Unchecked Police Powers Makes Driving A Motor Vehicle A Veritable Minefield.….

Policing and Judging for prof­it have become a norm in America; some­where in there is also pros­e­cut­ing for prof­it. The rapa­cious arti­fi­cial need cre­at­ed by states and munic­i­pal­i­ties to extract rev­enue from cit­i­zens to fund the police state has made dri­ving down a high­way or street a per­ilous adven­ture for motorists.
Unmitigated and unchecked pow­ers placed into the hands of police offi­cers add to the dan­gers motorists face mere­ly dri­ving down the street.
The desire of states and munic­i­pal­i­ties to main­tain con­trol of the cit­i­zen­ry and to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly extract rev­enue to fund the police state, cou­pled with the over-mil­i­ta­riza­tion of the police, has left many ask­ing if they are already liv­ing in a police state.
Whether or not it is a police state is above my pay grade. It is suf­fi­cient to say that we are in a dystopi­an night­mare where the very cit­i­zens who are at risk active­ly cheer on police gun­ning down oth­er cit­i­zens to pro­vide a so-called safe environment.
Who is safe when the police are empow­ered to sum­mar­i­ly slaugh­ter inno­cent cit­i­zens who may or may not have trans­gressed against road traf­fic laws?

The notion of many who believed that they will not fall to police bul­lets because of the col­or of their skin, their slav­ish obe­di­ence to the rov­ing assas­sins, or both is high­ly misguided.
The dan­gers posed by the police stretch far out­side the nar­row con­fines of the gun vio­lence they engage in, with hard­ly any con­se­quence. The immoral laws cre­at­ed to give them faux jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to breach the Fourth Amendment right of cit­i­zens; laws that they use to tar­get com­mu­ni­ties they hate have cre­at­ed a widen­ing chasm between them and those bru­tal­ized communities.
Every stop in cer­tain com­mu­ni­ties, just or unjust, becomes a dan­ger­ous expe­ri­ence for all involved.
Pretextual sea­sons for stop­ping motorists include bro­ken tail­lights, tint too dark, unable-to-see license plates, and a litany of oth­er fraud­u­lent claims by cops. The motorist hit a yel­low line and swerved. In most cas­es, the charges are con­coct­ed to search the motorist’s vehi­cle and to see if the dri­ver has a warrant.
This is where many who are for the police state argue that these uncon­sti­tu­tion­al breach­es yield results. What are those results? The results, they argue, are that police can find nar­cotics; usu­al­ly, the motorist had a lit­tle mar­i­jua­na or a cig­ar not ful­ly con­sumed in the vehi­cle. These are called pre­tex­tu­al stops.
For starters, they do not make any­one safer. Rigorous stud­ies have shown that pre­text stops pro­duce evi­dence of non-traf­fic crimes at very low rates and have no effect on crime rates. These same stud­ies con­firm that when cops are allowed to be led by their gut instincts and oth­er unchecked heuris­tics, peo­ple of col­or are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affect­ed. Racial dis­par­i­ties in who gets pulled over erode trust in the police and deep­en the per­cep­tion that police use race as a proxy for criminality.

On that basis, police are giv­en unchecked pow­ers to vio­late the rights of cit­i­zens, usu­al­ly with the bless­ings of their high­er-ups and local prosecutors.
In one case, a cop con­tact­ed a local pros­e­cu­tor whom he called by his first name. The cop want­ed to vio­late a cit­i­zen’s right, but the man stood his ground and would not relent to the ille­gal violation.
The pros­e­cu­tor cor­rupt­ly told the cop to fol­low the motorist as long as it took to find a pre­tex­tu­al rea­son for pulling the motorist over.
Nothing can jus­ti­fy that kind of cor­rup­tion in the process of law enforce­ment; the cop did not sus­pect the motorist to be a want­ed mur­der­er; he mere­ly want­ed to flex author­i­ty he did not have. The local pros­e­cu­tor he was bud­dies with was a will­ing par­tic­i­pant in the scheme. The cor­rup­tion usu­al­ly runs from the top down.
The anger and resent­ment this type of polic­ing cre­ates makes it dif­fi­cult for the police to enforce the laws. It ren­ders legit­i­mate enforce­ment a dan­ger­ous endeav­or that gives rise to a sick and con­vo­lut­ed need for more police, more arma­ments, and more aggres­sion from police. Where it stops is any­body’s guess.
The dan­gers these stu­pid laws pose to the dri­ving pub­lic can­not be overem­pha­sized, but extract­ing every pen­ny in tax­a­tion states and munic­i­pal­i­ties can is paramount.

As I have said in pre­vi­ous arti­cles, the prob­lem is not the police mak­ing; state and local leg­is­la­tures have cre­at­ed this mess they can­not and do not intend to dis­en­tan­gle them­selves from.
For exam­ple, what harm is done if a motorist does not stop imme­di­ate­ly when a cop ini­ti­ates his lights? Many motorists who, for good rea­sons, do [not] trust the police not to mur­der them on a traf­fic stop have every right to slow down, ini­ti­ate their haz­ard lights, and slow­ly dri­ve to a well-lit area before stopping.
Doing that sim­ple, sane thing in many states will get you mur­dered by the police you were scared would kill you in the first place. Florida is chief among those states. The motorist must pull over imme­di­ate­ly because the police need to know that you obey them imme­di­ate­ly, fuck your con­cern for your safe­ty or that of the motor­ing pub­lic. Local moron­ic politi­cians with their heads up the ass­es of the police unions have made that state a death trap for the trav­el­ing public.
There is an estab­lished under­stand­ing that there is no well-inten­tioned law that the police can­not turn into a nightmare.
Giving police these unfet­tered pow­ers to do as they please has been used with dis­as­trous con­se­quences for the public.
Cops, in their quest to exert pow­er, pull motorists over on nar­row wind­ing roads even at night, pre­sent­ing grave dan­ger to the dri­ving pub­lic. The lives of the cit­i­zens do not mat­ter as long as the cop gets to show who is the boss and the state or munic­i­pal­i­ty acqui­esces because the fines keep flow­ing into their coffers.
In New York and oth­er States, so-called,*move over* laws make it dou­bly dan­ger­ous, as motorists must move out of the lane where there is police action. 

So when that much pow­er is placed into the hands of the least edu­cat­ed, usu­al­ly most nar­cis­sis­tic, low self-esteem peo­ple, the results are trag­ic — hand­cuff­ing a per­son and plac­ing them in the back of a vehi­cle and leav­ing the vehi­cle on an active train track.
Any cit­i­zen who com­mits an act like that would be appro­pri­ate­ly charged with attempt­ed mur­der. A cop does it, and there is no con­se­quence.….….. the sad real­i­ty is that the life of indi­vid­u­als, par­tic­u­lar­ly those of col­or, is of no con­cern to the leg­is­la­tors who empow­ers the police.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.