To be clear, this series of posts on our European trip is meant to serve as a chronicle of a trip that we returned from 2 weeks ago. Some people seem confused on that point. For OPSEC reasons, I never discuss our travels until after we return. Don’t want anyone who doesn’t have a need to know being aware of our absence.
So this is about day three in Paris, the 20th day of our trip. Being our last day here, we did a bit of shopping, a bit of packing, and some lying around doing nothing. To be quite honest, we had both reached a point where we were just tired of being on this trip. So we went to breakfast, and I want to show some pictures of what a European (French) breakfast looks like. First, there are meats and cheeses:
Fruit:
Baked goods:
along with the Omelet I pictured in other posts.
We walked a couple of blocks to the Champs Elysees. We didn’t get much, mostly because prices were ridiculous. Here is a purse we saw
Yeah. That purse wasn’t big enough to hold $3500 worth of stuff, making the back worth more than anything you would put in it. We walked into the McDonald’s- not to eat, but to establish prices for my Big Mac index. A Big Mac in Paris costs about $10. Just the sandwich.
We stopped by a French pastry shop and bought some Eclairs (chocolate and coffee flavored, if you are interested). We also hit up the Lindt chocolate store. I bought about $150 Euros worth of chocolate. We are still snacking on it two weeks later.
Then it was dinner time and get ready for bed. Tomorrow is a travel day, so it will be a long one.
On the way back to the hotel, I saw a store with a raisable vehicle barrier to prevent smash and grabs.
Police have two ways they can talk to someone in the public: consensual or seizure. A police consensual encounter is a voluntary, non-detention interaction where an officer approaches a person to ask questions or for identification. The person is free to leave, refuse to answer questions, or decline requests at any time- to include refusal to provide ID. It does not involve commands, force, or blocked movement.
A seizure is where a person isn’t free to leave. Police can use force to keep you there, they can search you, demand your ID. Noncompliance with this is considered obstruction or resisting and is illegal. The person being questioned still has the ability to refuse to answer questions, or refuse to answer them without a lawyer present. This is why asking police if you are free to leave is so important. This tells you if you are in a consensual encounter or have been seized.
If the police want to talk to you, they can ask or they can seize. In order to seize, they have to have probable cause that you are or have committed a crime, or they have to have a warrant. If you are in your home, a warrant is generally required, if they don’t have exigent circumstances. Those include the belief you are destroying evidence (e.g., flushing drugs down the toilet), or there is something going on that is an emergency (say you are murdering someone in the home). Police cannot make a warrantless, non-consensual seizure inside someone’s home just because they have probable cause. They generally need an arrest warrant (unless exigent circumstances apply). This is important.
Now to the case at hand:
Two years ago, three men were involved in a fight in a bar in Saint Cloud, Florida. One of the men was reportedly armed with a handgun and had left the scene. The other two individuals who were in the fight contacted police: one of them refused to give a statement, and the other (visibly intoxicated) man did give a written statement claiming the third man displayed a handgun. Both of the men who spoke to the police at the bar were rather vague on details about the fight or what started it.
The next step you would expect an investigator to do would be to, well…investigate. You would think that the cops would contact the man, ask him to come in and answer a few questions, or perhaps even send a cop or two over there to ask. After all, he isn’t under arrest, they don’t have a warrant, and the contact at this point is consensual. Or supposed to be.
The cops immediately assembled a tactical team and had a meeting where they discussed the methods and tactics they would use to take him into custody. They surrounded the house by posting two cops at the rear of the home to prevent his escape, the cops out front had a K9, bullet shields, and NFA long guns with suppressors. They called him on the phone and asked him to step outside to answer some questions.
The Raid
What happened next was captured on body camera video, you can see the video below. They held him at gunpoint and ordered him to the ground. Even though his hands were raised, they kicked him to the ground, used the K9 to bite him because he wasn’t going down fast enough, and used quite a bit of force for a consensual encounter.
Any reasonable person would agree that they are not free to leave at this point. This is a seizure. They avoided the requirement for a warrant by luring him outside using a friendly tone and a request to just “Answer a couple of questions.” Since police tricked him to come outside specifically to avoid the warrant requirement, courts tend to scrutinize that. This trick is called constructive entry. This was never intended to be a consensual encounter, as evidenced by their own meeting and plans to take him into custody.
There was no reason to rush over there and arrest him. The incident was over, and there was plenty of time to secure a warrant. There were no exigent circumstances, and therefore no exception to the requirement to get a warrant. This doesn’t look like a casual “knock-and-talk” but more like a planned arrest operation without a warrant, which courts scrutinize closely. Payton v. New York ruled that police cannot do indirectly what they’re forbidden to do directly—i.e., they can’t avoid the warrant requirement by tricking or forcing someone out of their home.
House surrounded by armed officers
Officers positioned to prevent exit
Suspect called and told to come out
Show of force (guns, numbers) suggesting no real choice
Use of force when subject was compliant and not offering active resistance
In my mind, there is little doubt that this man’s constitutional rights were violated, both in the arrest without warrant, and in the manner the arrest was carried out. There was no reason to use force on a man who had come out voluntarily and was offering no resistance. Not one of those cops mentioned “hey, maybe there is a better, more constitutional way to do this.” This, in my opinion, destroys the “few bad apples” trope.
