Kentucky — An ominous bill that is currently making its way through the Kentucky Senate aims to give police unprecedented unconstitutional powers. These new powers will allow cops to stop anyone they want and demand that person tell them who they are, where they are going, and explain their actions. Naturally, it has civil rights advocates up in arms, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing down the bill’s momentum.
Police merely need to make an unsubstantiated claim that a person is involved in criminal activity which gives them free reign to stop that person, demand his name, home address and age — as well as ask to see his driver’s license, if he has one — and tell him to explain what he is presently doing “to the satisfaction of the officer.”
If you invoke your constitutional right not to answer the officer’s questions, this new bill grants cops the right to detain you for two hours. Even more ominous is the fact that this detainment is not considered an arrest so you have no right to an attorney and police don’t even have to record it. This non-arrest grey area detention will undoubtedly be rife for abuse.
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Nevertheless, advocates for the police state tyranny say cops must have this new ability—to keep us safe. As Kentucky.com reports, Sen. Stephen Meredith, R-Leitchfield, said Grayson County law enforcement officials asked him for the bill after a number of local incidents showed the need for it.
“If a man acts suspicious, then why wouldn’t you want to know what his name is?” Meredith said in an interview. “I can’t imagine any legitimate reason in the world why a person would refuse to give their name and photo identification to a police officer if they were asked.”
In other words, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear…or, in other words, submit to the police state. Wrong!
Well Sen. Meredith, we’d like to educate you in why a person would refuse to talk to police—because it is our right not to! Legislation like this is straight out of the playbook of every tyranny in history. Remember “Ihre Papiere, Bitte”?
That phrase often brought shudders to the people who heard it in the 1930s and ’40s. It is German for “Your papers, please,” and this bill is nearly identical to that sinister Nazi policy.
