Posted on 09/27/2007 6:23:25 PM PDT by Ken H
Victim of a setup, so just exactly how did this setup force Kuehnlein into a maniacal rage and force him to say that he was going to fabricate charges and ruin people's lives, and lie about resisting arrest, and on and on and on???? Just how stupid do they think people are????
Sounds like atty bs speak to me. I suppose the grand jury from the previous ‘episode’ was in on it too.
Admin Mod, why isn’t this under “news and activism”? Please note post #71.. Thnx!
***According to the article Ken H posted, Brett’s video has been viewed more than 500,000 times online. But I can’t find a Brett Darrow video at YouTube that’s got more than 60,000 views, so the LSM is off by an order of magnitude. So, of course, this is just a backwater discussion for bloggers/personal!
"The next day, Darrow uploaded the video to the Web, calling it "Cop Gone Wild." Since then, the video has been viewed more than 500,000 times online. "
May include the online local news sites from across the state and maybe other states....?? OR, maybe the stats include the viewers who saw it on our local news in missouri?
It says "uploaded to the web" not uploaded to Youtube, it's also available from Google Video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2715792117793977759&q=brett+darrow&total=13&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2) and it says: All time views:491,492, so add that to the 60,000 views from just one of the Youtube postings and it's well over 500,000 views online.
Contrast this with your tag line:
Should beating an unconscious and bleeding person reaaaallly be a crime?
Yes, Brett could end this tomorrow - by allowing these uniformed masters to intimidate him into submission. Likewise, the beating victim could end his abuse, as well. After all, he could die, or otherwise stop bleeding...
If a LEO is within the boudaries of their duties, then they deserve respect. When rogue LEOs step outside those boundaries, it is my experience that they DEMAND respect, despite not meriting it.
Just my $.02.
A Thank you for investigating that bump.....
Thanks for finding that. So a constitutional issue which has viewership of 1/2 a million people gets relegated to bloggers/personal just because we’ve had some provocateurs operating on these threads. It just doesn’t seem right, especially when we see that a fellow Freeper is the one who is in danger and the increased exposure would help him.
So please move this thread back to the news/activist forum.....
I’d love to. Which button do I push here? Maybe I’m not logged in.
That’s series!!!!!
.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/20/2003.asp
Missouri: Residents Fed Up with Roadblocks
Saint Louis County, Missouri residents are growing tired of drunk driving roadblocks designed to generate traffic citation revenue.
Residents in Saint Louis County, Missouri are growing tired of being stopped at police roadblocks. Although local police insist that the stops are designed to cut down on drunk driving, it is far more common for the stops to generate nothing but revenue from seatbelt and paperwork violations. A group of businessmen have banded together to speak out against the speed traps and roadblocks that have driven away customers from areas around Natural Bridge, a four mile stretch that runs through eight separate speed trap jurisdictions.
“Natural Bridge used to be really busy,” tavern owner Shaun Butler told the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. “Now it’s like a ghost town.”
Motorist Brett Darrow, 19, filmed an encounter at one of these roadblocks last November. He was ordered out of the car and nearly arrested for saying nothing more than, “I don’t wish to discuss my personal life with you officer.” View video or read transcript of incident.
Normandy Police Chief Douglas Lebert questioned the motivation of the small towns that operate the roadblocks — especially Beverly Hills, Pine Lawn and Uplands Park which earn between one-third and two-thirds of their annual budget from traffic citations.
“I would say that the lack of solid crash data and the fact that they’re not concerned with the business owners’ perspective on this leads me to believe that it’s policing for profit, not policing to try to solve a problem,” Lebert told the Post-Dispatch.
Motorist Jabara Burris, 27, was stopped on September 14 by a Beverly Hills Police roadblock. He was ticketed for failure to produce proof of automobile insurance. Burris, who is insured, later found his insurance card in the trunk of his car. When he returned to the roadblock, the police response was, “Tell it to the judge.”
Source: Searching for drunks triggers a backlash (St Louis Post-Dispatch (MO), 10/1/2007)
New Article is posted...
policing for profit, not policing to try to solve a problem
***I had posted something along similar lines on the thread that got pulled. Let me see if I can dig it up.
That would be great.... It’s hard to believe that even after all the publicity, change hasn’t taken place. How much do they need before someone steps up to the plate? Where are the missouri leaders when we need them? Or federal investigators for that matter? Action is needed...and let this be a lesson for all the “bad apples”.
I had a similar experience to yours a couple months ago by a group of corrupt cops. They fortunately didn't threaten me, but what they were doing was completely illegal and harassing.
I was driving home at about 1 am one evening. I had been in class all day, then at work till midnight. Part of my normal route home goes through a residential area with narrow streets in it by the usual standard. People also park their cars on the curb in this neighborhood. This particular night there was a large truck parked on the curb. It was sticking out far enough and the street is narrow enough that you had to cross the middle line into the opposing lane to safely get around it. It's a lightly travelled road and nobody was coming in the other direction. So the car in front of me did this, I did it, the car behind me did it and so forth.
