09/28/16 – Raeford Davis – The Scott Horton Show

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Scott Horton Show.
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All right, introducing Rayford Davis.
He is a former cop, and he keeps this great blog called Blue Enmity.
I always say that wrong.
It's enmity, but I always switch the N and the M around, don't I?
A libertarian cop's view of law enforcement.
Very interesting.
He's a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
Writes lots of great stuff and does lots of great interviews with other libertarians as well.
Definitely check him out in your Google there.
Rayford Davis.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you for having me on, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate it.
And, you know, so we got a few different cop killings to talk about on the show today.
And I want to start with the one in your latest piece here, the Passion of Livonia Riggins.
This young man who was killed by cops not very long ago.
But before we actually get into the substance of the article, I want to talk to you a little bit about the form of it.
You're really writing to other cops here.
You're not writing, you know, as like some kind of ombudsman for the cops, explaining them to libertarians.
You're trying to explain what freedom means to cops, what their proper role in the society is meant to be as per, you know, like in the deal.
Well, that's true.
And, you know, I don't want to sound selfish.
You know, I have great sympathy to Livonia Riggins family.
But in a way, I'm worried about cops that actually kill people.
I'm worried about them.
And I don't want them to harm others unjustly and suffer spiritual and moral and mental anguish that is going to negatively affect them in their lives.
And, you know, the thing is, I mean, speaking for myself, I know that you're right about that.
I mean, I know from studying the history of torture, for example, that the torturers themselves end up with PTSD in this kind of deal.
Must be the same thing for, well, and we know it's the same thing for soldiers.
Must be the same thing for cops who, because it's the job, they do the wrong thing to somebody.
And you're talking about someone who probably most of the time, they're not a psychopath.
And, you know, they do it because it's the job.
And then later they got to live with themselves.
It's not my main concern, because I'm more concerned with their victims and their victim survivors and how they feel about the whole thing.
You know, boohoo for the perpetrator.
On the other hand, well, you're a cop.
This is your tribe.
These are the people that you do think about.
And you do have a great point.
You really are right that somebody kills somebody for nothing, like, say, Lavonia Riggins here.
This cop, assuming he's not a psychopath who just had a great time doing it, has got to deal with this day in, day out for the rest of his life.
Now, I can see why that's important to you, you know, since you're putting yourself in his position.
Yeah.
And, you know, and what I say is, you know, just as Deputy Johnson pulled that trigger to send a bullet fatally piercing through Lavonia's flesh, Deputy Johnson dealt mortal wounds to his own spirituality and moral fiber that only true repentance and undeserved forgiveness can heal.
And to do that, to even begin that, you have to admit that what you did was wrong.
And by cops covering for each other and bending over so, you know, backwards to say, oh, it was a good shoot.
And and, you know, legally you're justified, you know, maybe in some kind of, you know, this bizarre legal system that we have.
That doesn't help the officer.
All right.
Now, so.
All right.
You know what?
I think that's fair enough.
Again, it's not exactly the position I'm coming from, but that's why I brought you on the show.
And so in this case, tell us about what happened here to this young man, Lavonia Riggins, and and the cop who was put in this position here.
Yeah, so this is a Hillsborough, Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.
This is down in Tampa, Florida.
And what they did, undercover officers bought small amounts from of marijuana from Lavonia at a nearby convenience store.
I think two or three times over the past month.
And then they decided, OK, we'll go raid his house.
And so they decided to use a SWAT team to do it.
So they roll up to the house, 8 a.m., early morning hours.
And they call out using a loudspeaker.
And most of the family, everyone comes out of the house except for Lavonia.
And the deputies run around the back of the house toward his bedroom.
And they they bash through the window.
They see him in his bed under the covers, which that's their own words.
And so, yeah, he's probably asleep and didn't hear the commotion.
And so, of course, you know, when you hear a someone, you know, some very angry looking armed individual busting through your window as you wake up, you're probably going to panic, which is obviously what Lavonia did, got up out of bed and had some furtive movements or something that they described.
And so the officer fired once, killing him instantly.
Of course, they searched the home for about eight hours and find no gun whatsoever, only two grams of marijuana.
And mind you, this is for a search warrant.
