the hallway?
Well, from a tactical purpose, they're trying to get him away from the door just in case there's someone else in the room.
But how they you know, how they did it is just a total cluster.
And they put so much fear in the guy.
You know, when you're scream somebody screaming at you, you know, to do, you know, to an end, you're intoxicated.
It's like you're trying to unlock the door of your house and put your keys in a lock.
You know, normally you can do it, but somebody starts screaming at you and you're a little intoxicated and intoxicated.
You can't do it.
You're holding an AR-15 at your head.
Yeah.
Sergeant Langley, he testified and said this is his quote for him.
And he's talking about Daniel Shavers, the victim, for him to be safe, for us to be safe.
There was one simple rule, and that was to keep his hands in the air.
Yet he's telling him to crawl at the same time.
So he gave him.
Yeah.
Ridiculous.
Just like some kind of psychotic Simon Says game.
Well, it's that whole Nazi drill sergeant routine, too, where don't you say a word.
He's trying to say I'm unarmed.
I'm not.
It's cool.
And they're going, shut up.
You know, because they're Nazis and we're supposed to worship them.
And they have total authority.
And we don't even have the authority to say, officer, it's cool.
I don't have a gun.
Believe me here.
Cuff me.
It's fine.
I'm trying to surrender to you because, no, you just obey.
Like because we're just humans and they're government employees.
So they're demigods and we're less than dogs.
That's how they're really trained.
Right.
That you are at war and the civilian population of the town you're ostensibly protecting are the enemy.
So go ahead and do your worst to them because screw them.
I mean, that's how I've been treated by cops my entire life.
And I'm a rich white kid.
Well, so they'll have they have that mindset.
That's that that warrior training.
And what's what's one of the guys, Dave Grossman, you know, where he talks about, you know, the after you shoot someone, that'll be the best, best sex in your life.
You know, and this guy's training police officers and giving that and to train them in this.
But, yes.
So that's Sergeant Langley screaming and everything.
And so he in a way, he's he's the one freaking out Daniel Philip Brailsford until he's got him.
And in a in a state to where he panics as well and just any flinch he shoots.
And.
But I'll say this now, police officers rarely shoot people, but this does provide insight into how police officers manipulate situations.
And I think this is one of that rare, is it?
I mean, I understand that you're saying that you could have taken chances to shoot if you'd wanted to more often.
But so you're saying that however many thousands of shootings a year, that, boy, you have no idea what you're missing out there when it comes to close calls, I guess.
That is that is absolutely correct.
And again, that just goes to that just demonstrates how bad the training and the mindset.
And by justifying this and saying, well, you know, we can't second guess cops and we got to let them off and don't charge them, actually feeds that and perpetuates it.
It does a disservice to the police officers.
It does a disservice to a free society.
And but now.
They do this, cops do this, even when they don't shoot people, they they potentially use their words and can get you to not comply.
And I think this is one of the reasons why this why this particular case has gotten such, you know, kind of a media and pushback from so much of the population is because so many people have had experiences like this, where they face cops that have even pulled guns on them and stuff.
Now, they didn't get shot, but they say, man, those guys were crazy.
And, you know, they almost killed me or and or they arrested me for resisting or something like this.
See, police officers know how to get people can give them conflicting orders and maybe.
And in that way, get them in a position where they don't comply.
Well, right.
This is what this is the thing, man.
This is what is so apparent about this is that, you know, they have the excuse that, oh, I was scared.
He did have a knife and I told him to drop it.
And then I counted to one Mrs.
Sit and then I shot him because he hadn't dropped it yet.
And so I was in fear or I had reason to think that it was my only choice or whatever.
But to anyone else's eyes, well, you just put any other civilian in their same circumstances, a civilian with a gun.
And there was a guy with a knife and I told him to drop it, but he didn't drop it.
But he was still he was just standing there and he was 40 yards away or whatever.
Like you don't have the right to murder someone for standing with a knife.
But if you're a cop, you do.
And and so when the standard is that different, when you can see what's a justifiable homicide for a regular person compared to for a cop, then it sure looks like what they're looking for is an opportunity where they can shoot someone, where they may, not where they have to, not where they feel like they have to at all, because any reasonable regular human would not feel like they have to in the same circumstances.
