Guy calls cop on ATF agent - Hilarity ensues
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Setting aside how hilarious and amazing the whole thing is, his reaction is the most key thing to take away.
He thinks because he is a federal agent he is above them, doesn't have to do what they say, and they must abide by his demands because he has a badge lazily hanging off his belt. That he is in complete control. Yet when the slightest bit of pushback is given, he suddenly has a medical condition, his wife is pregnant, and he is crying. No control, no dignity, just squealing.
Its almost a perfect representation of the empty straw house the entire fed system is built on. And how quickly they fall apart when you stand up to them, which while funny here is how you end up with them reacting with overt violence to the slightest slights.
Yeah, he thinks that because he's a fed, he's above them. But that's not how jurisdiction works.
One of the craziest fed v. local stories like this I've ever heard was a death-in-custody incident. The feds were basically hunting anyone associated with the Boston Bombers, and they'd been hounding and harassing one specific guy for months that they were just sure was involved in some way.
The day of the incident, they pulled this guy over at an intersection, ripped him from his car, and interrogated him, not in his house, but in some other house. This was in Florida, and it was over 100 F, and over 100% humidity. The feds interrogated this guy for 6 hours well into the early morning but they had one Florida State trooper there to observe, because this was a federal investigation, but in Florida's jurisdiction. There were moments in the interrogation where the feds were screaming at him and throwing things. Eventually, the guy broke down, told him he'd sign whatever confession they wanted.
The next moment was chaos, but IIRC this is what happened: he didn't write out a confession, they gave him a pre-written one. He immediately signed it. Then he flipped the table he was sitting at, grabbed one of the fed's guns, actually removed it from his holster, and shot himself in the head with it. One of the feds also shot him ('cause he grabbed a gun).
The only reason we know about this is that the Florida State Trooper, immediately walked out of the room, call the Florida AG, and told him what happened. The AG was like, 'Oh fuck, get the fuck out of there right now and we'll record your testimony.'
The feds were still trying to process what the fuck to even do, by the time the trooper had yeeted himself as far away as he could to CYA. Basically, because the Florida AG got involved immediately, and had a state trooper for the whole interview, it prevented the feds from covering the whole thing up. The State of Florida launched an investigation into the federal investigation, and the family sued the feds for millions of dollars. I think they were actually awarded significant compensation in a wrongful death suit.
All because a state trooper was like "fuck this bullshit, I'm not getting rolled up in negligent homicide charges".
As always, anytime I hear a story with a fed involved I never come out of it being thankful for them. Only with increased desire to help them all commit not alive.
At least with the various levels of state and local police, I hear good stories about them to balance out the failures and brutality of other times. But with feds, its always thugs trying to honeypot or kill people.
Feds are the most detached from people so they can treat people as numbers than individuals. The lower you go from state to officer Bob at a local station, the more connected they are to their communities so less likely to do horrific things.
There's an easier way to show this in history with Machiavelli as he recruited people for a local militia than rely on mercenaries like other city states as a militia would fight till the end as their families live there, mercenaries would switch sides at the chance of losing. Same applies to Feds and local police.
I, too, wish that they might achieve an hero status.
Honest question because I’ve never been interrogated by the feds so I literally don’t know and am sincerely asking. But how does one go from completely innocent of a crime to wanting to kill themselves in 6 hours because of hard questioning? I feel like I would just shutdown and/or laugh at the situation and say nothing.
I legit cannot fathom the process to not being involved at all morphing into agreeing it was me as a ruse to kill myself
There are still people out there wearing masks when walking outside by themselves. Some people are just built different (worse).
I think the biggest blackpill of 2020 is just how many of these people exist. Coping was much easier when I could just dismiss these people as lunatics or shitlibs.
He was already being harassed for months prior.
But interrogations can go very badly because the exert enormous mental pressure on people. It's genuinely what they are designed to do. An interrogation weaponizes every available part of self-doubt, insecurity, anxiety, as a weapon.
One effective weapon that interrogations use is silence. You ever get nervous when you were talking about a subject, and the other person just doesn't speak and it freaks you out a bit. Well imagine going through that, and a thousand other pressures, by 2 or 3 people who are trained in making that weapon as painful to you as possible, and the intensity is up by a thousand. These are people who can put enough psychological and emotional pressure on you, that they can actually convince you that you did something you actually know you didn't do. It's not even uncommon, and it's not even special to feds. Your local city police are probably not too shabby at it.
Normally, interrogators desperately avoid letting you kill yourself because it's contradictory to the mission. The problem in the story is that they fucking broke him. He was so mentally broken, he just didn't fucking care, and then killed himself. They put so much pressure on him that he assumed his whole life was over so he decided to end it anyway, even though that wasn't what they wanted.