Lavonia wasn't there was no arrest warrant issued for him.
So it's not like they were going to grab him up.
They were going to do a search warrant for a plant.
Yeah, and now.
So why did they send the SWAT team when couldn't they have, you know, they had an informant, they couldn't set him up and arrest him at the Kwik-E-Mart, the place where he had sold weed to him twice before?
Well, they wanted they wanted to get a stash, you see, and that way they could charge him with, you know, trafficking or whatever, some higher charge.
And there was they cited when when the narcotics detectives go through their little their little, you know, use of force kind of matrix for justification.
And we had one, you know, it's just like a photocopy of a photocopy of a checklist of, you know, what when you can do it like an armed raid like this.
And so they checked off.
Is there a history of a gun?
And they checked off.
Yes, because there was an incident report from a year earlier about deputies being called to the house and some issue about there being a gun there.
And you read that report.
And it was Livonia's family that called the police because they were afraid someone was going to come by and like do a drive by on their house and deputies search around, you know, are suspicious because, you know, it's obviously, you know, some type of, you know, drug transaction dispute.
And so the deputies search around the house and they find like an old rusty gun and they think it maybe could have possibly belong to Livonia.
So they use that as, oh, yep, he's armed and dangerous.
And, you know, we've got to swarm his house like Osama bin Laden's compound.
Yeah, well, you know, that's such an important point, I think, about the police, the the force matrix or whichever they call it.
They usually call it a matrix of some kind where, because like you say, it's this checklist where if the numbers add up to three or more or whatever, we send SWAT instead of just a deputy to the door, that kind of thing.
It on the surface, it makes sense, right?
That there's some kind of objective reasoning behind whether or not you send a SWAT team.
But at the same time, when you have that, that means that you take the personal responsibility for making the choice out of the decision making.
And now it's, you know, just the piece of paper decides.
So where possibly the team leader of the cops might say, you know what?
Actually, I went on that call a year ago and it was a rusted old gun we found outside.
And I'm not so sure that, you know, this is really necessary.
Let's just go over there.
And right.
That kind of thing is taken out of the equation.
The discretion of just adult human reason is taken out.
And the piece of paper says we go in there like Delta Force.
And so we do.
Right.
And for these for these drug raids.
Yeah, of course, you're worried about officer safety.
But the main reason you're looking to justify, you know, storming in there is to catch the dope before they flush it down the toilet.
And, you know, not not really any type of, you know, safety's there, but that's that's secondary.
What you really do using that for is is do you have an excuse to bash in so you could grab their stuff before they're able to destroy it?
Well, and not to get too far off on the tangent of the evolution of the SWAT team, you know, Radley Belko has written so much about in the past and that kind of thing.
But it's pretty easy to see.
And, you know, I don't know.
Was it like this in your town where the SWAT team?
Basically, they're dressed up like Navy SEALs.
They got all this equipment and all these bad ass guns, but they've got nothing to do.
Right.
How often do some real hard ass criminals take a bunch of hostages at a bank or something that hardly ever happens?
So they're sitting around all day and maybe they even start to feel like dweebs.
They're way overdressed for the job when regular deputies and regular cops are out there in, you know, more or less dress blues, actually interacting with people out there in the world.
These guys are all holed up with all this military gear doing nothing.
And so that basically becomes untenable.
They got to find something to do.
They got to find something to justify the fact that they're all dressed up like G.I. Joe in the middle of their own damn hometown.
It doesn't, you know, and it helps that it's a lot of fun, too, and exciting that adrenaline rush and you kind of get addicted to that.
But yeah, so over the United States, you know, at least 80 percent of these SWAT raid call outs are for, again, search warrants, which is, you know, never should be used for something like that.
Yes, if you have, you know, a barricaded subject or an active shooter, then SWAT teams have their place.
But that's a very small percentage.
And when you when you overuse them and you use that that that real heavy hand, you actually create more potentially violent situation.
So if you think, well, we need to do that because we want the cops to come home at night and actually by being overaggressive, you put citizens and cops themselves in danger because so many of these people, they do.
They have no clue what's going on.
You go bashing through their doors.
They panic and they think they're being robbed or something.
So they pull a gun.
Right.
Which happens, right?
That's just hypothetical, right?