I remember one where it's the Williamson County Sheriff's just, I don't know, 10 years ago or something, 12 years ago.
And the dad had called the cops on his son was suicidal and was having a freak out.
But he had like a butter, like a kitchen knife.
Maybe it was sharp, but it was still it was a kitchen knife.
And he was in a parking lot and he was cornered with his back to whatever the, you know, the quickie mart and the fence or whatever.
He wasn't going anywhere.
The cops were still at plenty of range and he was just standing there with the knife.
He was basically threatening himself, not them.
He he had made no move to try to murder them.
Give me a break.
And they just shot him because they could.
They're like, all right.
So we've crossed the technicality threshold where now I'm allowed to bang, bang, bang, bang, bang your dead kid.
Helpless, harmless kid.
And they shot him because they could.
And that is the standard.
And, you know, there was a one in The Washington Post in right after Mike Brown in Ferguson, where it was a former Ferguson County sheriff or Ferguson police city police officer, I guess.
And he wrote this in The Washington Post.
People can find I've tweeted this numerous times where he talked about he was in a situation where a guy had a knife.
It was in his house and he ended up resolving it somehow.
But he said he knows that in the exact same situation that most of his colleagues would have, quote, taken the opportunity to escalate the situation.
In other words, like you're saying, bark orders at the person so loud that they do something goofy like hold the knife up in the air higher or whatever the hell it is.
And then the cops just take the opportunity to get away with killing somebody.
And, you know, I got to tell you, I've been like this since I was a little kid, but it seems like more and more people just have no confidence in the security force at all.
Because they can see that these guys, they're murdering people who aren't criminals.
They're murder.
This guy was the pest control guy with a BB gun.
They're killing people who didn't do anything to anyone and they keep doing it over and over and over again.
And more and more white people are saying, oh, now I understand why.
But why black people have been complaining about this stuff, because this is what's been going on to them all this time.
And but now police brutality is not just for black people anymore.
Now it's for everybody, because now they've trained these guys to be soldiers, not protectors of people's rights whatsoever.
Correct.
And this is this is bad for cops, too.
I can guarantee you that Philip Brailsford is, you know, is not better off because of the experience that he's gone through, even though he was acquitted.
I mean, his life in a way is just, you know, is just devastated as well.
And emotionally, too.
He's a wreck.
For what?
And so police officers, they've got to start making those decisions and understand that the system they're getting involved in will can train them, make them believe in this fear and and then train them to justify killing someone.
It's not going to be OK for them.
Now, the state will get away with it.
They're not the one on trial.
They're not the one that's going to go to prison.
It's you know, it's it's going to be that individual police officer.
So, you know, they've got to start making those decisions themselves and and start to understand just how dangerous they're really.
Their training is more of an indoctrination.
Yeah, well, now this one was not a drug case, but a lot of this is, you know, consequences overall of the drug war.
That is the primary excuse for the militarization of American police.
We're now every deputy is a SWAT team member all day, even on his traffic patrol and everything, you know.
Right.
In a war, in a war on guns, too.
So, yeah, people say, well, guns are legal.
But no, this is the response you get to an incident.
You just say, well, cops aren't confiscating guns.
And Arizona is, you know, an open carry state or whatever the laws are.
Doesn't matter.
This is this is what you get.
The police officers are swooping in, looking to arrest someone and just kill them, even if they flinch.
Because he had a gun at some point, somewhere, sometime, and it was a pellet gun, too.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, we got it now.
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Yeah, there was one fact that reminds me of one where it was an old man, again, a white guy who was in, you know, prosperous part of central Texas.
Not a high crime area or any kind of thing where the cops should be like overly paranoid or anything.
He calls because there's a prowler around his house and he meets the deputy in the driveway and he's holding a gun in his hand.
But he's the homeowner and the deputy freaks out.
Drop it, drop it, drop it.
And he's confused.
He's like looking behind him.
What is he behind me?
You know what I mean?
Because he knows he's the good guy.
He doesn't understand why the guy's screaming at him.
And then the cop just shoots him because, again, he counted to one misses it.