So I go about a block and I see a police car sitting there, watching traffic go by. I don't think much of it until I go another block. First the lights go on as another cop car pulls out in front of me and gets the guy who's ahead of me by about a block's length. I begin to wonder cause I'm not sure what he did wrong, but before I could even react a second pulls out and flags me down. As I stopped I saw a third pull out and grab the guy behind me. While we're all waiting, the original cop who had been parked about a block back flies around us and grabs another guy who had just passed by all three of the stopped motorists.
So it's 4 cops total, working in tandem and they stopped 4 cars in succession.
By now i'm wondering exactly what is going on. The one who stopped me comes up to my window and does the usual license and registration thing. I gave him my papers and volunteered my concealed handgun license as required by the law.
Then he asks me if I know why I was stopped. I honestly had no clue and responded politely by saying "no." He then explained to me that he was pulling me over because I had crossed the white line in the middle of the street when I pulled around that truck a few blocks back, and said that this was illegal. I'm certain the other four cars were all stopped for the same reason.
In my mind I was furious - I had never heard of such an absurd thing. But I kept my cool and tried to be polite. That's when it started to get wierd. I was immediately barraged with a line of increasingly intrusive questions. "Where are you going?" "Why are you driving through this neighborhood?" "What are you doing out this late at night?"
I kept my answers simple and told him I was driving home from work. Then he pressed with more questions: "You look tired. Did you get much sleep last night? How long have you been awake?" and other stuff like that. I politely answered I had been at class since 9AM then at work. Then the cop revealed his real intention: "Have you had anything to drink tonight?" I hadn't, so I said no. Throughout he was very obviously leaning into my car window to see if there was any alcohol on my breath, and obviously looking around in the cup holders to see if there were any open containers. There weren't.
It was now pretty clear to me why I was pulled over and it had nothing to do with crossing the white line. These 4 cops were running an unauthorized sobriety check point in tandem with each other. The law requires that actual sobriety checkpoints be authorized by the state, but these guys were just doing there own at random on the side of the road and using the white line as a pretext to stop people. Since he didn't have anything on me I figured I'd be free to go soon.
But the questioning continued and got increasingly intrusive. Next was "So, you're a college student?" I said yes. "So have you ever been in trouble before? You know, trouble with the law? Trouble on campus?" I said no, and then politely reminded him that I had to pass a criminal background check to get my CCL. He kept pressing though. "Ever smoked pot? Used drugs at a college party or anything?" Again, I said no. "Ever engage in underage drinking?" I said no, but this was a wierd question in itself because i'm over 21 and he knew that because of my license. "So no drugs and no alcohol?" I again answered, "no sir."
He replies "You sure about that?" Becoming irritated, I said "Yes I am sure. I just told you no. Now are we done here?." He says "just a moment" and goes back to his car as I'm sitting there waiting for a minute or two, honestly not knowing what was going to happen next. I had been pretty confident that I could challenge his made-up charge about the white line at the beginning of the stop in court and get them dismissed, but now i'm beginning to worry that he's going to invent something else.
Finally he comes back and says to my relief "I'm not going to give you a ticket tonight - just be careful not to cross any white lines in the future." And he lets me go. The whole ordeal lasted about 15 minutes, and as far as I can tell the same thing happened to the other 3 cars that were stopped with me.
I got to thinking about it afterwards and figured out exactly what this guy was trying to do. All the wierd questions about drugs and underage drinking and college parties were intended to get me to say something that would give him probable cause to do a search of my vehicle! I've never been a drug user so he wouldn't have gotten anything, but just the thought that he was trying to find a phony pretext to search my car is troubling.
More angry about them wasting my time than anything, I drove home. I thought about it more and more the next day and became certain that (1) they were running an illegal sobriety check point, and (2) they were trying to coax drivers into giving them probable cause to do equally illegal vehicle searches. Also keep in mind that this was not one rogue cop. There were at least four of them and they were working as a group. The lead guy was watching the cars as they crossed the white line to go around the truck, and the other three were positioned up the road to make the stops as the vehicles went by.
Kim,
Here’s what I posted about using cops for revenue generation on that thread which was pulled.
Note that we have another primary source posting on this thread.
Kevmo
________________________________________
To: Brett Darrow
Thanks for posting. This has become a fascinating thread.
In suburban districts, cops are basically revenue generators. Many of them could be replaced by the “lovely Rita, Meter Maid” ladies. Of course, when they REALLY are needed, that’s when everyone’s grateful for them. And like firefighters, usually at such times, you need more than one or 2 of them. That’s a lot of overhead to pay for a small suburban city.
Perhaps it’s time to reconsider their role. Firefighters and cops are sitting around on the guvmint dime and they’re bored silly. If they had projects to do that would keep them busy, keep them in shape, keep them out in the community interacting on a more genuine level with constituents, then everyone would be better off. Maybe they should be involved in construction & maintenance of roads & parks. I’m thinking out loud, haven’t really put this whole thing together in my mind yet, so it’s still a half-baked idea.
441 posted on 09/27/2007 10:21:35 AM PDT by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
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