I mean, cops get killed in these home invasions.
That's what we would call if anybody else did it.
Yeah.
So I've been reading up on the Afghan war where, you know, the U.S., the Navy SEALs and the Delta Force do night raids, you know, have been for years and years and years doing night raids there in Afghanistan.
And the locals complain that when the USSR totalitarian, lawless, godless communists occupied our country, they never came in our houses after dark.
What the hell?
And there is an element and this is, you know, this kind of understated, but there you know, there is a show that we're getting tough and, you know, to send a message to the community officer say, hey, we're sending a message.
We're not going to tolerate this.
That's the same.
Yes.
We are intimidating and terrifying you with these with these violent tactics.
That's what that's our intent.
And then which is now back to what police should be doing.
Right.
Well, yeah.
And yeah, because, of course, if we assume if the premise is that everybody is innocent until they're proven guilty, you know, in a conviction in a court or whatever, then that means that they are supposedly the security force of all of us, even the guy they're going after.
In fact, the theory is that their job is protecting the rights of the suspect and keeping them safe in jail from the mob that would otherwise get them for the horrible thing that they did.
That's their their primary responsibility is supposedly thinking of themselves as the security force, even of the suspects that they're going after.
But what you're talking about is where it's turned completely upside down, where not only are they, you know, using this overwhelming force against the so-called bad guy who's now outside of their protection, but they're doing it in order to impress the neighbors to that.
This could happen to you rather than see what heroes we are protecting you by doing this to your neighbor.
The message is loud and clear.
They're talking to you.
Right.
And I go back to Sir Robert Peel.
He's considered the father of modern policing from the London's from London in the 1930s, and he has these nine principles.
They're kind of like our nine commandments.
And number nine, the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action and dealing with it.
And we've turned that completely upside down.
And then what do you do?
You lose respect and trust of the community with law enforcement.
And and when you do that, you cannot function.
You cannot do your real job.
And that's what we're seeing going on with these police shootings here in Charlotte and Tulsa and with Livonia Riggins down in Tampa, Florida.
Well, yeah.
And Livonia Riggins here is a perfect example of what you're saying about how, you know, they escalate the thing in a way that even puts themselves in danger, which, of course, this guy actually wasn't threatening them.
But instead of, you know, when his family came out, instead of saying, well, I don't know, maybe he's still asleep and ringing the doorbell a bunch of times to get him up, they went ahead and went around to the window because, hey, after all, you know, why not escalate?
I got my body armor on and all this kind of thing.
And then but so this is the part I really want to get to, because the way you write it in this article here is, yeah, look, you know, it's already a foregone conclusion.
This cop is going to be cleared, as you put it when you were describing the situation a minute ago.
Oh, he must have made a furtive movement or something.
This is the code word.
This is the magic word furtive and waistband.
I think they have them both here.
Well, gee, he he was pulling the sheets down and getting out from under them and in the process of doing so.
Well, geez, his hands weren't up in the air.
They were on the bed sheet moving down toward his waistband.
He's probably in his boxer shorts, right?
Oh, well, waistband.
There's no gun, but furtive waistband.
But so here's my problem with that.
What's reasonable about that, Rayford Davis?
When you don't see a gun, we have no reason to believe that this guy sleeps with a gun in the waistband of his boxer shorts.
And when just any hand movement we saw and we're going to get in Terrence Crutcher in a second seems likely that the taser hit him a moment before the bullet and that's what made his hand drop.
And then, oh, look, furtive waistband because his hand is no longer up in the air.
Now it's moving toward his waistband.
That's a reason to murder somebody.
Not they're drawing a gun on you and you can see a gun in their hand and you're looking down the barrel of one like, you know, some old Western.
The guy's actually drawing on you.
But just waistband, just hand dropping toward waistband, just furtive.
What law did any state legislature pass that said that a cop can kill anyone as long as he yells furtive and waistband at the end of it?
Well, it's actually the Supreme Court and where they come with this objective reasonableness and then they turn around and say, well, you know, we can't second guess the cops.
We'll let them judge what's objectively unreasonable.
Well, they're going to find that every time they shoot somebody, that their fear was objective and reasonable.