And that's enough.
And he was the old man who called the cops and they shot him in his own damn driveway.
And and he wasn't even black and he clearly and he was just pointing the gun down at the ground.
He wasn't threatening the cop with it at all.
And so, again, I don't know if this was one where he's taking the opportunity or he's really that paranoid.
Or I guess what you're saying, again, is it doesn't matter either way because they're all trained that it's always better to be safe than sorry.
Go ahead and kill the citizen here.
Here's a quote for him.
This is from the Philando Castile killing where in the court.
This is one of these is the guy who was who was pulled over on the side of the road because he was a black man with a wide set nose.
So that was probable cause that he fit the description of a bank robber from a week before.
How do you like that, black people?
Yes.
And and here's one of the trainers or a police instructor that was hired to testify.
And about the police officer and he's saying the police officers trained to do so and talk about shooting just at a at a flinch.
He's justified in doing so.
He would be remiss in not doing so.
As soon as you see that hand go to the waistband, you would be remiss in not doing so.
And now that's how I was trained.
And that was saying, you better shoot him because you've got three quarters of a second.
They can pull that gun and shoot you before before you can react.
And now, while this is that really true that the average citizen is a quicker draw than a deputy sheriff.
And while he's sitting in a car, that's that's what they train you.
And now their specific policy may not be written that way.
And the Arizona, the Mesa, Arizona policy says just because someone has a gun, that's not necessarily, you know, a justification for shooting them.
That's what's written.
But that's not exactly what's trained.
It's that kind of unwritten mindset in indoctrination.
Right.
Yeah.
The idea is if they have one, you're certainly never going to get in trouble.
That's going to always be a good enough excuse no matter what they're doing with it.
They call that like a scenario for fulfillment where, I mean, you see it.
Oh, you've trained so much that hands to the waistband.
He's pulling a gun.
And and so you almost just see it happen, even though it just you make it up in your mind.
Well, so let me ask you about this.
Do they teach you at all that like, OK, in a limited constitutional republic, your job as a peace officer is to protect the rights of the accused suspects, someone who like the theory being that the mob would come and get these people for disturbing the peace in such a horrible, felonious way.
And so your job is protecting them by bringing them down to the local jail so that they're safe until they get a fair trial.
When we find out whether they really did it or not, this kind of do they even teach you that at all, that your job is to protect the rights of even murderers and the very worst people that you're grabbing or simply just you are a soldier.
This is a war up to up to blood makes the grass grow and all this.
No, they do both.
And so you are conflicted.
And and that even puts a kind of more stress on you as well.
And so, you know, just enough to kind of justify your overreaction is to say, well, I'm doing this.
I have to sacrifice myself.
I have to do that hard job to pull that trigger and and kill someone.
Or I've got to do that hard job and put those handcuffs on that person.
And even if I don't like it or I don't think it's right, just just to keep the system that we have in place, because, you know, it's it's the best in the world.
Yeah.
All of civilization would tear itself apart if it wasn't for even if I don't like overlords.
Don't I all know it?
I've got to do my duty in it.
And if there's something unjust about that, well, you need to talk to your senators.
You need to talk to the Supreme Court and get it changed there.
So, yeah.
Now, let's talk about the law a little bit, because that's the whole thing, right, is it's the courts.
It's not even the legislature.
It's the courts that have done this to us.
And, you know, my first impression and I saw a lot of this discussion on Twitter.
Who the hell are these jurors where one in a million shot the D.A. actually brings charges and then the jurors refuse to prosecute to convict?
And what is this system?
And of course, the answer is the jurors are a bunch of government employees.
That's why they're retired at 55 and have a bunch of free time to serve on a jury.
And they're all married to other government employees and they're all in on it against us.
And they're never going to side with just some guy against a bureaucrat because that's who they are.
And, you know, someone was it was Mance Rader on Twitter was saying, look, the cops and the judges and the D.A. all get paid out of the same general fund.
I mean, what are we even talking about?
Why is this even a pretension of a legitimate check and balance system?
We're like, oh, no, the judge and the D.A. have totally different jobs.
No, it might as well be like Spain where, no, they don't.
The judge is the prosecutor or whatever.