To make it even worse, it turned out that this man was the victim and the two intoxicated men had attacked him. The prosecutor in the case dismissed all charges, saying that the case was “unsuitable for prosecution.” He has since filed a lawsuit against the city and its police department for violating his civil rights. The cops will almost certainly hide behind qualified immunity claims.
There is a lesson to be learned here.
Don’t talk to the police.
I’ve said this before- don’t talk to the police. Ever. There is no such thing as a friendly chat with cop. I will refer you to an old post of mine on the subject that contains a video titled “Don’t talk to the police.” Don’t talk to the cops, no matter what. They aren’t your friends. They aren’t there to help you. They are there to make a case to arrest someone, and they will get the arrest that requires them to do the least amount of work they can. At best, they are there to find reasons to take you to jail, at worst they are there to use their cool toys on you- whether that be a machine gun, a K9, or just a good old fashioned beating.
Most cops are pussies and cowards. We see that time and again- they will use overwhelming force on those who pose no threat, even going so far as to toss grenades into a baby crib, but will cower outside with their machine guns and body armor while children are being killed by an armed murderer.
A cop calls you on the phone and wants you to come out and answer questions, ask them if they have a warrant. If the answer is no, you tell them you don’t want to answer any questions or speak with them until you have an attorney. Offer to come down to the station with your attorney to answer questions, and tell them your attorney will schedule the meeting. Whatever you do, don’t open the door. You have a doorbell camera for a reason.
Open that door, and this just might happen to you. Ever since my incident in Orange County, Florida in 2001 where a Deputy Sergeant threatened to kill me when I presented him with my concealed weapons permit during a traffic stop, I don’t inform cops of shit.
The cops may not have enough to arrest someone, but you talking will give them what they need. If they DO have enough to arrest you, there is nothing you can say that will talk them out of it. Refuse to talk to them, don’t open the door, and go about the rest of your life.
Today, we continued our bus adventures and also did a cruise on the river Seine.
The island in the middle of the river that contains both the Louvre and Notre Dame used to be a fortress where the king oof France lived. Taking this river tour really reinforced that. You can see how easily defended it was.
We visited the Louvre to see the castle, but we didn’t want to wait in the long lines, brave the crowds, and pay the high fees to enter the museum, but the castle was magnificent.
It was pretty cold. At dinner time, we encountered the first truly rude Frenchman of the entire trip. I didn’t want to drink alcohol and noted that the restaurant we were dining in had Coca Cola, so I ordered one. The waiter presented it to me like it was a bottle of wine and called it “American Champagne” then asked how I wanted my beef prepared- “burned the American way, or the French way.” Dick. It reminded me of this:
After dinner, we went to watch the Eiffel tower at night, as it was on my wife’s bucket list of things she wanted to do while in Paris.
The first 5 minutes of each hour, there are sparkling lights on the tower:
Anyone who reads this blog knows I am opposed to the death penalty- not in theory, but because too many in our court system are willing to lie, cheat, and right the system to get convictions whether or not the accused is innocent.
This animal pled guilty, claiming he panicked after accidently hitting her with his FEDEX work van. Video showed otherwise, and audio captured after he covered the camera caught the rape and murder.
The family’s life has been torn apart. Kill him. There is no way to make him well again, but there is a way to make sure he never kills again. Society failed that little girl. Let’s no fail another.
By the autumn of 1919, the United States was already the largest industrial economy on Earth. It was industry being carried out on a scale never before seen: oil wells, refineries, factories, railroads, material flows, conversion capacity. The US had woven industrial capacity and manufacturing into every fiber of its economy. The entire nation was a huge factory.
In 1901, Ransom Olds, owner of Oldsmobile, had invented the assembly line. In 1913, Henry Ford had improved upon it by using a conveyor belt to bring the work to the worker, instead of moving workers around the factory. Before this innovation, it took 12.5 hours to build a Model T, but afterwards it only took 2 hours.
A few years later, Ford went on to invent the 40 hour workweek, and the US workforce was still the most productive in the world.
The entire rise of the USA to being the world economic leader was created in the first quarter of the 20th century.
When a young Isoroku Yamamoto (later Admiral of the Japanese navy) was a graduate student at Harvard, one of the things he marveled at was the US manufacturing capacity. He told the leaders of Japan that any war with the US would need to be won in 6 months or less, or the US would manufacture things faster than they could be destroyed.
He was right. The US at the height of wartime production was allowing a shipyard to complete a fleet aircraft carrier in just 16 months, and an escort carrier in two months. In all, 170 aircraft carriers were produced between 1942 and 1945.On top of that, the US built 350 destroyers, 48 cruisers, 10 battleships, 230 submarines, with the a total of more than 9,000 combat ships and 3,600 cargo ships.
There were over 96,000 aircraft produced in 1944 alone. A B-24 rolled off the assembly line in 2 days from start to finish, one bomber every hour.
Every month, 2000 M4 Sherman tanks rolled off the assembly line.