Unfortunately, that's the real problem here. A false confession from an interrogation can be done so effectively, that interrogators aren't worried about going far enough, but going too far and then invalidating the confession should it ever be reviewed to court.
Interrogators use everything to their advantage, including the size of the room, the temperature and humidity, the aesthetics, literally anything.
I'm not even saying it's all bad. Sometimes, it's good because it can be very hard to convince a murderous sociopath to tell you where the bodies of the children he raped and murdered are. Actually, I distinctly remember watching one interrogation footage of a kidnapping suspect by a police detective and a polygraph assistant (all polygraph assistants are actually just 2nd interrogators, no polygraphs are admissible, it's just a good way to convince you to trust a second interrogator instead of the cop). They managed, after what must have been 2-4 hours to get the guy to confess to the murder, identify where the woman's body was, and then got him to walk them back to the location to find her.
They found her just barely alive. The attempted murderer left her for dead, but she had held on just long enough to be rescued by those very detectives that got her attacker to confess.
It's kind of a Dark Art. Don't trust cops, never trust interrogators, but by god, a good interrogator can do more to get justice for victims and families than any beat cop, prosecutor, or judge ever could.
Also ask if you can leave, if you're being detained, or being arrested.
In that Florida story, I don't think there's any way they could argue he wasn't arrested when they pulled him from his vehicle and took him against his will to a different place, but other times police can basically interrogate you and as long as you are technically free to go they neither have to volunteer that fact nor honor any requests for an attorney.
There's no hard and fast rule when a detention transforms into arrest, but they can't detain you indefinitely. They either have to escalate to an arrest or let you go. Refuse to speak, ask to leave and if they won't let you leave ask for an attorney.
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
They all think they are above everyone. It's why they murder people and their dogs like it means nothing to them. Because it doesn't. The common rabble are lesser peasants to them, the oh so gracious nobility.
I wish more people understood that just because someone isn't called a lord or duke or king, doesn't mean that they aren't in practice or don't behave like it. The ATF would never have been able to do what they do back in 1822, because people rejected a kingly authority. But 200 years later, people have their dogs killed and don't take a few agents with them, and it only serves to embolden organizations like the ATF.
One of the things that I still don't entirely get is the American idea that they don't have any aristocracy.
I mean, maybe, because I'm a Brit, I can see it more readily than they can, but if you know what to look for, yeah, it's there, plain as day. In some cases worse than the UK system, which has been around long enough to have rules and boundaries placed on it - not a feature of the US system.
I think the real issue with this is that the aristocracy in America has brainwashed the common man into thinking that the well off people are the aristocracy and not the politicians and their obscenely rich owners who operate above the law.
Just look at the BLM protests. I didn't see them protesting in front of Biden's house despite his policies destroying black lives long before Trump got in office.
Or the people who hate landlords. They bitch and moan every time rent goes up, but at no point do they direct their anger at the source of the problem, which is property tax (the thing rent is largely based on).
Then there's the whole vaccine bullshit. The aristocracy got all the peasant mobs to go after people who didn't leap at the chance to inject themselves with unknown chemicals, claiming that they were the ones keeping society from returning to normal. Innocent people's lives were destroyed by this phenomenon. Meanwhile, the aristocrats were flouting the very laws that they set in place and no one even threw a brick through their windows.
I think one of the problems with the constitution is that the founders either didn't predict or didn't prepare for an aristocracy when they founded the country. A lack of ability for vigilante justice means that the state has the ultiimate power to dispense justice. This inevitably leads to corruption, because while the state might guard our country, who will guard the guards?
Well, the founders of the US thought they'd done a pretty good job of dismantling any aristocracy ... and if you'll recall, one of them advocated for periodic revolutions to keep any such tendencies in check.
More prosaically, the US system, with it's focus on building things up from a low level rather than imposing from above, does offer plenty of prospects to shutter doors to would-be aristocrats ... or would have done, had those local- and state-level organisations stopped playing ball somewhat earlier than this. As it is now, I'm just not sure if the mere fact that the letter of the law is on their side will be enough to counterbalance the immense weight of a US Federal government intent on turning the country it's conquered into a colonial possession.
I can't say if your wrong by the book, but in nearly all circumstances I've seen they have been in pairs. Honestly just from a safety point of view I cannot see any reason to have a singular agent over a pair. Whether that's two agents or an agent and a local officer.
Yup, that's the thing; he was an arrogant jackass, and ended up with guns pointed at him, thrown to the ground, and cuffed, for his troubles.