It doesn't make any difference either way.
In other words, the prosecutor is the judge.
The prosecutor can stack on so many charges that it doesn't matter whether you get a fair trial because you're going to plead guilty to something rather than risk it.
They all they all benefit.
The prosecutors, the judge, you know, they go through the process.
And and so they can they can charge a guy like the officer Brailsford.
And whether he's convicted or not, it doesn't really matter to them.
They can they can say, well, the system worked.
It went through the process and it worked.
And that way they can they can anoint themselves with, you know, with their majesty and carry carry on.
And is there any actual justice?
Doesn't matter.
Just the process.
Yeah, there was a great quote from I think it was a Texas state Supreme Court justice who said that, hey, look, you know, finality is so important.
We just can't let every convict who might be innocent have his day in court to prove his innocence or something, because that would undermine the entire belief that if somebody is duly convicted, that that's good enough.
And so, geez, we can't have people questioning whether that's good enough, can we?
And like, what is all this do over stuff just because you think you have evidence to show that you were in Mississippi at the time?
Anyway, listen, there's a great lawyer who I know you also follow on Twitter and read his blog.
It's called Simple Justice.
The lawyer's name is Scott Greenfield.
And he wrote this article.
There's a few different ones, but the one to me, that's the very best one that I like to recommend to people is called Tamir Rice's Basically Reasonable Murder.
And this is the boy, the 12 year old boy with the BB gun, where someone called the cops on him.
And even the 9-1-1 caller said, oh, it's probably just a toy, though, which why do you even call him then?
But then the 9-1-1 dispatcher did not tell the cops.
Well, the caller thinks it's probably just a toy.
So maybe dial down your panic a little bit.
But no, they pull up.
Cop jumps out of the passenger side and just waste the kid.
He's just holding it.
They claimed he was drawing it on him and all of this.
If anything, he may be was going to show it to them.
It's just a BB gun or something like that, but never had a chance because they killed him.
But anyway, so Greenfield writes, he's the only person I've ever seen explain it this way and this thoroughly and in order where it makes sense in this way.
He says there is no law.
It's only the word reasonable in the Fourth Amendment that prohibits the government from killing innocent people.
That's it.
And because they can't seize your life from you.
Unless it is reasonable.
And then but that's, of course, not the same standard at all for.
Well, I guess maybe it is in some circumstance or whatever, but it's a different standard than regular justifiable homicide for regular civilians already.
But then the real kicker, as Scott Greenfield points out, is this case from 1989 in front of the Supreme Court where they ruled that what's reasonable is not up to the members of the jury.
What's reasonable is what the expert testimony says is reasonable.
In other words, what's within the training, as you've been saying this whole time.
And so the instructions to the juries in cases like this are not use your judgment to decide whether you think this was a reasonable shoot or not.
You must respect and take at face value, I guess, the testimony of the experts who only they know how to look out of the eyes of a police officer and know what must have seemed reasonable to them at the time, which, of course, is always 100 percent of the time in favor of the cop.
Right.
And then so that's what happens.
And the juries, that's their specific instructions, is that there's this whole other standard.
And that is whatever the paid expert says that this guy was probably trained to do, that if if the guy's hand is not visible to you, then you must assume he has a gun and he's trying to kill you.
That's it.
It doesn't matter if, you know, he's just pulling up his pants, you know, it doesn't matter if, you know, he's just pulling up his pants.
You just go ahead because that's the thing.
And then the juries go, well, you heard the judge.
We don't have a choice but to let the cop go.
Right.
And the police departments and just law enforcement community in general, you see, they have they have a big incentive to anybody that's going to be an instructor or trainer or expert is going to they have say if they have a choice.
We're going to pick two training experts.
One of them says, hey, you can't shoot here.
You can't, you know, escalate because of this.
You can't do this.
You can't do that.
Or you have one that says, oh, yeah, you should do that.
You should do this.
Now, see, the one that's going to that is going to justify everything you do for liability purposes.
That's the guy who you go with because he's going to cover for you.
And this has been going on for decades until people in really in law enforcement have grown up with it.
So they just don't they think it's normal.