OK, so no law was ever passed that said that all the state legislatures back in American history, they had a different standard before the Supreme Court came and legislated from the bench.
I know you conservatives love it when the courts legislate from the bench as long as it's in favor of cops.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
What did the standard used to be before the Supreme Court said you all have a license to kill whoever you want?
You know, I don't I don't know that it's it's really been that much different.
It's just probably just as the Supreme Court comes along with the cases they you know, they seem to really want to decide with law enforcement, even though they get the appearance that's the other way.
But, you know, going back to this, when you shoot someone and you don't even see a gun, you think they're going to it.
A average private citizen, imagine if they conducted themselves in that matter, visualize a convenience store clerk.
And they deal with some weirdos and some very aggressive people in their in their store, sometimes that are quite bizarre.
And imagine if they just pulled out their gun from behind the counter and shot every person that they saw that was was acting in an aggressive manner and had furtive movements.
Right.
And we would charge all those with murder and say, wow, you should you know, you shouldn't have done that.
You should you know, that's you overreacted.
Hey, what if somebody shot a cop right in the face because he was reaching for his waistband and I saw he did have a gun?
Your Honor, I thought he was going to murder me.
Right.
And so law enforcement should be held to a higher standard that if you claim honor and integrity and you want people to thank you for your service, well, then you've got you've got to take that risk.
And we actually what we see is that law enforcement had held to a lower standard than the average public.
And that's wrong right now.
So talk about Terrence Crutcher a little bit.
The footage is not perfectly clear.
Maybe the version I saw of it, it's not high definition.
The cops are kind of in the way.
But the officer that shot him has been charged with manslaughter, which in itself, I thought was meaningful because a lot of time.
Well, not a lot of times.
Sometimes when a cop is charged at all, they charge him with first degree murder, something that they're guaranteed to be acquitted for, you know, overcharge them, which seems like kind of a scam.
But manslaughter, even Donald Trump said, you know, Mr. He loves cops and they can do whatever they want, said, geez, looks like she choked.
Maybe it's because it's a woman he's willing to attack her.
But it sure does seem like he's right that she just panicked and shot this guy.
But will she not be able to just say, yeah, but furtive waistband, even if it is because the the other cop with the taser shot him with the taser first and that's what caused his hand to drop.
Still, that's furtive.
And by the way, what does furtive mean?
Who cares?
Furtive.
I use that word and I still have no clue.
I remember writing it in interim reports and thinking, what the heck is this thing?
But now, first of all, the difference between Lavonia Riggins is law enforcement.
You have no moral justification whatsoever to invade people's homes and shoves guns in their faces and shoot them over a plant.
So that's that's just straight up murder right there from the get go.
It really doesn't even matter what happens after, you know, after you you invade their property like that.
Now, with with the Terrence Crusher, it's a little bit different.
At least the officers have a reason to be out with him.
I mean, the dude's parked in the middle of the road and he is kind of walking around strange, you know, something's something's going on, whether he's just upset because his car broke down or, you know, maybe he's off his meds or too much meds.
You don't know.
And so at least at least they have justification for being out with him.
But then they go and, you know, just straight up escalated.
And that's that's how you're you know, you're trained is this use of force continuum.
And if you don't get compliance, you can move it up.
And what I you know, what I think happened here is is a couple of things.
Probably like a sympathetic response.
I mean, she she terrified herself and when the taser went off and whatever that didn't happen to her, it made him flinch.
And so she flinched and fired and he was not a threat.
So, yep, that sounds like manslaughter to me.
The fact that he's trying to reach in his car and now that's bad.
And as a police officer, you know, people that aren't being compliant and are acting strange and they do something like that, man, that is really scary.
And but you can't shoot someone just because of that.
You you know, that's what you signed up for.
And so you have you have to wait until you see some imminent threat, not just, oh, well, he's reaching back in the car.
Now, what what do you do at that point?
Do you go hands on or do you back up?
You know, that all depends.
And I want you know, that's on the situation and kind of that's kind of armchair quarterbacking there.
But when I look at it, no, no gun, no gun unjustified.
Right.
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When your article you and back to the other the previous case, the Riggins case, you sort of write as all one word in screaming police, all capitals.
It's the sheriff's office.
Get down.
Screaming orders.
