Trapped In America

Oh it’s abused alright. They’re called pretextual stops and they’re basically used to skirt your rights of unreasonable search and seizure.

Despite the fact that SOCTUS has ruled that traffic stops are NOT grounds for further criminal investigations.

They also say they pulled him over for not wearing his seat-belt, but I don’t see how they could have possibly known that until they had already pulled him over.

This has been a thing forever here. It’s common(-ish) knowledge to leave your seatbealt on until the cop approaches you. Otherwise they’re allowed to assume that you also weren’t wearing it before the stop and write you a ticket. It’s dumb.

Which sucks for guys, since we usually carry our wallets in our back pocket. So our first instinct is to take off the belt, take out our wallet and have everything ready for the cop when they walk up. Which is a $100 mistake you only make once (hopefully).

This whole thing is a shit show. From the cops lying on the report about him reaching for a knife, which the cellphone video shows clearly didn’t happen, to the State Attorney writing it off and the Sheriff going full DARVO during the press conference.

Sheriff’s Full Press Conference and Bodycam Footage

Notes:

1. The sheriff was in church when the story broke, so it inconvenienced him during his Good Boy time.
2. The victim should have filed a complaint so the Sheriff’s Office could do things The Right Way (aka. get ahead of the story).
3. The unannounced public release of the cellphone video was intended to hurt the Sheriff’s Office reputation (no shit). Implying they’re the real victims here.

Oh, in that case, I assume they have you running Pro or Enterprise? If so, ignore what I said about disabling the Remote Desktop and Work Folder stuff. Work Folders especially though, they’re a complete pain (or were) and used pretty frequently. So you’ll probably be working with them a bit.

Anyone else wanna move to the hills and watch this dumpster fire of a country from a distance? I’ll bring the marshmallows…

MAS <3

Bonus: If you use the new TSForge method, it’s a permanent hardware registration. Meaning you’ll never have to activate Windows again, just connect to the internet and it’ll do it’s thing when it calls home.

It also has ESU support for Windows 10, so you can register for the extended security updates after it reaches EOL completely free.

Just a tip: If you installed Pro or better you can use Group Policies (gpedit.msc) to strip the OS bloat down slightly more than the Home versions. Education and Enterprise also have the telemetry spyware completely removed. But they have a few extra things you’ll probably never use and you’ll want to disable (like their terrible Remote Desktop stuff, Work Folders, etc.)

(I dual boot for gaming. So I know the pain.)