Yeah, well, and it's the kind of thing right where, geez, you can't even get a right wing legislature to pass a law like this.
It takes Supreme Court judges to just make this stuff up.
Does that seem right to you?
Well, that's that's what again, that's what we're taught.
The Supreme Court.
What does the Supreme Court says?
Oh, you can shoot him.
OK, good.
All right.
We'll do it then.
And they carry on.
You know, one of the things I noticed on Twitter a lot and, you know, I got to say, I'm not too sensitive to this or anything in most cases, at least.
But for my own confirmation bias purposes anyway, I guess I thought it was notable how many Europeans on Twitter were saying what in the world is going on over there in your completely schizophrenic, bankrupt, corrupt society.
America, you're just you're doing it wrong.
The hell is the matter with you?
And, you know, I mean, they don't have to be that specific.
They're looking at it overall and they're going, man, you've been up for too many hours in a row.
You need a nap.
You need to chill the hell out.
Well, here in the United States, you compare our incarceration rates to Western Europe, and we would have to reduce our incarceration rate by 80 percent just to equal the average in Western Europe.
So we we incarcerate, you know, it's like five to seven times more people.
That's how many more people we arrest.
That's how many more people, you know, have contact with law enforcement.
That's we certainly the law enforcement kills probably seven to 12 times more people than in West in countries in Western Europe.
So here we are supposed to be the greatest, freest country in the world.
And we're just, you know, orders of magnitude more oppressive with our policing in our prison industrial complex than those those crazy socialists over there in Europe.
Well, yeah, you know what?
It really is useful, right, to take all the.
You know, the criminality out of it, just, you know, for policy's sake that.
Even if everybody means well is is the way that you confront it, which I think is probably better than my ranting and raving, although I you know, I think some of these are first degree murders, really.
But anyway, overall, it is a systematic thing, a systemic thing.
And because we're talking about government and not markets, when supplies and demands change, government bureaucracies really don't.
And I was reading this one article back, I don't know, a few months ago, six months ago or something about how in the early 90s when it was the CIA supplied crack epidemic and all of the crime that came with that and all of the propaganda about all the crime that came with that, there was a huge push to hire a lot more district attorneys to do a lot more prosecutions to crack down on this crime that government had helped create in the first place, of course, with their supply and their prohibition, I should say.
Because cheap people, poor people could could do regular cocaine without smoking it if it was legal.
But anyway, so during the big crack epidemic and all the crackdown against it and drug wars of the Bush senior administration, all that, that state governments across the country had hired all of these extra assistant district attorneys.
Well, but then when the crime rates completely plummeted, which they did, then all those district attorneys all still are holding jobs, as Mencken would say.
And so they're basically all just out fishing, looking for something to do.
They don't have any real criminals to prosecute, but the budget says, go ahead and make sure that you have at least 13 days for every office or whatever it is.
And so they just keep themselves busy at the expense of the people.
And instead, if it was a business and the demand had dropped that much, then they would have to figure out something else to do with those employees or lay them off.
But since it's government, they just keep on going.
Well, and that's the same with policing, where their metrics really are number of arrests.
So that's what they show as they're active.
How many people have we arrested?
And so for policing, a lot of that is that's how you measure yourself, not necessarily by how much crime there is.
It's just how many arrests have you made.
Right.
They're there to overreact.
Call 911.
Oh, my God, there's a guy with a rifle in the Walmart.
Well, it was a BB gun he just picked up off the shelf in the Walmart two aisles over.
And he was standing there talking on the phone with his friend and had it slung over his shoulder.
He wasn't doing anything.
The cops come.
They see a black guy with a rifle.
They waste him in a moment's notice.
You know, they just start screaming at him and shooting him at the same time.
Basically, his name is on the tip of my tongue, too.
I'm sorry.
I can't remember that.
It's just a few years ago.
And I wonder, you know, what's it going to take where people will finally stop calling the cops on each other unless they're really sure they really need to.
You know, I mean, and there are situations, you know, I walked in on an armed robbery at a quickie mart one time and I wasn't armed.
So what the hell is I going to do?
There is a monopoly security force around here.
It's not like I can just call some local private security company that doesn't have a contract with that quickie mart.