And my first impression of the Crutcher thing, I've seen this thing a lot of times, too, where the cop goes into straight up full metal jacket drill sergeant mode with the screaming and the commands and the whatever.
And the normal law abiding citizen who didn't do anything to anyone is basically just incredulous if not in shock.
And they're basically they don't have a chance to say, hey, lady, what are you screaming for?
I pay your taxes.
You work for me.
Why are you yelling at me?
I'm a good guy.
My truck broke down.
Right.
Like this is what he's trying.
He's thinking, but doesn't have a chance to say because she's just completely gone crazy.
And so, you know, it seems pretty clear to me or not necessarily clear in this exact case, but in other like cases, it seems pretty obvious that a lot of time that's what happens is that people don't even have time to react to the fact that they're being treated like they're a felon when they've never considered themselves in that situation before.
They don't know how to act.
They've only ever watched this on cops.
They've never had anyone point a gun at them and scream at them like that.
And they're just you know, there was an old man who got shot in his driveway.
He called the cops because of a prowler and he met the cop in the driveway with the gun in his hand.
He wasn't pointing at the cop is point at the ground.
But the deputy goes, ah, drop a gun.
And he's like, what?
You know, he maybe even raised it in the like shrug motion.
Like, what is the problem?
Blam dead when he didn't even have time to compute that he's freaking out because you're holding a gun and he's a cop and he was trained to be the tiniest little coward in the world or whatever.
He didn't he didn't have time before he died to figure out what was going on and why the cop was freaking out.
And that's what that was my impression of the Crutcher thing was like he was like, whatever, lady, you know what?
Whatever your problem is, you go take your meds.
I'm going to go and see, you know, call the tow truck, you know, something like that.
Yes, I see that as well.
Yeah, the screaming and everything.
That's what we do.
And you see that in the Keith Lamont Scott case as well.
They're just, you know, screaming probably lots of different things.
Show me, you know, put your hands up.
Don't move.
Drop the gun.
Get out of the vehicle.
Don't move.
You know, all of these conflicting things, screaming.
And that makes people freeze up and panic.
And it makes the officers you're yelling and screaming that works yourself up.
It makes it harder for you to think and to slow things down.
And and so that definitely goes into it.
But that's the training.
And so you take a normal person that could probably handle that situation and then give them the law enforcement training like we have today with the use of force continuum and this whole take charge of the situation thing by any means necessary.
And this is what you get.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Let's talk about the Keith Scott here, too, to wrap up, because this is one where, you know, really, I think skates the line real close and puts the very most basic questions in relief here, because at least apparently none of the footage shows a gun in his hand.
But I guess at this point, it's believable that he did have a gun in his left hand.
I guess, you know, he had a they say they found the gun.
He apparently did have an ankle holster.
We haven't seen any video, but assuming that he did have a gun, they certainly, according to the footage from his wife's phone, they certainly told him to drop it.
I don't know.
They had for 30 or 40 seconds.
They were telling him to drop it.
Now, unless he had, you know, gone deaf or saying ringing in his ear or some insane kind of confusion, he couldn't figure out how to turn his stereo down or I don't know what his excuse would be.
Maybe there was a reason that he didn't just empty his hands and show the cops his hands were empty.
He gets out of the car.
Let's assume for the sake of argument, they're telling the truth here that he did have the gun in his left hand.
There's no evidence, no indication in the video, although it is kind of shaky and and cuts off his left side a little bit.
But there's no real indication that he raised the gun to shoot it at anyone.
And that's where we get right to what you just said about any other person, even if the guy has a gun, any other just regular civilian in that situation can't shoot at that point.
He'd have to point it at you for you to be able to shoot him now that you're not a cop anymore, right?
For me to shoot him, for any of our listeners to shoot him, he would have to actually raise the thing.
So that's the one where I'm I'm trying hard to see it from the cop's point of view.
They told him for at least, you know, near half a minute to drop the thing in his hand, whether it was a book or whatever the hell it was.
He should have had nothing in his hands by then.
And yet he still wasn't apparently trying to kill him.
So well, you're one of those cops.
Good shoot or not.
What do you think?
Well, you know, that one's tough.