Now compare that to today. 750 Patriot, 90 Tomahawks, and 100 SM3 missiles per year. In any real conflict, the US will be outproduced by China, just as the Axis was in WW2. Now we struggle to built 10 ships a year, and we struggle to maintain a fleet of 300 ships. In fact, the only thing our Navy is producing in large numbers is Admirals- we have as many of them as we do ships. OK, maybe paperwork is produced in larger numbers.
The only good news here is I don’t think China will need to fight the US. Instead, they will continue what they have been doing: destabilize the nation by supporting the left while using honeypots to compromise our lawmakers. Our nation will eventually collapse under the weight of bureaucrats and useless breeders who collect government benefits to make more useless breeders. We don’t even create the currency that we use to pay them any longer- it exists mostly in digital form now.
We got up early and had breakfast. The hotel where we were staying provides breakfast as part of the price of renting a room. They had a European style buffet with plenty of ham, fish, cheese, fruit, and some baked goods. They also served omelets to order. This place made the fluffiest ham, cheese and onion omelets I’ve ever had. Once breakfast was done, we headed out to see the sights.
Whenever I visit a town I’ve never been to before, I try to find the double decker busses. They usually charge you a fee for the day, which allows you ride those open topped, double decker busses without restriction. They usually have a circular route around the tourist areas, where they play a narration in several languages, and are a cost effective way to see the sights.
As you can see, the weather wasn’t great for sightseeing.
There were at least two squads of troops patrolling the immediate vicinity of the Eiffel Tower. Note that they have magazines inserted, but also have chamber flags in place. You can see the chamber flags if you zoom into the picture. We would periodically see armed patrols throughout the city, mostly centered around tourist areas. These aren’t parade troops- they appear to be (to my non-soldier Navy eye) regular troops- rifles with the bluing worn off in places, that sort of thing. The beret colors varied- we saw black, dark green, maroon, blue, and black.
These guys were just standing on the banks of the river Seine.
There was a giant shopping mall, two buildings- one for the women that was five stories tall, then you cross a pedestrian bridge over the street to the men’s building, and it was three stories tall. Even the building looked like artwork:
I really like the little cafes that are everywhere. Less of the franchise slop that you find in the US, more of little privately owned places.
The buildings and architecture make me realize just how talented craftsmen used to be. Even in the US, we don’t make stuff like this anymore.
Despite the fact that we rode a bus most of the way, we still managed to walk nearly ten miles, according to my smart watch. After a day like that, it was time to get some dinner and head back to the hotel.
Antigun democrat former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who called gun rights activists extremists after they handed out standard capacity magazines at the Virginia State Capitol Building, has killed his wife and himself with a gun in front of their teenage children.
He pushed for “red flag laws” and a ban on “high capacity magazines.”
Leftists aren’t against guns. They are against guns for everyone but them. They fear gun violence because that is what they will do with them- it’s projection.
A pretty good discussion on the difficulties of SEAD in Iran. I trust this channel because the guy who runs it, MOOCH, was assigned to the same ship I was on during the Gulf War. Meaning, I met him in a previous life, and therefore know he isn’t some Asian fake account.
There are the people (mostly women, and disproportionally black) who think arguing with the cops while demanding to speak with a supervisor will get them out of legal trouble.
Then there are the dumbasses who have taken the “don’t fight on the road, fight in court” advice to heart, and do some studying on the Internet. They don’t understand legal terminology, so they attempt to fake it by spouting a bunch of big words arranged into nonsensical phrases, using them as if they were the magic words in a spell that will make the bad consequences of their actions go away. Some of them even comment on this blog.
It’s tiresome and I can’t imagine how much restraint some of those in the courthouse have to put up with. Heck, I have problems dealing with it on this very blog. Let me illustrate:
Look, I make no bones about being more than disappointed with how our government does business. However, the things some of these outright morons come up with are simply incorrect and won’t work. They haven’t worked. No, you can’t get out of paying income taxes by casting a magic spell using vague Latin sounding phrases in court. Wesley Snipes tried using the 861 argument, and he went to prison for four years. He tried making the argument that he isn’t obligated to pay taxes. He has an outstanding $23 million tax bill. They have been fighting this in court since 2006. The IRS offered to settle it for $9.5 million, but Snipes refused.
This argument has been ruled frivolous in DOZENS of appellate cases. It just isn’t a thing. Proving that everything that comes up on this blog has been discussed already, I posted on this back in 2008. As I said then:
I agree that progressive income taxes are [morally and ethically] wrong. I agree that taking my money to give to someone else in a socialistic redistribution of wealth is the equivalent of armed robbery. I disagree that the tax code has such ludicrous loopholes.
I will not entertain any argument to the contrary in the comments to this post, unless that comment comes with a valid citation to an appellate case verifying your position. I am not going to turn this blog into a Sovereign citizen sounding board.
However, in the interest of fairness, anyone who wishes to set up their own blog to espouse those theories is perfectly welcome to do so. Just contact me, and I can set you up on this very server for the low, low price of $15 per month. The only rule I have for server space here is no porn. It takes up too much bandwidth and invites accusations of child porn and all of the scrutiny that comes with it.
