In this video, recorded during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, a police officer with ten years in law enforcement speaks to his fellow officers. He says they should refuse to enforce orders that violate people’s constitutional rights, even when the orders come from a mayor, a governor or their own chief. He is also a Special Operations veteran who served in Iraq. You can download the video below and read the full transcript, lightly edited for readability.
Note: The original video is no longer available on YouTube.
In this article
Full transcript
A message to fellow officers
You know, as a police officer, I’m compelled to make this video. I’ve been in law enforcement for ten years, and I’m speaking to my peers: fellow officers, people in any kind of law enforcement position.
I’ve seen officers nationwide enforcing tyrannical orders against the people. I’m hoping it’s a minority of officers, but I’m not sure anymore. Every time I turn on the television, every time I look at the internet, I’m seeing people arrested or cited for going to church, for traveling on the roadways, for going surfing, opening their businesses, going to the park with their families, or doing nails out of their own house, using their own house as a place of business, and having undercover agents go there, arrest them and charge them with… with what? With a crime? I don’t know what crime people are committing by doing nails in their own house, but we’re seeing this more and more and more. We need to start looking at ourselves as officers and thinking about what we’re doing right now.
Constitutional rights
I want to remind you that, regardless of where you stand on the coronavirus, we don’t have the authority to do those things to people just because a mayor or a governor tells you otherwise. I don’t care if it’s your sergeant or your chief of police: we don’t get to violate people’s constitutional rights because somebody in our chain of command tells us otherwise. That’s not how this country works. Those are de facto arrests. We’re violating people’s rights and taking money from them, or even worse, arresting them and depriving them of their freedom when they are exercising their constitutional rights.
So let’s talk about that. Let’s read something right here from the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal, among these we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their power from the consent of the governed. Meaning, our power, and any government official’s power, is derived from the people. We don’t hold power over our citizens. That’s contradictory to everything our country stands for.
And this is what I’m saying. First Amendment rights: telling people they can’t go to church, that’s freedom of religion. Telling people they can’t protest, that’s freedom of assembly. Fourth Amendment violations: illegal traffic stops to check for papers. What are you, the Gestapo? Is this 1930s Nazi Germany? You don’t get to stop people unless you have reasonable suspicion or probable cause that they have committed a crime. I know people who have personally been stopped and told, “We want to see papers showing that you’re essential.” That is not how our job works.
Public trust and officer safety
What has really been pissing me off lately is that these officers who are going out and enforcing these tyrannical orders are putting my job and my safety at risk, because what you’re doing is widening the gap between public trust and law enforcement officers. Look at what’s happened to law enforcement in the last ten years: less and less public trust. More often than not, that is the result of isolated incidents that get blown out of proportion. Well, they’re not isolated anymore. They’re happening every single day.
The thing I want you guys to realize is that the power we hold as law enforcement officers is nothing more than a facade. It’s a badge and a gun. If you haven’t lived in anarchy, if you haven’t seen combat, you don’t realize that things can be stripped from people in a heartbeat, and that’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that these actions are going to wake a sleeping giant, that is, the American people. They are going to be put in a position where they won’t have their rights trampled anymore, and we as law enforcement officers will have our ability to enforce the law stripped from us in about ten minutes.
I think what is going to happen, if this continues, is that we’re going to see bloodshed in the streets. I don’t want to see bloodshed in the streets on either side of this coin. I don’t want to see fellow officers get injured or killed, and I certainly don’t want to see citizens get injured or killed. And I promise you, most of you out there doing these tyrannical acts against our citizens are not ready for combat. You’re not mentally or physically ready for combat in the first place. I promise you, you don’t want to go through that, and I hope I never have to go through that again.
“Following orders” is no excuse
You don’t get to just say, “Well, I’m doing this because I was told to,” or “I’m following orders,” or “I need to keep this job.” Guess what? I need to keep this job. I have the same sob story as the rest of you guys, but my personal choices and my living arrangements, no matter what they are, don’t allow me to trample on people’s rights. I don’t understand why that concept is so hard for people to understand.
Listen, you need to stand up for what’s right. If you’re part of a department or an agency that is asking its officers or deputies to impose on people’s rights and infringe on their freedoms, you need to step up and say, “No, that’s not me. That’s not what I signed up for, and that’s going against my oath.” And if that costs you your job, so be it. At least you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror at night.
I’ve already expressed this to my department, and luckily for me, I come from a department where I feel my chain of command shares my view. But I don’t care what department you’re part of or what your chain of command thinks: you don’t get to trample on people’s liberty.
As a Special Operations veteran, I’ve fought on the streets of Iraq under the US government’s guise of freedom, and I’m telling you what the American people are going to do: you are going to wake a sleeping giant, and they are going to fight ten times harder for their freedom on their soil than anything you’ve ever seen before. If that’s something you’re willing to face, then keep trampling on people’s rights. But I promise you, the American spirit of defiance is going to rise again, and it’s going to be a big problem for our country.
Do the right thing
So I’ll leave you with this, something I learned in the Army: no matter what situation you’re put in, if you look inside yourself and ask yourself one question, “Am I doing the right thing?”, you know the answer. No amount of money, no order, no law, nothing should be able to make you go against doing the right thing.
So I’m imploring officers to look inside themselves and ask themselves: is this what I want to be doing to my citizens? I think the answer is clear. And if we all stand up together, guess what? It’ll be a non-issue, no factor, because people in law enforcement will be united, like we should be.
