OFF THE WIRE
Matt Agorist
Austin, TX — Instead of going out and solving robberies, rapes,
murders, domestic disputes, or thefts, the Austin police department is
doing something that doesn’t benefit society in any manner whatsoever.
They are going undercover in city buses to catch people who don’t have their seat belt on.
This week, Austin cops took to city buses to peer through the windows at unsuspecting criminals — who’d dare drive their own vehicle without their own seat belt on.
When the cop on the bus spots the dangerous criminal driver who may
have simply forgotten to buckle up, he signals the hero officer out on
the road to pull them over and extort money from them. Why is the Austin
police department doing this, you ask?
“To try and make people aware of the dangers of driving without a seat belt,” APD Officer Mike Barger said.
However, the dangers of driving without a seat belt are well known.
Cops do not have to rob people of their hard earned money to hammer that
point home. The real reason the APD is conducting this program is the
reason police departments exist in the first place — revenue collection.
Nothing exposes the revenue collecting nature of the state quite like
police officers pulling over citizens and issuing them fines for not
wearing their seat belts.
Seat belt ‘laws’ exhibit the tyrannical nature of government and
illustrate the lengths to which the state will go to separate the
citizen from their wealth.
It takes a person incapable of questioning morality versus legality
to approach otherwise entirely innocent individuals and target them for
extortion via fines issued for failure to comply with arbitrary decrees
for victimless ‘crimes.’
To think that society needs to be extorted by armed agents of the
state to protect them from themselves is as asinine as it is tyrannical.
If you personally feel that you need a police officer to steal your
money and threaten you with jail because you aren’t wearing your seat
belt — you are part of the problem.
Sadly, municipalities across the country are so addicted to the
extortion of citizens for victimless crimes that they are unable to see
the immoral nature of robbing people for not wearing their seat belts.
The Texas Department of Transportation even gave Austin police
$79,000 in taxpayer money to fund the start-up of this tyrannical
operation — “Click it or Ticket.”
“The dangers of being injured in a crash at low speeds are
significantly increased by not wearing a seat belt,” Barger said, again
attempting to justify robbery to ‘keep people safe.’
CBS Austin interviewed Sgt. David McDonald, who was also riding on
buses extorting people for seat belts. McDonald attempted to justify the
robbery of citizens for not wearing seat belts by using his wife as an
example — who he says took off her seat belt briefly and then got into
an accident.
“Someone ran a red light and she got ejected out of our vehicle
because she wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” McDonald said. “Finding my own
wife in the street bleeding profusely, I can’t get those images out of
my head.”
No one is going to deny that finding your wife bleeding in the road
is a horrifying experience that no one should go through. That being
said, the analogy is little more than a straw man. Short of placing a
cop inside every vehicle, the state will never be able to guarantee that
every citizen wears their seat belt.
If seat belt fines couldn’t stop a cop’s wife from buckling up, how
on earth can this officer justify robbing people to make them buckle up?
The bottom line is that people don’t refuse to buckle up because they
are intent on breaking the law. They don’t need to be treated as
criminals and, they most assuredly do not need to be robbed.
People wear their seat belts because it is safe. Those who
deliberately refuse to wear their seat belts — knowing the potential
repercussions — deserve the right to make that foolish choice as this
decision has NO VICTIM and harms no one but the person making it.
On the law enforcement side, however, stealing money from innocent
people for accidentally forgetting to buckle up, absolutely creates a
victim. And, being that victims can’t exist without someone making them
so, it also creates a criminal.
Ironically enough, the Austin cop in the image at the top of this
page, not only doesn’t have his seat belt on — as he robs people for not
wearing their seat belts — but he’s standing up. Hypocrisy at its
finest.
The good news is that the public is no longer buying it. When CBS
posted this article on their Facebook page, the comments said it all.