I've been in those situations, you know, with that, you know, where, you know, I've had that gun and and just kind of waited for a second for the guy to decide, OK, is he going to turn around and try to shoot me or is he going to try to toss the gun?
And that's not fun.
And and so I don't want to second guess officers on that.
But here's the thing.
What was the initial contact for?
Had he just, you know, finished doing a, you know, a drive by?
There's a black male with, you know, teal pants that did a.
Well, let's go back.
Let's go back.
I think that's important.
Wait, wait for I think that's important.
But go ahead and second guess him.
I mean, say yes or no, if you want.
But if the gun is pointed at the ground, so we're not talking about a furtive waistband BS here.
We're talking about he's got a gun in his hand, but it's pointed at the ground.
He's he's not moving.
He's not drawing on them, apparently.
But you're saying you that's still reasonable to you.
You know, that's really close.
You got to wait.
You got to wait till he starts to bring it up.
They've got the drop.
They've got the drop on him.
So, you know, it's not like there's just one officer in the dark of the night, you know, on the side of the road getting totally surprised by this.
No, these these are these are guys supposedly well trained and they're well positioned.
And and, you know, you you go through this all the time under circumstances like both of these.
I could have probably shot six to ten people a year.
And I'm just an average patrol officer.
So, yeah, you got it.
You got it.
You got to hold off.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
Go ahead back to the origin of the conflict here, because, yeah, this is a very important point as well.
What what did he done?
Was he was he a suspect in a drive by shooting or some type of armed robbery or a murder suspect?
No, he was sitting in his truck at worst rolling a blunt.
And again, here's this drug war sending, you know, cops into full commando mode in a apartment complex like that.
And you have a guy and you see him with a gun.
Do you want to go check him out and say, hey, what's you know, what's up with you?
I think that's very appropriate for a law for law enforcement to do.
But they go in there, like you said, and just go straight commando on him and jump out of the bushes, guns drawn, banging on his window, you know, with the baton trying to smash it.
That's going to freak anybody out.
And of course, he's going to act.
And he and you can see him trying to comply by walking backwards is kind of a way he's trying, you know, in a way to comply.
Well, and now so if you're in that situation, you're the commander on scene, whatever, you're just going to walk up to his window, tap on the window and say, hi, my name's Rayford.
How are you doing?
What's going on here today?
Kind of thing rather than, you know, hey, you drop it the way they handle it.
Well, assuming assuming their claim is true that they had seen him with a gun, not just a blunt.
Well, you would certainly have, you know, one officer try to make contact with him.
You could walk up and knock on the on the window in a gentle way to not provoke him rather than, hey, he's got a gun.
So we're going to go ahead and be confrontational in the first place.
Well, you have to because he's committed no crime.
So what do you pull in the gun on him for?
Right.
Well, that's where they bring up the pot again.
They go, well, he had a gun and some pot.
So we figured that was a danger.
One or the other.
They even say, you know, at first we just saw that he had some pot and we thought, man, who cares?
But then we saw he had a gun, too.
And so we thought, well, pot times gun equals let's kill this guy.
Whatever.
Something.
I don't know.
Yes.
And so, you know, law enforcement, police officers, their ability to perform their their duties is dependent on, you know, you know, the public approval of police actions.
And for people to to have willing cooperation is is really inversely proportional to the amount of force that law enforcement uses.
So the more force you use, the less respect and trust you're going to have with the community.
And the black community definitely has less respect and trust than the white community does.
And so you're going to have more of these noncompliant contacts.
For for legitimate purposes, you know, legitimate reasons, people don't want to cooperate with cops.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, blacks should know that there are a lot of white people who don't have any more political power than you do.
If we could call them off, we would.
You know, it's just not up to us.
I don't own a bank.
If I did, I would call off the cops in your town.
But I don't.
Although, on the other hand.
And this is really the last question here, because I almost forgot to ask you about it.
It seems and I could be very wrong about this.
Maybe it's just anecdotes, but it seems like maybe there's creeping accountability a little bit more here, seeing more and more cops being fired.
And, of course, only if the attack is on video, but we're seeing more and more cops being fired and even being indicted for crimes against citizens.
Or is that just the media is trying to highlight the very few and far between a little bit more often now for PR reasons?