These guys are the ones with the job.
And so, you know, what are you going to do?
There are circumstances like that, but it seems like they should be a lot fewer and further between, you know.
Well, that is true.
Law enforcement does do some legitimate services, but they just kind of distorted it in such a manner to where they actually.
When it was the caller, it was the caller that set him off.
911, you're a cop.
Well, you're a former cop.
911 operator goes, we got a guy with a gun on a balcony at a motel and you go, oh, my God.
Right.
You you got to take that pretty seriously when that's the way it comes across, even though, man, you know, even that was really kind of overstating it.
Right.
It's I mean, unless the witness, the 911 caller testified that he was like mock citing people with it or something like that.
But I don't think that that was ever the testimony.
Right.
I just made that up.
Nobody ever said that, that he was like, you know, pretending to aim it at people out there.
Yeah.
And police officers really, really that say they just they just thought the worst and said, OK, you know, active shooter, potential, you know, potential shooter or sniper and went with it just started escalating right up to the very worst, although it's the least likely scenario.
Right.
Here's the thing, though.
Once he comes out of the hotel room, then you can tell he's just some guy.
You can tell.
You can tell.
I mean, that's the whole thing about it, I guess.
OK.
And I get it.
OK.
The training and whatever.
But this is the sergeant, as you said, he's in charge of five more cops under him in this situation.
And so.
Is there not part of the training that says, hey, when you can at the point when you can tell that there's like a 99 percent chance that there's been some mistake here, that you can ratchet down the Nazi drill sergeant routine just a little bit and give some poor schmuck a chance to say his piece before you blow his head off?
Is that not ever part of the training or what?
It kind of it kind of looked like they kind of knew that when they came when they came out.
Yeah.
Just kept going with it.
Hardcore.
Have you been drinking?
Like, yeah, like a you know, like a kind of like a training process.
Hey, we're going to use this as a training and just do it hardcore anyway.
And in some ways, see, again, police officers can manipulate those situations and make things hard on you as part of a as we can punish you by treating you like that.
See, that's why I always make it the personal responsibility again of the cops, because I actually don't give a damn what the training is.
Your mama taught you right from wrong.
You know what you're doing here?
Individual human being responsible for your own actions out there.
As you were saying, I had chances where I could have, quote, unquote, shot somebody.
But you didn't because you were looking for an opportunity to you were looking for an opportunity not to.
And that's different.
You know, and we can see, you know, there's so many of these now.
And I've had so many for years.
And we talked about this before.
I guess for years I've had people who are my old friends from long ago who aren't even political people whatsoever.
You know who.
But they have Facebook and they're like, man, what is going on with the police these days?
And the answer is the police.
Yeah, they're marginally worse.
But now everybody has a video camera in their pocket.
And that's what's wrong with police these days is now that now these local stories that usually wouldn't even make the local news at all.
They end up making national news.
And it's not up to Jennings rather than Brokaw anymore to tell us what we're allowed to know or not tell us what the agenda is.
And so regular people are sharing these videos and saying, well, geez, that doesn't seem fair.
You know what I mean?
And if the if regular nonpolitical people can look at that that way, then the cops behaving that way can see it just as easy, you know?
No, they can't.
They can't see it because they they've been trained and indoctrinated to and kind of drank that Kool-Aid for so long that they even when faced with it, they can't.
Their cognitive dissonance kicks in and it just that feeds into that whole us versus them mentality in a lot of police officers and and kind of law enforcement supporters will even hunker down even more.
Yeah.
All right.
So now what about the part I said about, hey, no confidence that more and more, especially with these acquittals, regular folk who used to buy into this stuff are starting to not buy into it anymore.
And so that's a silver lining for me.
But it seems like I mean, I guess what I'm getting at is I wonder whether these police agencies get it that they don't really have a job unless people believe that they are our security force.
If they are just our overlords, then they're going to have to really step it up because we're going to have a real conflict around here.
And their their job is skating that line.
Right.
And keep preventing outright revolt, but getting away with as much bloody murder as they can figurative and literal otherwise.
And and don't they think that they're probably pushing that line a little bit?
Well, they regularly sent, quote, unquote, law abiding citizens hate and fear their tyranny.
