As far as not recognizing the legitimacy of the government, I’ve traveled in countries in which I didn’t recognize the legitimacy of those governments. OTOH I did recognize what would happen to me if I ignored their laws or even broke them. The ’sovereigns’ are entitled to their opinions, but whether or not you like the rules of the game, if you break them you’re going to pay the price.

./

One officer told me a story about another officer who was questioning someone who he didn’t know was deaf. The officer believed the subject was being uncooperative and “put a gun in his ear.”

The San Francisco Bay Ara Rapid Transit police killing of an evidently mentally ill man this month may be another example. It turns out that the BART police have only implemented a few of the may recommendations of the consultant they hired after the last shooting death two years ago.

Part of the solution is better officer training. In California, the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training has an excellent training program that, I believe, has made a big difference. Production of new training materials has been cut back, like everything else the state does, because of the budget. But all of the commission’s training materials are still available, and law enforcement agencies should use them more extensively. I believe they’re also available to law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

Rather than blanket emotional condemnations of police, people in any state who are angry about officer behavior should demand that their local law enforcement agencies devote more serious time to training. With budgets short, that might mean less time actually policing, but in many cases if would be worth it.

Training is not the entire solution, but but is a big part of it.

…nearly everyone else, to be honest. But there are about 300000 sovereign citizens, and all of them are not claiming sovereign citizenship to swagger around with unlicensed guns in their hands. It appears that a large number of them just don’t want to pay their speeding tickets, fines for minor infractions, or obey the rules of the road.

John,

What I am saying is that it’s possible that the officer is a liar. There is no witness confirmation as far as I can tell. This might be a fabricated excuse; there ought to be a thorough investigation to determine whether the cop had a reason to shoot, if no evidence exists. The public should not just be forced to accept the cops’ word as true; this has been proven in the past to be an untrustworthy.

Police officers often get away with far more than they should, and the judicial system’s bias in their favor sometimes allows them to get away with everything up to murder. Cops, like most authority figures, develop a power-crazed, arrogant response when questioned or challenged nonviolently. Unlike most authority figures, this petty authoritarian mentality is demonstrated in a rather extreme form when cops display it. And they are not held accountable to the public when it exceeds the bounds of legality. For example, the Erik Scott case. In my hometown, a man named Erik Scott was shot to death by Metro officers in the parking lot of a Costco supermarket. Erik Scott was armed, but his gun was registered and legal; he had a conceal-carry permit. There was no evidence whatsoever that Erik Scott was trying to kill the officer, or was a criminal. However, it was discovered that there were unusually high levels of morphine in Scott’s system at the time of his death. This allowed the cops to justify Scott’s killing by saying that he was erratic with his gun and needed to be shot because he could have harmed someone. A rubberstamp coroners’ inquest was held, which didn’t result in any legal repercussions for the police officers.

Was there a potential that Scott could have harmed someone? Yes, but there was no proof that he was credibly threatening the officers and needed to be killed to “control” him. Police perfidy + no accountability for cops = fail.

I’m sorry, I thought you were talking about this particular case.

I agree that police officers are too quick to resort to violence, but I don’t see any problem here. The officer approached Tesi- who was wanted for traffic violations and failure to appear in court- and Tesi opened fire. The officer defended himself.

Note the emphasis on peaceful demonstration from history’s best-known leaders of social change, such as Gandhi.

Saying that these incidents are evidence that the sovereign citizens movement can turn violent totally ignores context, obscuring who the victim is and who the abuser is. In both these cases, there was a total role reversal of the Jerry and Joe Kane incident; the sovereign was the victim, and the officer was the shooter.

If that’s true, then it may have been justified, but wanton police brutality (i.e. shooting people) simply because a power hungry cop finds it annoying that anyone would dare question his AUTHORITEH!!! is uncalled for and unjust. (This is in no way suggesting that this is what occurred in Mr. Tesi’s case, but a reference to the last “Sovereign” who got shot.) Why can cops never get it through their lunk-thick heads that in this country, dissent is a human right! Every attempt at questioning the idiot police or independently inquiring beyond the robotic Yessirs and Yesma’ams, is stifled by uninformative, unconstructive replies and violence. Only the dumbest among us use such jackbooted thuggery, since they cannot (or do not want to) engage in rational debate. Maybe they could all go to Burma, but I suppose that putting the Burmese though more hell wouldn’t help anyone.