Aiken Department of Public Safety Officer Chris Medlin is heard in the footage telling Hicks he pulled her over because of the paper tags, but SC case law stipulates that having temporary tags in the state is not illegal as long as they haven’t expired.
Medlin tells both Hicks and Pontoon to produce their ID cards, despite the fact that Pontoon was only a passenger and not required to show identification. Most of the interaction occurs off screen but Medlin is heard instructing Pontoon out of the vehicle where he is handcuffed.
The couple’s ID cards are run and the the Heroes find no issue with the vehicle’s tags before Medlin also instructs Hicks out of the car. He then informs Pontoon, “Because of your history, I’ve got a dog coming in here. Gonna walk a dog around the car.”
According to the Post, Pontoon has a prior criminal history that includes drug charges. Medlin is heard telling him, “You gonna pay for this one boy,” before a K-9 officer arrives on the scene and the car is thoroughly searched.
No contraband is found in the vehicle so the cops then turn their attention to Hicks with Medlin asking a female officer to “search her real good.”
In a federal lawsuit filed against the City of Aiken in September, it is alleged that the officers exposed Hicks’s breasts on the side of the road in direct view of the public and three male officers.
No contraband is found on her so the officers then proceed to search Pontoon. During the pat down, Medlin is heard saying to the man, “You’ve got something here right between your legs. There’s something hard right there between your legs.”
Medlin says that he’s going to “put some gloves on,” and an anal probe begins off-screen. This is verified by the audio of the recording that relates a horrifying conversation.
At one point, Pontoon is heard telling one of the officers that he is grabbing his hemorrhoids before Medlin replies, “I’ve had hemorrhoids, and they ain’t that hard.”
The audio suggests that two officers may have inserted fingers into Pontoon’s anus. One of the cops is heard asking, “What are you talking about, right here?” The other officer answers, “Right straight up in there.”
Pontoon is then heard once again telling the officers that they’re pushing on a hemorrhoid – and one replies, “If that’s a hemorrhoid, that’s a hemorrhoid, all right? But that don’t feel like no hemorrhoid to me.”
The cops continue to search Pontoon’s ass for another three minutes, finding no contraband. Medlin then tries to justify his actions by telling the man, “Now I know you from before, from when I worked dope. I seen you. That’s why I put a dog on the car.”
Watch the raw footage:
The stop ended with Hicks receiving a “courtesy warning” from the officers, but accordingto the federal lawsuit, there was no indication of what the warning was for. The suit asserts the searches were illegal and invasive.
I would love to see someone (maybe Tor?) put together a compilation of violence and abuse by pheroes. They could call it 50 Shades of Freddie Gray.
Ha, good one, Phillip.
Maybe a review of the Chevy Express Van that transported him to his death would be in order.
http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5543af34eab8ea6f0e01cedf/heres-what-we-know-about-the-van-ride-that-freddie-gray-may-have-been-killed-during.jpg
It’s especially shocking, looking at the dimensions of the cargo area of those vans, where human beings are supposed to be put.
Hardly looks big enough to haul dogs around in. How is it expected that some fat homicidal thug is going to risk getting up in there and securing some mundane for to the neighborhood gulag. That is some worldclass police state madness right in everyone’s face.
I suppose anyone who sells autos in the US, also makes prisoner transport vans.
Who the fuck wants to hear about these merchants of misery. You gotta be cuckoo for cocoa puffs to think for one minute, clutching a shop manual like its a sacred bible is going to get you away from any of this.
The plantation system is alive and well, and everything you think has happened, never did. It’s been a prison matrix here for 150 years or more now for many ‘Merkins.
Seems so got dam pointless, pinning any kind of hopes for freedom on the assholes who build death wagons for Darth Vader and friends. Its been so long since they crossed the rubicon, which was the final river before reaching Rome.
Now they pump their shit and piss in the rubicon and make you drink it. The barbarians aren’t just beyond the gates. They’re forging the got dam gates with Potomac bog iron, everywhere now there is gates, and Eyes of Sauron are on every freaking corner of the street. Don’t be one of their helpful, boring, moronic orcs. No one wants to hear from you, if you’re one of them.
I know some of you guys can snap out of this. Its grim, its worst days of the Soviet society grim. Its different in the amount of goods and services the Gulag keepers provide this time.
But really its the same, because its so stale and artificially scarce, when everywhere there should be so much more abundance. Only this time everywhere there is a Gulag, only its called an elementary, secondary, high school or public university. Or the courthouse. Library. Expressway. Public park. Its all fake and a lie, if its merely another path in their elaborate rat maze.
It turns out wherever the stuff comes from, wherever their might be some bit of cheese, be it a cool car, or a smart sail fawn, or a big 4000 pixeled smart teever, is where the people will happily go. Even if its straight into a giant surveillance compound that calls itself the mall. Or the housing development. Or the Walmart, or whatever.
You have to learn to smell the stench of political entrepreneurs and never accept anything from them ever. I know its hard, but its at least the start of the end of all this Neo Spartan madness.
Gore Vidal’s dishonest dismissal of Ayn Rand’s system of morality. A system she crafted due to spontaneous market demand. Vidal, on the other hand, reveals himself as nothing more than a typical Atlas Shrugged villain. Apologist for the reigning system of plunder and control. Fish heads for all such collectivist bastards…
Now, before I’m investigated for having taken the un-American stand that sex is a minor department of morality, let me try to show what I think is morally important. Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. She has just published a book, For the New Intellectual, subtitled The Philosophy of Ayn Rand; it is a collection of pensées and arias from her novels and it must be read to be believed. Herewith, a few excerpts from the Rand collection.
• “It was the morality of altruism that undercut American and is now destroying her.”
• “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom…or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.”
• Then from one of her arias for heldentenor: “I am done with the monster of ‘we,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.'”
• “The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself.”
• “To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.”
• “The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral….”
This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the “freedom is slavery” sort. What interests me most about her is not the absurdity of her “philosophy,” but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about). She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the “welfare” state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.
She is fighting two battles: the first, against the idea of the State being anything more than a police force and a judiciary to restrain people from stealing each other’s money openly. She is in legitimate company here. There is a reactionary position which has many valid attractions, among them lean, sinewy, regular-guy Barry Goldwater. But it is Miss Rand’s second battle that is the moral one. She has declared war not only on Marx but on Christ. Now, although my own enthusiasm for the various systems evolved in the names of those two figures is limited, I doubt if even the most anti-Christian free-thinker would want to deny the ethical value of Christ in the Gospels. To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed. For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more difficult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea which ahs figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race. We often fail. That predatory demon “I” is difficult to contain but until now we have all agreed that to help others is a right action. Now the dictionary definition of “moral” is: “concerned with the distinction between right and wrong” as in “moral law, the requirements to which right action must conform.” Though Miss Rand’s grasp of logic is uncertain, she does realize that to make even a modicum of sense she must change all the terms. Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead. But to counter trolls and Caesars, we have such men as Lewis Mumford whose new book, The City in History, inspires. He traces the growth of communities from Neolithic to present times. He is wise. He is moral: that is, he favors right action and he believes it possible for us to make things better for us (not “me”!). He belongs to the currently unfashionable line of makers who believe that if something is wrong it can be made right, whether a faulty water main or a faulty idea. May he flourish!