Well, they they will.
But then we'll have a video come out of a police officer getting shot and killed under some horrendous circumstances.
And it it'll flow back the other way and it'll ebb and flow like that.
And they'll just kind of keep it on the edge and try to keep people from tumbling over and losing support completely.
So they'll they'll push that back and forth and it will continue.
This is how Harvey Weinstein can redeem himself.
Right.
He can just make a bunch of pro cop movies.
Well, like the TV show Cops and everything that people have watched for, you know, 20 years.
By the way, we talked about this before, man, about this documentary I saw on The Learning Channel one time where.
It was 1970 something and Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood put out The French Connection and Dirty Harry.
And in both of those, it was really like the first time, at least in a long time, where Hollywood had put out a movie where the cops are the good guys.
And not only are they the good guys, but they have to break the law to do the right thing because those pansy civil rights liberals are standing in their way.
And so, you know, Dirty Harry steps on the guy's broken arm and goes where's the girl or whatever it is.
Right.
And that when that when those movies came out and they I don't think there was an agenda behind those movies as far as they go.
I don't know.
But that wasn't part of the story anyway.
But the story is the effect that overnight it was like 9-11 happened.
And all of a sudden girls are all hitting on the cops in the bars and all of a sudden societal attitudes towards these revenuers, these criminals who Americans have historically resented, really changed powerfully because of friggin Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood.
And so when they saw the effect of that, they went, all right, so that's it.
We have to open up.
All the police unions have to immediately create liaisons to Hollywood, do everything we can to put out pro cop propaganda because it's everything to them and they know it.
You know, without cops and without law and order, without all this, boy, it's a good thing there's a camera on every intersection because now the centralized overseer can, you know, can protect people from crime and whatever.
All these TV shows that they run like that without all of that might be a lot different.
Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you one specific instance that I look back now that I realize how the lethal weapon, what was a Mel Gibson's character I think was Riggs.
Riggs or Murtaugh.
So Riggs always had that kind of on the edge, kind of unstable kind of character.
And I kind of like I kind of like that.
And and so I'm I caught myself a few times as a police officer actually acting kind of crazy and unstable when I was dealing with people.
And I did it.
I did it intentionally.
So people would think, God, this cops, he's he's unhinged, man.
We better do what he says, you know.
And it in and I was I knew I was kind of playing that at the time.
And I really.
But in a way, I I worked myself up and I got I know I looked like an idiot to everyone else.
But it worked for me.
And that's a bad thing.
You know, because I start, you know, we kind of use that persona.
And so that's how I know one specific incident of how that influenced me in a really negative manner as a police officer.
All right now.
So I don't know, man, I guess we got to go.
I don't want to keep you too long here.
But any final thoughts about what people can do to start really making a difference about this and getting these guys to because, I mean, we could talk about, you know, in a libertarian world and whatever.
But I guess I mean more like right now to make them kill less people the day after tomorrow or something, make them think that they better kill less people the day after tomorrow or something.
What do you think?
Well, for me, you know, I talk to police officers, that's that's my people, you know, in my tribe and tell them that you are not serving and protecting when you shoot and kill an unarmed person.
You are making the community less safe.
You become the violent predator, even though you have that badge.
You're you're no better.
You're worse.
And all of this escalation tactics and and all of this warrior mindset that you think is so honorable is actually making you less safe as a police officer.
It's going to make you he actually creates deadly and dangerous situation.
So don't even give me that.
Oh, well, we've got to do it to stay safe.
No, it actually makes you less safe as a police officer.
So that I would give that to people who support law enforcement.
Say no, it's not.
It's not even helping them by promoting this or to stop judging them because you're not even helping them either.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, man, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Rayford.
It's good to talk to you.
Oh, wait, you know what?
Let me ask you one more thing, then.
I forgot.
It's in my notes here, but it's in a weird place.
Walter Scott, the dead man and Michael Slager, the cop who shot him, Slager, I guess, the cop who shot and killed him.
And it was on video.
Good Samaritan filmed it.
And the guy was clearly running away and the cops shot him in the back.
And, you know, it was the kill shot was the very last one.
There was a real pause there as he stopped to recite.