Or what do you think about that?
A little bit more accountability because of the outcry.
A little bit more, but also law enforcement leadership, they will sacrifice their pawns like this.
And so, you know, for, you know, Betty Shelby, who shot, you know.
Mr. Terrence Crutcher.
Yeah.
So they'll charge her, you know, they'll they'll throw her throw her away.
Yeah.
OK.
They gave her impossible rules, terrible training.
And, you know, and then she acted predictably.
And but they're going to they're going to use the prosecution of her in kind of this perverse justification of themselves in this this horribly unjust legal system that we have and try to prop it up by that.
So they'll sacrifice her to.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, at least they're feeling the demand for some sacrifices here.
And she is the one who pulled the trigger.
So, yeah, her captain should have to resign as well, of course.
And training should change and all kinds of laws should change.
And yeah, the entire chain of command, you know, in all of these are responsible.
Yeah, definitely.
But, you know, yeah, it is it amounts to, you know, I think like you're kind of saying there it amounts to public relations.
And yet it does show that the reaction on the part of the public really because of the advent of the pocket high quality video camera and Facebook and Twitter have created this situation where all these local disparate police abuse stories that no one else in the country ever used to hear about each and every one of them become national news now.
And really, Mike Brown was the watershed.
But it had been building up before that where regular people, regular and totally nonpolitical people were saying, man, I can't go on Facebook without watching a cop murder some guy.
Holy crap.
And people were asking me.
Nonpolitical people are asking me because they know I pay attention to these things.
What is going on with the cops?
It's like they got the flu or something.
They're just coast to coast.
All of a sudden, you can just see their tactics become so much more violent against regular people they're supposed to be protecting.
It's just kind of out of control.
Even, you know, the kind of people and you hear this one all the time, too.
Gee, I never had reason to doubt my government before until I saw them do this to my cousin right in front of my eyes or, you know, this kind of thing.
People are just totally taken aback by it.
You know, two things.
This is blowback from the aggressive nature for every contact that law enforcement has.
Twelve billion arrests a year.
And so all of those contacts, they, you know, escalate them, arrest people unjustly with this with this drug war and and then people lose respect and trust.
And then they that's why you see more and more people not complying.
What do officers do?
They escalate even more and it becomes this vicious feedback.
But that's on law enforcement to to to fix that.
That's not on the public.
Hey, you just need to be more compliant.
No, that's on law enforcement to they really have to look deep down.
And that's what I'm trying to do to speak out to them is it's on you.
You have to deescalate.
Right.
I mean, well, tell me this when back when you were a cop, did you guys ever talk about how, man, and it's sort of weird that so many people who are not criminals but are regular people hate our guts?
Instead of I mean, obviously, if you're a cop, you know, criminals hate you.
But, gee, I wonder why regular everyday Joe's laugh when they see us get in a car wreck or whatever it is, you know, do you wonder that?
Well, you get that the kind of mindset a lot of cops, they love Jack Nicholson's character Colonel Jessup, Nathan Jessup and a few good men.
And then, you know, his speech about, you know, he wraps you and you wrap yourself in the blanket of security that I provide and the question that means I provided every officer can quote that.
And they love it.
And so so they see them as tough guys like that and totally forget that Nathan Jessup was a dishonorable, you know, vicious individual.
Yeah.
And who is he protecting us from the Cubans down there?
Guantanamo Bay?
Yeah.
Very convincing.
Stay on that wall in order to keep a bunch of, you know, lawless, tortured, helpless, innocent prisoners there forever without trial on the American side.
Yeah.
You know, I ate breakfast 200 yards from a bunch of crack dealers with tech tech nines that are going to take over the world.
You need me there.
And actually, you know, we're out there just causing more destabilization to these communities with these aggressive tactics.
What heroes.
All right.
Well, you keep your hands away from your waistband there, Rayford.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate you coming on the show very much.
All right.
So that is Rayford Davis.
He writes at Blue Enmity.
I said it right.
A libertarian cop's view of law enforcement.
And the latest one is called Murder in Service of the Drug War.
It's Blue Enmity dot blogspot dot com.
And you can also find them at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
That's LEAP, a great organization you should check out if you haven't before.
That's Scott Horton Show.
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