Well, this is a bit of a doozy. This case — via the Institute for Justice — involves a possible First Amendment violation but somehow ends with a judicial blessing of cops who make things up after the fact to justify an arrest that has already taken place.
That’s literally what happened here. Mason Murphy was walking down a Missouri road when he was accosted by Officer Michael Schmitt. From the opening of this very unfortunate decision [PDF]:
Schmitt stopped his car, approached Murphy, and asked Murphy to identify himself. Murphy refused to identify himself, and Schmitt put Murphy in handcuffs after nine minutes of argument. Murphy asked why Schmitt arrested him, and Schmitt refused to answer.
So far, it would appear no criminal act was committed and that the cuffing of Murphy by Schmitt was in retaliation for Murphy’s refusal to identify himself and, First Amendment-wise, his refusal to shut up.
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I didn’t say unowned, I said unincorporated. You can purchase land outside the jurisdiction of anything below the county level and there will be effectively no police presence for you to worry about.
And yes, I’m aware of the hilarious New Hampshire libertarian experiment. I’m comparing the person I was speaking with to the libertarians. They said police are the enemy, and I was trying to imply that grouping together a bunch of like-minded people together and living in a place with none of those “enemies” would expose the underlying flaws in the idea of how police are just a bad thing in the US from start to finish. I’m obviously being facetious when I say they should do that. If it actually was an accurate summary of what the police do to a community, then what I’m saying would be a sensible idea.
There are actually good examples of takeovers of a place by like-minded individuals to make the government there better. A big part of the reason Vermont is a pleasant place to live even up to the present day is that 50 years ago a whole bunch of liberal-minded people moved there, some of them with the specific goal of concentrating their political power in a single place so they could make it more progressive in its government. So that “takeover” worked, because the people moving up there actually had good, productive ideas for how they wanted their community to be, and Vermont is still a very nice place overall.
In this case though, I’m suggesting that “police are the enemy” is just as childish an idea as “government regulation on my trash disposal is the enemy,” and trying to put that attitude into practice would fail just as badly as that libertarian project. But, who knows, y’all can always make it happen and prove me wrong.
Garbage collectors are way more likely to die on the job than cops, and they don’t shoot innocent people on the regular. Peddle your false equivalencies elsewhere.
Plus, unless you’re a complete fool, you know perfectly well that a good percentage of people saying “police are the enemy” are using that as shorthand for “policing as it exists in the US today makes the police the enemy.”
Plus, most people aren’t willing to uproot their lives for a single political belief (assuming they can afford to), so I don’t see why you’re holding this group of people to a higher standard.
What percentage of police shoot an innocent person in any given decade that they’re on the force? I would be interested in the answer to this question.
So, being antagonistic to any individual cop when you interact with them is going to make this situation worse? Or better?
That’s what strikes me as so childish about the whole thing. If the statement was “Obviously we need to have police, but there are systemic problems with the way policing is done in the United States today, and we need to do X, Y, and Z in order to improve it,” then there’s a pretty good chance I’d 100% agree with it. That’s productive. Saying police are the enemy and always have been, and so implying that it’s reasonable to be a dick to any individual cop and try to make the interaction as painful as possible, just seems way counterproductive to anything that’ll actually improve anything.