Get good dead center right on his heart and murder the guy.
He followed his training.
Yeah.
Well, and the guy.
Well, is that what they train you to shoot a guy who's running away in the back?
You know, I get the same kind of this.
I would say the same thing with that Michael Slager shooting is he follows his training.
Now, he followed it very poorly, but.
They, quote, unquote, struggled over the taser, and that is considered a lethal force situation, because the theory is somebody can take your taser and then tase you and disarm you and take your gun and then shoot you.
And it was already too late for that because the guy was 30 yards away.
Right.
And so his I think I think that that Michael Slager, he said, OK, he tried to take my taser, even though he really didn't.
He just put his hands out.
And so now I can shoot him.
And then that's where it goes into that warrior mindset that they put into you.
Oh, not only should you you could shoot them, but you you would be remiss in not doing so.
And so that went into his head and he just reacted very slowly, pulled his weapon and and fired because that's what he had been indoctrinated to do.
He just did it really slowly.
And he was prosecuted for this on the state level and got three hung juries or two hung juries.
Right.
Yeah.
It's like two, two hung juries.
And so this was federal charges.
And he pleaded guilty.
No.
Oh, I thought he had pleaded guilty to it.
No, he did not.
He did not plead guilty.
He was convicted to 20 years for four for whatever civil rights violations.
Now, you know, in a way, it's kind of isn't that double jeopardy?
But but, you know, he did find accountability with the with the federal government, which is very rare.
They generally justify these type of shootings.
So, well, and they have a very limited mandate to where most of the time, if the cop is not literally screaming the N-word as he does the shooting, then it's hard to prove that he had any, you know, ulterior private civil rights violating motive to what it is that he did.
It's a very narrow mandate there as far as the DOJ prosecuting local cops for this kind of thing.
It's not a question of just whether it was a good shoot or not, like they were asking at the state level.
And so his you know, his conviction certainly helps provide some closure.
It's surprising that he was convicted for so long and there's no parole in federal prison.
Right.
In Walter Scott's family.
So, you know, he's going to do I don't know what, 14 years, I think is the minimum.
Now, does that change anything?
Does Michael Slager, by him being in prison for 14 years at taxpayer expense, you know, the family, part of their taxes is going to go pay to incarcerate him, the victim, the victim's family.
Does that really change things?
And, you know, and I would say, no, it doesn't.
Again, it's that fundamental lack of it's not it's like an after effect accountability.
And nothing will really change very much with just convicting the individual officers.
You've got to you've got to have a real change at a structural and systemic level.
Yeah.
Then again, they prosecute innocent people all the time in the name of setting an example.
So, yeah, if they have to think twice or three times, that could make a lot of difference.
And, you know, I see what you're saying, though, that it's not good enough to prosecute a couple of cops and and think that that's going to change it.
But, you know, hopefully it does make a little bit of a difference on the margin.
But anyway, you know, I hope that people can see why people who are not criminals hate and fear cops, people who are not bad people, because, of course, criminals hate and fear cops.
Screw them.
Who cares about them?
Right.
But that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about regular citizens who feel like, hey, geez, it's sort of like we have that standing army, you know, armed soldiers quartered amongst us, just like in the Declaration of Independence says is a reason to declare independence.
It is.
And you see none of these situations where where the where these individuals, where these victims, you know, a real criminal, where they actually trying to rob a liquor store, where they actually shooting up a nursing home or, you know, or or or trying to, you know, just snipe people from the balcony of the hotel.
That was not happening.
Not happening.
So none of this was necessary.
All right, you guys, that's Rayford Davis.
You can follow him on Twitter.
Rayford D. And he is part of law enforcement against prohibition.
I forgot to say that, but I see that on your Twitter page right now.
So that's good, too.
All right.
Thank you again, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, you know me.
Scott Horton.org for the show.
Antiwar.com for the articles I want you to read.
Libertarian Institute.org for more articles I want you to read.
And Fool's Errand dot US for my book, Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
You should buy it for everyone you care about for Christmas.
Fool's Errand dot US.
It's on Amazon.com.
Everybody likes it.
Seems like so far.
OK, bye.
Thanks.
