Trinidad Colorado PD makes an illegal stop and frisk. This will evaluate the video and explain why it was illegal.
Welcome to Mayberry, um... I mean Trinidad Colorado. Population 9000, and a hotbed of crime and murder with MS-13 and Mexican cartels routinely engaging in shootouts in the city streets.
Well, actually that's not true.
Trinidad is the County seat for Las Animas county in south eastern Colorado. The entire county has a population of only 15,500. It is the largest county in Colorado with nearly 4800 square miles, with a significant portion of that being farm land. They actually do not have a very high crime rate, and property crimes like burglaries and theft are the biggest problems that police there face. In fact, violent crimes are pretty rare. Most years, the combined total of murders, rapes, and robberies is less than 10, and the only time a cop has been killed there was in 1905.
Violent crime there is significantly less than both the U.S. average and the average for Colorado, with Trinidad ranking as the 5th safest mid-sized city in all of Colorado.
So what is Trinidad known for? It was the site of the worlds first Hippie Commune called Drop City, which formed in 1965, on a 6 acre plot about 4 miles north of the city. The commune was made famous by articles in both LIFE and Time magazines. Drop city lasted until the 1970's Before being sold off and becoming an automobile repair shop.
Trinidad is even more famous as the Sex Change Capital of the World. Starting in 1969 when Dr. Stanley Biber performed his first sex change operation. During his heyday, Dr. Biber would perform four sex change operations per day. In fact, an entire industry rose up around his medical practice since people needed a place to stay and recuperate after their surgeries. The term “taking a trip to Trinidad” Is still used to this day as a euphemism for going to get a sex change operation. This all ended in 2010, though, when the practice moved to California.
This was a severe blow to the economy of this small town, but that was eventually saved by the new industry of Marijuana. Since Las Animas county is on the border with New Mexico, it makes it easy for people to drive across the state line, purchase some recreational weed, and sneak it back into New Mexico, where they only have medical marijuana. There are now at least twenty dispensaries located in Trinidad.
This background information is helpful to us as we analyze what happened to a first amendment activist there on May 16th 2018. The activist, who goes by the YouTube name of First Amendment Strike Team, goes around and conducts “audits”. This is usually done by filming public places and public employees engaged in their jobs. This can be a police station, post office, city hall, or just about any public building that he has the right to be in.
On this day, he had been at the Safeway store in town, when a jeep going approximately 30 miles per hour in the parking lot, nearly struck 3 other people, and himself. He confronted the driver at the Safeway gas station to object to their dangerous driving and noticed that the woman was actually a County Sheriff's Deputy, so he asked her to identify herself. She refused. So he called the police department to file a complaint on her, since if any regular citizen was driving in such a reckless way, we would have certainly been on the receiving end of a ticket, or at least a severe lecture on safe driving. Here is a quick look at that confrontation. (see video)
When two officers arrived to take his complaint, he grabbed his cell phone and his camera and led the to his side yard, because a civil rights activist never lets cops in his house without a warrant. Let's watch what happens next. (see video) For those who are reading, I will give a description of events: The man begins to tell the story of what happened and gives his cell phone to the Corporal to see the car and the officer so she could recognize her. Since it is such a small community, all of the cops know who all of the other cops are, so she would know who this woman was on sight.
The woman cop then notices that he is filming her and asks him to point the camera elsewhere. He politely declines her request, at which point she immediately tells him to take his hand out of his pocket. He again politely declines to do so. At this point, the cop tells him that if he does not remove his hand, she will not take his complaint. He says fine, then leave his property. The cop turns her back on the man and begins to leave when the man demands her name and badge number. (so he can now file a complaint on her) At this point the cop gets agitated and tell him she doesn't know whats in his pocket and then grabs him and forces him against the fence with the help of the other officer. She then removes a small pocket knife and proceeds to try to lecture him on why she can do whatever she wants to him because of “officer safety” He doesn't want to hear it, and demands she drop his property and leave. She ignores his demands and continues to try to explain herself. Eventually she gives the pocket knife to a woman on the porch and leaves.
See the full video for more detail and a Terry v Ohio evaluation at the end.
